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Sexuality
Louisiana Saturday Nights
Man who once was a boy on a strawberry farm in Ponchatoula. / Man who pulled me onto his lap in front of his friends, / played my spine like a fiddle. / The notes were off beat, / off-key, a collection of minor chords in my teenage heart.
February 2022Sometimes Things Just Don’t
We always went to Dancing Pins because it was cheap and we could spend all day there, easy, no complaints. We’d go when our mom was drunk and didn’t have anyone to sleep with. She brought her own vodka in a paper bag, like it wasn’t obvious.
February 2022Happiness
She liked classic rock and country, while I favored singer-songwriters with whispery voices and acoustic guitars. She teased me that this was typical of kids whose older parents had made them listen to Bob Dylan instead of Michael Jackson. In fact, my parents had usually listened to silence, but I liked her theory anyway, because it suggested that my personality was not my fault.
June 2021What I Lived For
When I was young, I lived for what I thought of as “lyrical moments,” when the details of life were suddenly heightened and approached the transcendent. . . . Of course, if you live long enough, you start thinking more and more not about the lyrical but rather about time. . . . I am living to stay alive.
May 2021A Very Brutal Game
A man with the right scruffed-up beard and breadth of chest swaggered into the S and M dungeon that was my place of business, and twenty minutes and one grand later had my chin — still soft with the downy fluff of teen-girl skin — held steady in one paw while the other one flew at my face so hard and fast that I ceased to exist as the same collection of matter I had been the previous instant.
October 2020Sex After Death
I’d thought dating would make me feel less grief, but it was the opposite. I decided to delete my Match.com account and learn to masturbate. I had enough sadness in my own life.
July 2020Boyfriends & Girlfriends
Falling for a firefighter, staying single, trusting someone with your cat
July 2020Nice Girls
I used to feel like an imposter because of my breasts, because even before I got pregnant they were pretty spectacular, and it’s made me wonder if I’ve ever actually earned anything, or if all the jobs and awards and opportunities I’ve gotten, really, have just been handed to me because of fat deposits that would be disgusting if they were placed a few inches lower, on my belly.
September 2018