But of course, unlike our sugar babies, we had real bodies, made of flesh and blood. We had learned early on how to categorize these bodies into distinct parts, but we jumped from head and shoulders to knees and toes, glossing over our “private parts” as if they too were made of sugar or construction paper—as if one day they would be swapped out for real and functional parts. Eventually we would find language for these parts of ourselves—but not before language found us.
“The Things We Name” in Witness Magazine (runner-up for the 2022 Witness Literary Award in nonfiction)
Now the bowl begins to empty and become something else. The blue of the sky deepens; the white rock turns golden, the trees along the rim turn a darker green; the trees near me at the base transform from green to black. Eventually, without the myriad shades of green, the overlapping textures, I no longer have a sense that there’s a bottom. As the sun abandons us, I’m no longer safely suspended: I’m just a woman alone in the woods.
“For Mom, Who Asked for Description” in The Sequoia Grove Journal (image by Emily Rose Michaud, Cosmos)
“I’m your wall between the American Dream and chaos,” Trump warns a crowd in northern Minnesota, deriding “far-left riders” rampaging across Minneapolis and the state. This is his convenient spin on the civil unrest following George Floyd’s murder. Since I live in a neighborhood that was intimately affected by this unrest, his distortion feels personal, if entirely predictable.
“For the Voter Who Is Worried about Law and Order” in the series Undecided: Writers Seek to Convince the Unconvinced at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency