Being A Girl is Hard
For me, the label of girl was almost threatening—something forced on me that I could never escape. I know every woman could, to some degree, feel threatened by their status as a woman, with sexual assault, harassment, and overall danger and misogyny following them everywhere they turn—those things followed me, too. But the threat I felt went beyond that: I wasn’t the girl my birth certificate said I was.
The Lilac and The Housefly: A Tale of Tortured Romanticism
The lilac was unimpressive. Nothing more than a stick jabbed into soil with a price tag tied around the base of its stem, like some sort of prank on a naive consumer. And it worked. I saw the dingy branch and fell in love, sharing the same compassion as Charlie Brown when he bought that pathetic little Christmas Tree. I liked the idea of improving something.
In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury writes, “It doesn’t matter what you do … so long as you change
Monkey Business
On Tuesday, November 6, during a presidential election that many consider disastrous, forty-three monkeys escaped from a research facility in Yemassee, South Carolina. A red state, as you probably know.
I’ve Stayed in the Front Yard
My father never drank except at Christmastime, I’ve
never seen a brown bottle drain until I was seven, stayed
at my grandmother’s house and knew the skank smell of alcohol, in
winter where cigarette smoke looks ghostly, the
ash tray a black patch of night, he sat on the steps in front
