No Poem Is the Only Poem. No Story Is the Only Story. Since 2015.
The night Megha decided that I was the one was the night, I’m certain, when I invited her back to my room—an austere room, halfway up the west side of a high rise, with walls of brick, and laminated floors, and knots of copper plumbing arbitrarily exposed—and she laid eyes upon my mason jars, all eleven of them, lined up neatly on a single wooden shelf above my bed, each containing a single reconstructed cockroach peacefully suspended in a solution of H2O and ethyl alcohol.
But I think of a quote from Joyce Carol Oates, “The sun is setting on another day and I’m covered in loneliness”...
They waited tables at the same restaurant. Brent was a year older than Mariah. He was a senior in college, a business major, working for rent and beer money, instead of kids’ clothes, frozen dinners, and daycare payments. They’d met a few months before, when he first got hired. His first day on the job, he stepped in when Mariah screwed up an order and the customer started cussing her out.
I've initiated the art of flash reading.
...Why did I follow her meekly all the way to Thailand? Why did I allow myself to be dragged here in the first place? As we walked along the dirty sidewalk, I pondered these questions, and unwillingly admitted the answer—because she is my mom. In Chinese culture, filial piety is the prime virtue; as a daughter, I owe my mother unwavering respect, gratitude, and obedience. Resistance would have brought harsh criticism from all sides of the family: “Your mom works so hard for you, and she just wants you to go to a concert with her. You are a person without gratitude…” I wanted to scream, “I don’t want to go!”
we'd been spit forward from our youth and were now in middle school. the building looked more like a prison than most prisons did...