“Clear!” The exclamation echoes down the grid line. You get up and keep moving systematically across your chunk of burned ground, guided by repeating chants of “bump left,” “pivot right,” “hold for heat!”
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Tree shadows splay across the gray pavement, flickering patterns of dark and light overlapping. Windows up, already hot at 9 a.m., AC on, a thin breeze against your wrist. The first few notes of Heroin on the car stereo, PLING din-din-din-din-din-din-din…
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the drug kept riding my / head until I slid past sane/
into the room out back with the shivery-silver hue/
we blackdanced there until I felt the heartbeat thrash onto my tongue…
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Who Turned Fifty—WTF—during the Coronavirus Lockdown? Me. I was none the wiser. I blamed the Global Pandemic for my uppity uptick in heart palpy all-nighters, binging Tiger King and matching my paranoia with How To Get Away With Murder. This was my “come down” after faking we’ll-be-okay-ness each day in our John Stamos-less full house. Our elementary, middle and high school kids Zoom-schooled, snark-walked miles of hills and dales in lieu of team sports, saaang every word of Hamilton while gobbling mountains of strawberry cheesecake pancakes…
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When I was young I wanted a statue of myself. I was humble, I wanted a mere statue for saving a lake or a patch of forest or something, not to revolutionize the study of truth, like my dad, who wanted to “beat Einstein,” a dream he abandoned four months before graduating with a PhD in Physics to help my mother start an accounting firm in Arizona…
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In March this year, the Oxford English Dictionary added forty-two untranslatable words to its over half a million word collection. One of them is from the Philippines, the word gigil. Pronounced “ghee-gill,” it’s the word for “cuteness aggression.” It can be an adjective or a noun, used as shorthand for OMG I wanna pinch squeeze and take a bite of this totes adorbs…
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