“You’re So Vane: on George R. Stewart’s Storm“
10 February 2025

I often find myself wondering how many people are behind these divinations, the meteorologists who cast their eyes over fluctuating numbers and patterns, their graphs filling with isobars and front lines like occult glyphs, indecipherable to the layperson. I think about how, as a child, I would wander out into the quickly-darkening backyard and stand on a rock while the westerly wind blew all around me. The leaves of the trees would always turn up before a storm, exposing their pale bellies as if they were frightened of the oncoming force—that was how I knew…

“Touching Words: on Poetry in Memoir”
10 March 2025

Memory and imagination are twins, in that they are both vulnerable to the distorting forces of great emotion, and there is no distortion greater than grief. When we grieve, memory can come in bright flashes, often intensified to a fever pitch, causing grimace or shudder at the recall. Our seeking selves scry omens from patterns found in nature: in the movement of the stars, the looping paths of birds in the sky, or the settling of leaves in the trees, to help us find our way back from a darkness absolute...

“‘Yours Is a Servant Heart,’ He Said.”
11 April 2025

Inherently, the service industry is broken. It relies on an underpaid and overworked group of people whose typical demographic is the very young, the very old, and those who—like myself—have a lack of marketable skill. Is it any wonder that there is such rapid turnover in the business? Yet the grocery store is one of the only places in society that serves as a cultural and social nexus: we must shop for food. And so, while shopping, we find ourselves in sometimes surprising proximity to our neighbors—even if we do not know they live adjacent to us...

“An Interview with Tom Nero; or, the Mirror, the Gaze, and the Mask”
11 May 2025

Note: Tom was agreeable through the interview process, and even deigned to answer a few questions regarding the book. As I probed deeper into the reason for his disappearance, though, he became taciturn and furtive, shifting uncomfortably in his seat. During the latter part of the interview, he began to chainsmoke. His hand shook appreciably while lighting each cigarette, and I could tell he was struggling to maintain an even keel in his voice. As the clouds moved in and the temperature dropped, his gaze flickered skyward with increasing frequency, like someone agitatedly checking a clock. As I began to ask him to recapitulate the circumstances surrounding his disappearance, he abruptly ended the interview. It was strange, however—as he stood up, he swung his backpack around and drew out a white mask. He gave me a rueful, chastising glance, and then slipped behind it...

“I’m in My ‘End-of-the-World’ Era”
5 June 2025

In these days, there’s unprecedented amounts of strife and calamity, as evidenced by the ever-more-definite probability of climatological oblivion and global political unrest with the rank scent of war in the wind—not to mention that the lower classes don’t trust the upper classes, but now the upper classes have learned how to hide better from the guillotine...

“I Have Nothing to Say; I Must Say It”
3 July 2025

Interestingly enough, though I feel as if I have nothing to say, I’ve used up nearly 1200 words talking about it. Even now, I can feel the silence surrounding me start to bunch up, gathering, gliding into position like a snake poised to strike, either repelled—or attracted—by all this noise I’m making, and this enormous, invisible threat is rising, rising…

“Is There a Collective Noun for the Lonely?”
30 July 2025

When you hear a warning, you always assume the danger is close, that it’s just moving through. That you might miss being targeted, if you just lay still enough and let its massive shadow pass over you. The danger part wasn’t immediately apparent to me, nor to Cheryl, at the time of the ritual, and it wouldn’t become clear or present until much later, after the final battle...

“Authors, Seen & Otherwise”
29 August 2025

In January of 2024, I received an email from someone calling themselves “Author Unseen.” This is the story of what happened after—a tale of artistic serendipity and literary confluence.

“Seeking Shelter from the Storm; or, Erasing the Prints of the Heir”
24 September 2025

I have impossible memories of the construction: my father, barechested in the sun, smoking a cigarette, his eyes shaded by aviator sunglasses. He is lean, wears jeans. The thrum of drugs in his blood, he grips a hammer and uses it to pound nails into beams. Slowly, all around him, the house takes shape, moves from an imagined outline. How points joined become a line, become a wall.

“Camera Obscura”
20 October 2025

Perhaps it is what my friend Chelsea calls the “villain edit,” which is done in post-production by the wizards cutting and sewing the scenes together. Perhaps this detestable-seeming individual was unfairly maligned by the editors’ need to present a cohesive narrative—a rise and fall, a ritual which would include chalking the shape of Freytag’s Triangle on the cutting room floor…

“Tributaries of the Hidden Curriculum”
17 November 2025

Why do we think that “drills” are an appropriate tool to use for education? A drill is something which bites into another material, which chips away at it, which reduces something through sheer repetition and pressure. “Tests”—there’s another one. A test is something which strains us, which bends us to our limit to determine performance. Our patience is often “tested.” Our faith. The waters. The etymology of the word in its current usage comes from metallurgy, in which metals were melted in a pot...

“One, Another; Other, Alone—on the Fiction of Andrés Barba”
17 December 2025

In all four of these books, there’s a kind of equanimity found to the prose, a simplicity that calls to mind a still pond, even when the temperature of the scene has either reached a boil or plunged into freeze. It puts me in mind of Shirley Jackson’s limpid writing—clear and straightforward, like a beam of light in an otherwise darkened room. Somehow, that beam draws attention to the shadows moreso than it does banish them, seeming to theorize that light may not always be the best antidote for darkness.

“The Minotaur is Patient: a Schizothemia”
12 January 2026

Perhaps it is possible to know too much. We are often critical of those who “know too little,” and much has been made of the axiomatic “ignorance is bliss,” but what if it truly is? Sapere aude! goes the cry. Dare to know! But every dare comes with a potential for cost—it’s whether or not that price is exacted wherein comes the risk, and sometimes the bill is not tendered until much later. Today, however, even “unknowing” has become risky, something divisible…

“The Way Station: a Clip Show”
12 February 2026

If a line becomes inevitably either a circle or a spiral, what about that aggregate of points which do not collect themselves neatly and smartly, to be led into the mouth of the hungry abattoir? What about the non-linear? What about the seemingly disparate points of light which are only in hindsight (and by the story-telling eye of the observer) drawn into constellation?  They connect the stars by drawing lines where none exist, then letting pareidolia do the rest—they construct narrative and pattern and superimpose it on chaos. (A butterfly in Tokyo falls in love with a hurricane in Topeka, is thenceforth dissatisfied by any wind below gale-force…)

“Casting Off in Heraclitus’ River”
12 March 2026

…it’s a failure of perspective to assume that repetition to one is repetition to another, even though bombs still fall from the sky in 2026 just as they once did in 2003; even though screens still flicker with the images of buildings falling. It’s easy to reduce tragedy to a headline when one is halfway around the world, abstracted from all that connects us...

“Memory, a Terrible Sound”
10 April 2026

I wasn’t getting any younger, I said, and it was true—in fact, we were only ever aging one another more rapidly, like two decaying particles stuck in a synchronous orbit around one another, superradiant and sick. I have always gravitated toward inertia, as if I have been living on the event horizon my entire life, hesitating to take a step beyond for fear of the enormous forces of nature that would rip me apart if I tried. I felt like she numbered among those forces...

“Napoleon Can Wait (I)”
5 May 2026

[reading advisory: sexual aggression, physical assault]

Then he was on top of me, his round, grinning face hovering like a bloated moon. He pressed his hands against my shoulders, pinning me to where he slept every night. He made a joke. I don’t remember what it was, because I wasn’t in the room anymore. I was here, right now, in the future moment, with my present self, curiously observing the words as they appeared on the screen. I was—am—curled up next to myself right now, murmuring something about at least I can write about this, at least I can use this—