My mother’s iron was heavy, with a speckled cord and stubby plug. In the cellar, she and I pressed my father’s shirts. He worked a desk job he’d never dreamed of growing up in a South End tenement, working a machine in a nearby raincoat factory and letting it all proceed from there. His Aunt Sadie, who cleaned rich peoples’ houses, spoke to a priest who got him off the line. His life, and my mother’s and mine, proceeded from there. His desk job was the kind people from his …
I’m music stand and mud, littered with the plastic lips of a late-night celebration. I’m walking down a bowling alley, ready to strike, gently. I’ve stopped at a gas station to fill the well with helium, squeaking, Please don’t let anyone I love die before their time. A guy on a bike with a boombox rides by, arms out like a kite. Confetti stains the shelves where toilet paper used to be. I check my phone again, in the middle of foraging for bubble wrap. What’s happening in …
Like Lewis and Clark, I learned it’s okay To be gay When you’re stuck on a boat. Like Lewis and Clark, I went out with my friend. Like Lewis and Clark I looked at a map. Like Lewis and Clark, I discovered something, Ass. Raechel Segal is a poet, playwright, actor, and improviser. Playwriting credits include "Dykes on Wheels" (The Tank, NYC), "We Can Be Queeros" (Hudson Guild Theatre, NYC), "Moon Juice" (Manhattan Repertory Theatre, NYC), "The Best of Bushwick" (Manhattan Repertory …
How awful, I say in tweet and reply. How terrible. Disgusting! Enraging. Why? What a monster. How awful. My heart. Round face, single tear emoji. What is even happening? Who are we? I heart the posts that share my mood, I heart the posts that implicate me. I put my phone down and take out the chicken that has been defrosting on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator for nearly three days. I begin to ease out of my worry. I begin to reach for the salt, white pepper, without thinking of …
Let's say I throw the pebble and the pebble is you gray and irregular slightly more jagged at one end than the other the ripples then in the pond are also you or you-shaped somewhat anyway let's say you-influenced at least at first that first one that pushes out the rest shoulders out the rest of the ripples surprising the face of the pond confusing the sky's calm reflection startling the fish beneath the surface just there topsy-turvying perhaps the water …
“When a man rides a long time through wild regions he feels the desire for a city.” —Italo Calvino Desires, according to Calvino, are already memories. This is a way of saying that language is a fist of snakes, that it is too late for remorse if you are watching another invisible city burn. My throat is a thing of contradiction: too many unoiled syllables collecting into sharpness. The autumn of my birth, my mother tells me, You must know this— your name means harvest. And so another city is …