Browse Topics
Identity
Loving a Sport That Doesn’t Always Love Me Back
I’ve always enjoyed pickup: the sudden poetry of it, the immediate bond and intimacy among strangers. . . . It’s all guts and very little glory—yet there is some glory, even if only a handful of spectators are watching. One OHHHHHHH, after you cross someone so hard they fall on their ass, can make you hold your head high for the rest of the week.
February 2024Kissing Strangers in the Street
Afterward I checked my phone. There were a dozen messages from three of my girlfriends who knew where I was. Like a chorus of Muses they asked, Are you alive? The dom was in the shower. I leaned against the glass-topped desk, my abandoned martini on the nightstand. I was very much alive.
February 2024The Hat
“You found it?” I could tell my answer had pleased him. By then the cashier was ready for me. The checkout had two conveyor belts, and I pushed my cart around to the belt on the opposite side, relieved to be out of close proximity to the man, who now stood across from me.
January 2024Anger Management
Dr. B. spun a finger in the air, his signal to let the games begin. I think I called Michael a “no-good fucking loser,” a put-down one of my bosses had once leveled at me. I watched Michael’s hands form fists and the whites of his eyes get bigger.
January 2024Falling Action in Hoboken
There is something hard in me, a seedlike malignancy. I can’t say how it got there or when, but I can’t remember the last time I felt pure love or sadness or joy. It’s always a mix of things, some confused and muted in-between.
January 2024I Was Carrying a Velvet Wingback through the Streets of Houston
Who isn’t, at twenty-three, sexy? In never-been-kissed / cutoffs with buzzed hair. Did I even have a beard yet? / I looked like the virgin I was—was, at least, in all / the interesting ways. “Chicken,” they would’ve said / back then.
January 2024Macho Baby
I know that what we call hate is sometimes love that was pushed under a rock, love deprived of light and water. “Tell me to what you pay attention,” writes the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset in his book Man and Crisis, “and I will tell you who you are.” How much love is putrefying inside boys this very moment, starved for nourishment?
December 2023Key Marco Cat
Legs folded / under its body, / the figure sits / straight up, alert, / an incarnation / of stillness, of eyes / looking everywhere / at once. I look at / this possibility of me/ rooted in the dark, / invisibly still.
December 2023La Diáspora
People of sub-Saharan African descent have lived in what is today Mexico since the early days of Spanish colonization. . . . Today there are only a handful of communities left with large Black Mexican populations. The Costa Chica, the coastal region of southern Guerrero and northern Oaxaca, boasts the greatest number. . . . My experience in Juárez and the relative scarcity of information about Mexico’s Black communities made me curious to visit the Costa Chica myself. So a few years later I did. I ended up staying there for six months, forming friendships and documenting the residents’ daily life. This is a selection of photos from my time there.
December 2023Basements
I was considered “good,” considered a “good influence.” It amazed me — like the cool feeling of Marshall’s tongue on my labia had amazed me — that I could possess all of these qualities; that I could be both warm and cold, virtuous and defiant; and that someone could love me for all of it.
December 2023