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Isabela’s Red Dress Flutters Away

September 11, 2023

For LaurenThe other teachers warned you: She will curse you out. She said: I thought  you would be just another white bitch, but you’re not. You heard Isabela improvise a bilingual trumpet solo of obscenities to blast the faces of the boys ci [...]

The Right to Work

Across the US, the decriminalization of sex work has become increasingly popular, provoking intense debates within communities. But what role, if any, will the police play?

The Realm of Possibility


“I have to do the wee,” announced the child.

“You have to make a wee,” her mother said. “And I asked you before we got in the car, remember? It’s too late for that now. You can go at the gym.”

“I have to do the wee,” the child repeated.

Suffer Me to Pass

It was only a beer bottle I found in the middle of the trail, but it pinged an impulse in me to go. Get back to the car, give up our Saturday hike. I didn’t tell Cheryl, who stood by while I picked up the bottle and knocked off the dust. She’s known me for thirty years, since our kids were babies, and mostly she endures my jumpy nervousness. But a single empty beer bottle in the big, wide open of Oregon on a sunny June day—it was silly, even for me, to get worked up over such a thing.

Nocturne

Daddy was a slick devil, so he must have thought my sister his
succubus; a mud-bone Lilith, her lurid tresses struck shut with
igneous flicker when it happened in the black. His cinereous 

peepers, glazed over moons which pierced through Tweety Bird
jammies. He tended to sissy’s unassuming sinew with his eyes first
so as to handle the unfathered clitoris with the only sort of care