when she is born, they name her mary. it means “bitter.” her mother—plain, unlovely—knows what her ugliness will mean. how it will feel. knows that ugliness makes everything harder, the mirror image of how being too beautiful makes everything harder. mary’s mother is unlovely, and she is happy, basically. she went to school, and they let her, not pretty enough to earn their scorn but too pretty to earn derision.
mary’s first word—a year old, face too red, eyes somehow too far apart and too
Prompt: A Genie offers you one wish, and you modestly wish to have a very productive 2017. The genie misunderstands, and for the rest of your life, every 20:17 you become impossibly productive for just 60 seconds.
“Well, it was a nice day.” You kiss your sweetheart gently on the forehead and sigh as the last remaining seconds of 20:16 tick away. “See you at 8:18,” you say.
Then it happens. Every ounce of fatigue or hunger leaves your body. The face of your beloved is per
Three years later, a new girl sits cross-legged on your bed.
She tastes like a different flavor of bubblegum than you are used to.
She opens up a book that you had to read in high school, and a folded picture of us falls out of chapter three.
Now there are two unfinished stories resting in her lap.
Inevitably, she asks, and you tell her.
You say: I dated her a while back.
You don’t say: Sometimes, when I’m holding you, I imagine the smell of her vanilla perfume.
You
we’re still my favorite ghost story / even if neither of us died / when we wanted to / but the red still drips / the blue still seethes / i never looked good in purple / but the morphine is steady / i’m a quiet unraveling / you don’t know how to break / with an audience’s eyes on you / i sleep and / the static crackles / you sleep / and the wind settles over us / and the sky is more forgiving / than i ever learned to be / and i bet she’s real pretty / and her fist never curls / and the witch wea
the man keeps a flower, one that he picks after Harry gets up, in his breast pocket. he brings it home and it’s not wilted, so he sticks it in a book to preserve and press it. as he gets older, he goes back to that book - one on history, focusing on wars, and sees exactly where he put it. in the section about coming home and the joys of victory. he thinks about it every day until he meets Harry again at that white kings cross station, holding that flower out to him.
http://caramel-in
the story starts with a window. it’s late and I’m waving. the people I love come back home (one by one or altogether, it doesn’t matter). airports aren’t a sad thing anymore. every plane lands in my backyard and I get back what’s lost. I throw a party to celebrate the way my heart’s acting like a heart again. the flowers stop wilting because they want to stay alive to see this. the long dead plant comes back to life because it’s heard the news. the bad stuff never really happened. we dreamed it
PROMPT: You’re in charge of assigning every child on Earth the monster under their bed. One child in particular has caused every monster assigned to him/her to quit. You decide to assign yourself.
I am not a careless person. I cover my tracks, monitor what I say, look before I cross the street. At least, I do now.
When I was 20 years old, I walked home reading a book. I was so engrossed that I failed to notice the heavy metal vehicle moving at my frail, human body at 40 mph.
It swerved, I stopped, no one was hurt, no one died. They never do.
It was only when I took the cookies out of the oven that I noticed the mark on my arm. I knew what it meant. It was my duty to report
YOU DIDN’T WRITE ME LOVE POEMS, SO NOW I’M WRITING THEM FOR MYSELF. CAPITAL LETTERS ON MY HEADER SO PEOPLE KNOW I’M MAKING CHANGES YOU NEVER WOULD HAVE APPROVED OF. NO MORE SMALL VOICES HERE, I’M LAUGHING LOUD NOW, I’M SINGING WHERE OTHERS CAN HEAR ME, I’M PRETENDING THAT I’M ON STAGE BECAUSE MAYBE SHAKESPEARE KNOWS A LITTLE SOMETHING.
YOU NEVER PUSHED MY HAIR BACK BEHIND MY EAR. YOU NEVER HELD ME GENTLY TO WAKE ME. YOU ONLY KISSED ME IF IT MEANT GETTING ME NAKED. YOU DIDN’T BUY ME CHOCOL
Don’t fall for your best friend,
even if cocoa is a really good color on you
and her shea butter curls feel like silk
in your hand.
Don’t sleep in her bed,
take her to breakfast,
and carry the so what are?
question under your tongue
while you eat. You know what you are:
I’m so glad we’re friends.
Don’t make her laugh, because her
silhouette will catch the moonlight
as you sit hip-to-hip
on the apartment roof— I see constellations.
The Virgo
will give you vertigo
Are gods really gods if no one believes in them anymore?
Zeus takes walks in the rain and tries to talk up joggers in central park. When they bolt, or only return his advances with polite smiles that look like fence posts too high for even him to jump, he sighs. He tells them he is a god, and his words echo back to him, accompanied by laughter. No one believes him
He picks up his wife, who might be his sister in this time, in a beat up car with a beautiful flame job, Hera is a marriage
Pestilence stalks the hospital corridors,
frail and pallid as every other half-dead thing around him.
He pours illness into the tiles and slathers it
like paint across the stark white walls,
wheezing a feeble laugh that would be sinister
if it weren’t so decrepit.
War haunts the law firms,
pressed three-piece suit tailored to perfection.
He is the reason for the palpable sting of separation—
estates and history and children and love
split right down the middle,
as
i. when you fall in love with an angel, you must understand that there are things you will not understand.
ii. when you first go to run your hands through his hair, his halo will slice your palm. and it will
hurt. he will will mend it with the touch of one golden finger, and will leave so abruptly that he is gone almost before you blink. the last thing you see will be him standing in the doorway, a terrified expression on his face and blood in his hair.
(later, he tells you that he di
there’s a cliff in town. you heard somewhere that someone jumped from it back in high school. no one talks about it. you woke up one day and you notice it where your front yard used to be. you’d never actually seen it before. but it’s there now. you tell your mother and tells you to pray. you tell your father and he asks you if you want to fishing. you mention it to friends and they change the subject. you want to ask strangers if they can hear that strange distant ringing too. you don’t want to