It was night / Death slept naked / on God’s corpse

The chicken crows at midnight. Crows at four o’clock in the morning. Crows when it rains. Crows when the sun sets. Crows when sirens blare down our street. Only stops crowing to eat.

I’d bicycle home after teaching, pumping the pedals so hard I hoped the blurred street would crack beneath them. I’d learned early how to leap—from hotel maid to fine dining server, student to teacher, dying desert town to rain-drenched city. So I left. I filled out applications, fielded phone interviews, signed a contract and flew to Hanoi, sight unseen.

This is the fantasy of self-sufficiency: healthy in a closed loop, without needing anything from anyone else.

Brian Van Reet, winner of the Gulf Coast Prize in Fiction, talks with Gulf Coastintern Melissa Dziedzic about his story, “The Window.” Melissa Dziedzic:…

a man gives just enough / to thunderous applause / and we made a statue/ of it.

My father / carried me often like a dead deer // on his shoulders up the stairs to bed, / my arms and legs gripped before his body, // my fallen neck bobbing

& after the first course, your corsage flatlines Beautiful convulsions Then, it sprouts wings, thorns, claws its way up your arm to swallow you goosebump by goosebump

In their entry on love, Berlant writes that we tend to (mistakenly) use the objects our desire attaches to in order to assume an identity— “you know who…

For Berlant, part of the problem of politics is that marginalized people have to accommodate the feelings of their majority counterparts in order to successfully…