My latest essay, “These Days,” was published on Friday at Corporeal Writing, home of author Lidia Yuknavitch’s world-shaking writing workshop. In recent weeks, when I wanted to look away, this piece pushed me to keep looking.

Excerpt, “These Days”

These days, no one wants to talk about it. The answer is “I can’t talk about it.” The same five words released in a warm, slow leak, uttered in the same, tired inflection.

November 9 picks up Twitter and scotch. It learns boardroom and braggadocio out of a need to understand. It wears the same shirt until the words wear off. On the eighth day, it puts away the pins and the shirts and the stickers and the signs. It wears mourning whites and throws on shovels of dirt.

December waits for the truth.

January and February march. They vow Next Time. They swear Never Again.

When April, May, and June ask “how are you,” no one is ever OK. They find new ways of talking. They ask questions like “when was the last time you held a blade of grass between your teeth?” or “who was the last person to show you kindness?” They look to each other to remember softness. [read the full essay]

This is the 6th piece for my monthly column, Secret Circus. If after reading this, you’re looking for some reasons to keep standing up, read this and this and  this. As the writing muses at Corporeal Writing say: “We are the rest of you.”

Publications

You are the Rest of Us, Corporeal Clamor.

Over Everything, Corporeal Clamor.

Test Tank, Corporeal Clamor.

You say, write something hopeful, Corporeal Clamor.

Make a Little Birdhouse in Your Soul, Corporeal Clamor.

You Can Do Anything, Corporeal Clamor.

The Right to Bare Arms, ENTROPY Magazine.

Still Gonna Do (#ShePersisted), The Manifest-Station.

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Excerpt: “You Are the Rest of Us”

The artist is filling the town with ghosts. She stacks cinder-block statues in forgotten chain link corners and adorns them with sun-bleached agave skeletons, colored glass, and rusty tools from the belly of the desert. She gives them faces like saints. The artist says sometimes people need a place to keep their secrets, so she builds them altars with gated chambers where the secrets cannot be retrieved. “If we could just have a place to put them, other than our minds, it might help us to be free of them.”

You pull a notebook from your pocket and fill the pages with everything you have been holding, and few of them are your own.

I stole my grandmother’s car and left it in LA when I ran out of gas. I save my used dental floss in a Ziploc bag. I have everyone else’s bad thoughts about me before they can even have them. Whenever I hear the song “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” I feel so terrified I have to leave the room. When I have sex with my husband, I roll my eyes – I do it for me. I have to buy exactly 2 of everything at the grocery store. I pee in the pool. When I’m driving alone, I read all the billboards with an Australian accent. I use my sister’s loofah to clean my teeth.

When you slip the folded papers inside the Secret Keeper’s womb, the sound is an aria, it’s how Earth sounds from space, it is the breath of a thousand bees…

[Read the full essay]

Publications

Over Everything, Corporeal Clamor.

Test Tank, Corporeal Clamor.

You say, write something hopeful, Corporeal Clamor.

Make a Little Birdhouse in Your Soul, Corporeal Clamor.

You Can Do Anything, Corporeal Clamor.

The Right to Bare Arms, ENTROPY Magazine.

Still Gonna Do (#ShePersisted), The Manifest-Station.