I’m sitting on one of the loveseats in the Starbucks on Nassau Street, weirdly conscious of my calves sticking to the cold leather seat covers, experiencing what I imagine only certain paparazzi have felt at the peaks of their careers. The strangeness of spending years seeing someone in two dimensions, only to have them sitting across from you, alive and fidgeting. Lorena Grundy gestures at my coffee cup.
There is a stain on our wall in Wilson and we haven’t spoken about it for a few days, my roommate and I. Streaked and coarse, a stain ground into the whitewash like graphite. It’s not visible if you don’t look for it, not something Building Services would fine us for. A stain, the length of two bobby pins held end to end. The diameter of a champagne grape. It doesn’t come out with Windex or Seventh Generation dish soap or OxiClean, left instead as a perpetual effigy of my fury and my guilt.
On Monday, December 7th, two seasoned reporters from the Nassau Weekly got the scoop on the Warwick Rowing Team of Warwick Rowers Calendar fame. The rowers release a naked calendar each year to raise money for the team. The proceeds … Read More
Shall hold a life like a cupped palm, lash in the ocean. It knows the best exoskeletons protect the glass self sleeping inside. How to define oneself as a self that is only itself without the self it … Read More
Watch the balloons sway in the center of the slick dance floor. You are here and you are not here, swaying yourself on too-thin heels and much too much mixed drink. Tie your hair back. You’re hopped up on hoping the ending of your night will deliver what the beginning has promised since you fished your junior prom dress out of the dorm closet you’re sure has moths.
The wind in the west blows across the Sioux prairieland, bending the wheat stalks at their waists. Nelson Elling lies beneath the swaying stalks, and from where he’s sprawled the wheat fields are dusted in a purpling haze.
Ladies and Gentlemen, bibliophiles and book lovers and lovers and book characters and bookish lovers and lovers of lovers of books, you all want the same thing. You aren’t unique for wanting this. People have done it before. Those doomed lovers in Atonement, releasing their furious need against each other, just once, bolstered by the burnished bookcase behind the two beloved.
