I often had nightmares of being drowned in pages and pages of medical disclaimers–the ones printed in magazines beside glossy advertisements showcasing elderly couples jogging in a park and smiling after having beaten incontinence/heartburn/impotence/anxiety/youth.
—Belinda Hermawan
It’s a rotary phone, and most visitors actually dial a number. Many speak out loud to their dead. They share mundane things, little updates that sew a life together.
—Donna Steiner
This is your society. Now you don’t have boyfriends or girlfriends, and you don’t get married. You cohabitate. You don’t say, “I love you,” as if to reassure your partner that nothing has changed since the last time you said it. You don’t have to say anything.
—Jacob Dimpsey
Winner of CLMP's 2018 Firecracker Award: Best Debut!
To mislabel the promise / of honey as merely something added to enhance / flavor is to disrespect its viscosity and heft as existing / in our tissue, in our animal body
“There is a wideness in God’s mercy, like the wideness of the sea.” I thought of our lake that couldn’t wash away the filth of this city. Of our river that burned so many years ago and still seemed to burn.
Companies like the one I worked for were criminals in plain sight. We kept paying off who needed paying off, kept swatting away the invisible hand that hovered over the free market, hissing at it to get out of our goddamn way.
