Like Krispy Kreme doughnuts my dad would smuggle past my mom — Hot Dogs And Beans. Tuna Noodle Casserole. Johnny Marzetti Also Known As American Chop Suey. Scrambled Eggs In The Microwave. Boston Market Rotisserie Chicken, A Bone Of Which My Dad Once Had To Heimlich Maneuver Out Of My Friend Mike Brosius’s Mouth To Save His Life. Berries Jubilee. Mocha Chip…

Like you’re dressed as you for Halloween. — Like starting a new season of a TV show, where your favorite character has a different haircut. Like you’re Mary-Kate dressed as Ashley. Like you got a tattoo of your face… over your face. Like seeing your third-grade teacher in tennis shoes. Like seeing your doctor in falsies. Like seeing…

Ben Kassoy (he/him) is… — Ben Kassoy (he/him) is a payphone that rings. Ben Kassoy (he/him) is a cartographer in a coma, psychokinetically mapping underwater worlds, waiting for someone to one day discover his sunken cities. Ben Kassoy (he/him) is having three vertebrae removed so he can put his ear right up to his chest…

“Some of it is pretty dark,” she warns. — “I found some of Papa’s poetry,” she tells me on the phone. “I didn’t know Papa wrote poetry.” “Me neither. I just have to warn you, it’s pretty dark. Do you want me to send it?” I’d read some of his writing before — Germany, 1944: the fire. He told…

As an octopus or a queen — (After “Let Me Begin Again” by Major Jackson) Let me begin again, steadfast and regal like a queen, adorned in an electric octopus gown, deep-sea purple and glowing like the sound of a harp-led orchestra scoring thousands of celestial slot machines in heaven’s casino. Let me begin again with the…

Imaginations ran wild — My mom was all about healthy snacks but knew enough about branding not to call them “healthy snacks” so she’d just ask if we wanted “something to eat.” A lot of our household items felt either like sentimental family heirlooms or like timeless, origin-less utilitarian practicalities that had always been…

His name was Adrion Skot — Back home on my childhood bed, Mom has laid out a half dozen dance belts, tiny beige thongs I’d worn under my ballet tights, designed to support my curious and newly sentient genitals — and a name rushes into the room: Adrion Skot you know, the guy from my math…

I just noticed it — My fingers are a dune buggy race down the endless sands of your back, and then they’re a squadron of submarines descending through the uncharted depths of your hair to your very top’s very bottom. And after so many years mapping your body and its complex topographies, I spy a…

Feels like this — Remembering you is like the time I went to the mansion of a widow who, until the day she died, kept building and building and building additions to her massive pathological hideaway, like a door that opens to a twenty-foot drop or a stairway directly into a ceiling. …