No Poem Is the Only Poem. No Story Is the Only Story. Celebrating Diversity Since 2015
You never understood the appeal—brown and gelatinous, tasteless under its soy sauce dressing. Dog food, your classmates used to hiss in the cafeteria. You flung it into the trash, container and all. Go back to your country. Can you see anything, with those eyes? You thought you belonged in the garbage as well, safe among juice boxes and pizza crusts.
In truth, I was a timid child, submerged in judgment and unrealistic expectations. I tottered and swayed, shaped by the whims of others. I envied these characters their abilities to take up space.
I traversed the pages of book after book, seeking comfort in their nooks. Eventually, I placed my own pen to paper and reclaimed control over my narrative.
“The suffering is…it’s just sublime. Do you understand what I mean?...
...: I devoured fantasy novels as a teenager, high and low, Tolkien and Le Guin and McCaffrey and Mercedes Lackey and trashy Piers Anthony, and then I discovered even trashier historical romance novels and gobbled them down like Little Debbie snack cakes. This was tempered in turn by a diet of Literature (such as a marathon of E.M. Forster’s novels after falling in love with the Merchant Ivory production of A Room With a View)...
I was Dish Pig, my lot to scrape, wash, polish, repeat. No customer interaction for me, save for pouring Mr. Evans’s Guinness pint.
Joe told me that they chained him to a hospital bed so he wouldn’t escape. Flight risk. Young male. Tested positive for COVID-19. It seemed so unlikely. What were the chances? And that’s when I realized that they were pretty high.