Nonfiction

I still think most of my sexual encounters were healthy ones. I’m one of the lucky few who has had the good fortune to escape any situation in which I might have lost all power. Maybe the unremarkable nature of my time in Newhookupland is why I rarely slowed down to think about what was being said versus what wasn’t being said. Mindlessly going through the mechanics gave me the false sense that I was the protagonist of my own narrative. Somehow, I’m not sure I ever truly learned how to be my own subject.

Since the second strike, he walks with a limp, talks a little to himself. Several mornings I have had to stop for him entering the school parking lot. Me, in a car; he, slowly stumbling across the street—stooped with a cane—a grim recognition of pain with each breath—a twinge that tucks the corner of his mouth in and under instead of up. We are the same age, but his aches are different from mine—visible in the ways nature marks us each differently.

I. From above There’s a car in the river, the boy repeats, pointing.  I stand beside B at the window opposite, clutching the sleeve of his denim jacket and gazing out at the county suburbs that sprawl westward six hundred feet below, the houses like spilled pills. It’s my first time inside the Gateway Arch, […]

I think I opted for the theatrics of bulimia over the melancholy of anorexia out of anger­—toward myself and toward all the Courtney Bakers who had practiced girlhood more comprehensibly.

To say one has experienced both rape and kindness from men is a paradox not of the sex but of humanity: sometimes I think my only acceptance with women would be to offer myself as the victim I was but no longer am, for then they might see me as someone, anyone.

Our sun produces a beautiful, arcing coronal rain of plasma, visible through telescopes on Earth. There are planets in the universe that rain rocks, molten iron, and sideways glass. But Earth alone, as far as current science can tell, rains water.

1. My desire to have a baby and to not have a baby is what makes me feel sorry for Donald Trump. Babies do the best they can, because first, more than any other fact of their identity, all they care about is survival. They learn to survive and then, much later, they learn to […]

This queer woman who found god in the woods— I’m always trying to believe her.