Nonfiction

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.

Omens and dreams and their designated decipherers played an important part in naming children in pre-Islamic Arabia through practices refashioned in every era that persist today. A Prophet whispers to a grandmother, and another Muhammad is born.

At last call, she leaned over. I regret leaving, she said. I always have. You nodded, vision blurring with tears, scribbling ink on a napkin: Maybe leaving is a kind of loving.

He hadn’t needed to handcuff her, but he wouldn’t have been able to anyway: the cuffs would have slipped over her hands.