(mac)ro(mic)

Our baby comes into the world, and the doctor winds it up and hands it to us as it starts to cry. It’ll run out of steam quickly, the doctor tells us. Best to let it sit for about an hour before winding it up again. Of course, […]

I fear I’m becoming one of those middle-aged Midwestern moms who decides to finally tell the truth about her life instead of taking a trip to Tuscany or adopting a kitten or fucking who she’s always wanted to fuck all along. You know the type. […]

The studio door opens. You enter, say Shalom, sorry, so sorry, traffic. You point to your champagne-colored hijab, asking if it’s okay to change. I multi-move: guide the group into Downward Facing Dog and show you the bathroom. When you emerge, I’m dazed by looping, […]

For four months, I dream my insides are jellybeans. Not the good flavors, the bad ones. Rotten eggs, smelly socks, dirty diapers, dead fish. If they were good flavors, normal flavors, I wouldn’t worry. When I call to tell you this, you’re in a meeting. […]

We learnt to speak in one-word sentences. Growing up, our families were similar – we had been born into families of craftsmen and arc-welders. They forged weapons with their teeth—each word an arrow, each syllable a silver bullet designed to puncture the air and bleed. […]

With a thud like a fall from grace, a horror that deepened like dread, like the truth, there was nothing–my right arm, hip, the length of my leg, my right foot—no feeling, no movement. I regained consciousness with the primitive sense of hearing—the voice of […]

Long before irony and before we all wore futuristic leggings, our class painted blotchy doomed planets, nobody yet wise or lucent or talented. We had graduated from shells and pebbles (delicately-seamed) and expanded logically into the universe. We’d captured Saturn’s rings and moons; our brushes […]

What to Bring: Seven short-sleeved tops in hard candy colors, neatly folded. Seven pairs of denim shorts, cuffed above the knee. Seven pairs of socks and underwear. Mom says laundry’s done weekly. There’s no need to stress. A pair of knock-off Keds, laces removed. You […]

trimmings from your shaved head itching my neck, when an egret swoops down low several cars ahead of me. Traffic is light but oppressive. The bird’s long legs probe the air over eight lanes of fast cars. “Don’t land here, bird!” I yell from inside […]

Marianne always had dreams like this, dreams where she had to pack and run. It was a leftover of a situation where that was a reality, where every day she wondered if it would be the day that she had to leave, that she had […]

I’m in the neighborhood a few times per month, mostly on weekend nights to make a hundred bucks by taking care of other people’s children. It’s an easy job—at least in the houses I go back to. If a kid throws a full-body tantrum and […]

Charlie’s wistful heart tingles as he pulls up to 437 Wilton Street, the apartment building from his childhood. Everything is gone but the skeleton of a structure and the echoes of Charlie’s memories. You can board up the windows, but you can’t cross out the […]