You hang out on top of the three ancient towels you’ve layered on your couch and know you’ve done the automated surveys, and they improve nothing. You and your doctor have pushed pre-authorization – nothing. You’ve talked to your HR managers and you’ve written to the state’s insurance commissioner, and this has done nothing.
(nonfiction)
Part of a series of Native poetry collected by Mark Turcotte.
Springtime is for the seeds and letting light into the home our spirits live in. We prep the soil for the ones who sleep there. Summer picks berries for playtime.
(poetry)
She poignantly asks, “In such a teeming ocean of words how could I know there was anything else to swim in?”
(reviews)
This week, ACM is posting poetry every weekday.
even baby’s breath is weary and stale
in their nostrils falls the hail
the country’s black men sent to jail
(poetry)
This week, ACM is posting poetry every weekday.
You are forced to think very formally, very
philosophically, Someday a siren will come for you,
and you hold your breath, rub your eyes, roll
with a groan to flick on the late Late Late Show.
(poetry)
This week, ACM is posting poetry every weekday.
One guy said I looked like Queen Elizabeth in it,
so I wore it everywhere, led entrances
with hip swishes and a smirk,
blasted “Flagpole Sitta” in my headphones
because it was my baddie girl-esque era.
(poetry)
This week, ACM is posting poetry every weekday.
Despite what you may think,
I am comfortably phallic.
I wonder if your punchline
can live for two hundred years,
burrowing through human muck
and blood and flushed tissues.
(poetry)
This week, ACM is posting poetry every weekday. This is the first.
through my brother’s bedroom door, the expectations of manhood
complete: apology, sincerity, apology—take it and move on.
In my bedroom alone, shaking, I have prayed the old prayers too.
(poetry)
One of the essential qualities of my mind has always been an inability to distinguish between “being” and “being with.” I wanted to play with girls, and hence decided, age eight, that I wanted to be a girl. Why is it, I asked myself and the sky, as I continued down Grand Street, that the current trans debate focuses so much on trans women in sports? Rather than on, say, sports?
(nonfiction)
When I traveled to Geneva, no matter what else was on the agenda, a reservation at the Boeuf Rouge was required. I never changed my order from quenelle de brochet. I looked forward to the quenelles more than any other part of my visit; they were a reliable, savory anchor in my itinerant young life.
(nonfiction)
