I will see myself in his shadow in the hallway, I will feel him kicking in the spaces I once thought empty. I will lose him in the swell. And I’ll say, God, please deliver me with softness, I am sick of being born. And He will offer me His milk.

I say to my men, I have always said to my men:

You make me feel safe.

Of course I say it. We all say it. I do not want to be the sole custodian of my body. I have failed before. I worry I will fail again. I am not the frontier; please do not make me be the frontier. But my problem is his problem now, because he fills the shoes that other men have... See more

uncanny

sodden

These women, many of them girls, found that in running away from their mothers, they had become them. We love to live in memory. We love the lightness with which we can slip into who we were.

It had been several weeks with this man, who had already taken pig-iron to my sense of direction. I took his ideas and mulled them in my mouth- dry wine; tasting tannin, inferring submission. Nothing he said made sense and I hung on it, this giant muscular child, this untrustable man, wearing himself on his skin.

You are told that when you meet the... See more