Gloria feels worms eating her flesh at night. They nibble and squirm across her, in her, up her. She scratches at them, leaps out of bed and jumps up and down hard on the floorboards, shaking them …
Pablo Auladell (b. 1972, Alicante, Spain) - 1: Illustration for Pablo Albo’s Alas y Olas, 2011 2: An Illustration for a recent edition of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw 3: Illustration for Silvina Ocampo’s Isis, 2010 4: Illustration for Antonio Ventura’s Le Rêve de Pablo, 2007
1. Revel in how good-looking he is, how he channels Jude Law when his lazy eye doesn’t wander, how his weaving a ghillie suit that he keeps in the rusted hutch of his white pick-up shows exceptional dedication.
2. Convince yourself it’s meaningful because he plays Nina Simone as you disrobe and paw at each other for the first time. Pay no attention when the music flips to “The Piña Colada Song.”
3. Find a point of adherence, your death-by-suicide fathers, and make it the only thing that matters, the very force that brought you together. Say destiny. Say you’re the same kind of wounded creature and flap your teary lashes like the wings of a condor.
4. Walk in the woods behind his family’s farmhouse fixated on the abandoned tool shed behind the weepy Spanish moss until the sun recedes and more fireflies than you’ve ever seen appear. Pretend you don’t see his mother watching you from the kitchen window.
5. Keep him away from your friends. But when the streams must cross and he agrees that George Eliot is great—insists he’s read all his books—try not to look repulsed or notice that everyone avoids your eyes but meets one another’s.
…
“Thinking gives off smoke to prove the existence of fire. A mystic sits inside the burning. There are wonderful shapes in rising smoke that imagination loves to watch. But it’s a mistake to leave the fire for that filmy sight. Stay here at the flame’s core.”
-Rumi
Confusion.
Confusion up till college.
Unsure. Shortly after meeting Gheri, a junior, she takes you to a house party, mixes you some 151 and coke. Later, she’ll climb into your lap too shitfaced to stand (while you’re too shitfaced to push her away) and lap dance her way into making out. It has the surrounding nerds stupefied, making the gossip rounds, but nobody gives you shit for it. Friendship spring quarter with a self-proclaimed “dyke” shows you just how out of your league you are. Maybe you’re just some try-sexual loser, who wants to make out with girls at parties for guy-attention.
Confusion in high school,
when you figure out boys equal as much adrenaline as girls, but half as much nervous
energy. Half as much work. When you figure out being black is bad enough, that liking girls would take it too far. High school produces an ethnic circle you are as a part of as you are excluded from. Within this tiny group of flies in the milk, you are beyond an anomaly. A dung beetle. Bisexual is un-acceptable. You’ll overhear a junior in the locker rooms balking about “lesbos”: “Like, can you imagine? In here, watching us undress and like…oh my god. Just like, gross.”
[MORE…]
An Australian Christmas illustration, featuring a terrified child with emu, Victorian (via)
Cover illustration by Chéri Hérouard for La Vie Parisienne, August 19, 1916
Looks like today is the day to make sure you’ve got your reading pile ready…
Illustration by Marguerite Davis from
My article, THE RISE AND FALL AND RISE OF A GREAT AMERICAN LITERARY JOURNAL is up at LitHub. As one of the new editors with Chris Campanioni and Ashley M. Jones I wanted to share the non-lit Lit Hub fun version, which Lit Hub felt was a little less scrubbed than what they wanted to run. Oh, bureaucracy, but I play nice and accepted the edit. Here’s the original and all of us look forward to dedicating ourselves to the PANK we all know and love.
fembroad
Spring break with friends out of town & parents working means public reading, well fed ducks, & tiny tableaux out of ready-to-hand materials (sponges, Altoids tins, paper, bottle caps)
