February 2012
9 posts
“What I don’t understand, or rather, I do understand all too well, and ...”
– I’m very grateful for this essay by Kate Zambreno
“It could be that I’m so good I even trick myself. I thought of how other girls I...”
– Shabby Love
Beatrice Eli’s “The Conqueror”...
January 2012
4 posts
“He felt me with his fingers and laid me down on his bed. I clung to him....”
– Incomplete
December 2011
17 posts
“‘No one appreciates you like me,’ he said, and that made me a little...”
– Melting
From "Control"
I gripped the sink with both hands, bent over. I didn’t look at our faces in the mirror. I looked at the black stockings and my skin. I tried not to make noise but I couldn’t help it. He made noise. He whispered to me the entire time. On his lap I leaned back and watched my patch of pubic hair move up and down. There was a faint pink stain on his white shirttail. I couldn’t think of what it was...
Strength and Appetite
Lessing noted what she called “a basic female ruthlessness” in herself, and went on to disdain the notion that gender is, in its essence, “socially constructed.” How, she asked, did she acquire her husband? She stole him from another woman. And how did she feel about that? She felt, she said, that it was “my right”: “When I’ve seen this creature emerge in myself, or in other women, I have felt...
“There are numerous ways in which God can make us lonely and lead us back to...”
– Herman Hesse, Demian
2 tags
“I had to apologize to him later for the blood, my legs trembling. That’s the...”
– Emptying My Pockets
October 2011
2 posts
September 2011
5 posts
Wedding Rings
Some keep them on. Some take them off. I wonder where the ring goes when it’s no longer on the hand, what places a man keeps it so it’s not lost or forgotten for a day or a full weekend or even a few hours. Many married men have hired me on their birthdays. Married or no, many enjoy talking about their sons, if they have them. They do not soon tire of describing how handsome and smart...
August 2011
7 posts
“I haven’t laid naked with someone and listened to music since college,” he told me. “And if someone told me then”—I felt sure he would make a comment about how much time passed before he would repeat this experience, a comment about how he’d expected to have a life full of listening to music with another nude person, but he didn’t—”that I’d...
“The night before he said, ‘I’ve never kissed the backs of a woman’s knees...”
– The Last Words On August
Gayngs — The Gaudy Side of Town
July 2011
16 posts
My orgasms are watery, thin and forgettable, diluted. There’s a ridge of anger running under everything, a live wire, a mountain range of rage. The photographer sent me an email about his coke addiction, about his “infatuation” with me. “Trying to figure out right and not wrong,” he wrote. Who bothers with that anymore? I couldn’t reply. I hung my torso over the...
Sleep Party People — I’m Not Human At All
“Seeing through people is so easy, and it gets you nowhere.”
– Elias Canetti