Poetry
Alternate Rooms
“Alternate Rooms” was inspired by the duality of the perception of my being. At the tail end of my struggle begins a parallel eventide of my escape which is mostly a surrealistic beauty that springs out from my ruins.
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Fiction
Laura Lau Will Drain You Dry
The day after the picture of your boobs gets sent around the school, a mosquito lands on your tongue and bursts like a ripe cherry. You are crying in the disabled stall of the girls’ bathroom where you took the photo to begin with. You hate that you’re back here, but it’s where you were that day four months ago because it’s the only private mirror in the whole school. It’s exactly the same. Paint-stained, clogged-up sink, graffiti all over the door that you’ve contributed to, no toilet paper on the roll.
Fiction
Terms of Service
Many EULAs take seventeen (or more!) hours to get through. I always feel like I’ve signed away a piece of my soul after agreeing to a super long one. Perhaps I have.
Fiction
The Dizzy Room
Mom and Dad all but forced the games on me. It’s hard to believe now. All you hear about these days is how kids don’t want to play water balloons anymore, don’t want to do sack race, how every year there’s an increase in reported grass allergies, and how in just a couple generations we as a society are going to forget we ever knew how to climb trees. Everyone has those apps that track screen time. Everyone’s tried that thing where the whole family stacks their phones in the middle of the table for a weekly distraction-free dinner, or “DFD.”
Fiction
A Girl Defines Herself
Years ago, while working online in curriculum development, I was set the task of helping high school students understand Hamlet. Many approaches exist—too many to enumerate here—but the one that changed my experience of “the Bard” and the English language itself was turning to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) whenever I had a question about a word. My favorite part of this process was learning about the history of the word: the obsolete definitions, the slang it once formed, the phrases in which it first appeared.
Fiction
Home
One could, if necessary, hide between the studs in your wall. Shoulders, narrower than the gap. Back against the plywood of the exterior panel; chest, when fully inflated with breath, pressing against the lath and plaster. Room enough to disappear. This was mine before it was yours. Single story 1920s bungalow, three bedrooms, an unfinished basement and an attic crawlspace. Flower beds in the front. Garden space in the backyard. In the door frame of the second bedroom, lines scratched to mark the top of a growing boy’s head.
Poetry
When At Last He Was Empty
I can’t recall the precise moment of inspiration that spawned this poem, but it’s a merger of two unsettling notions taken to terrible extremes. The first is the helplessness experienced while vomiting and the awful thought I’ve had in mid-spew: “What happens if this heaving doesn’t stop?” Second, the realization while browsing treasures at estate sales: “One day, the evidence of my life, too, will be laid out on display, labelled and bargain-priced.”
Fiction
Who The Final Girl Becomes
Cinda begins the worst afternoon of her life by hiding in a closet. It’s spring break of her senior year of high school, and she’s rented a cabin with four friends using money she saved from her job at the bookstore, and it all feels terribly grown-up: the long drive into the mountains in the passenger seat of her boyfriend Travis’s car; the box of condoms Paulina not-so-secretly tucked in the glove box; the case of cheap beer and freezer bag of weed that Wally stowed in the trunk; the excursions and activities that Maeve carefully planned.
Poetry
Fruit
As for the process of writing the piece—this was one of the pieces I wrote with fellow writers in a weekly writing session where someone gives a prompt and we each take an hour to create something. I have a fascination with the bubonic plague and fairy tales so I wanted to combine those elements. I got the idea of burying someone by a tree from “The Juniper Tree” story. My medical profession also helped in the making of this poem—since I’m a surgeon, I can actually say I’ve seen a couple of human hearts that really resemble fruit.
Fiction
Until It Has Your Reflection
I hold the crayon to the mirror, ready to swipe it across my reflection’s neck just as my husband, Tomas, instructed. Make a quick horizontal line, then break the crayon against the glass. Snap it like you would your reflection’s neck. I’ve chosen the shade closest to my skin tone because it feels fitting for the occasion, the brown that I’d had to explain to our kindergartener was not “the skin color” crayon. Not everyone has skin as dark as ours, and some have darker. I imagine similar conversations in other households, about other crayons.
