I’ve hated every job I ever had. I just don’t “get it” when a woman feels she has to leave the home to find fulfillment. I hate to leave my home. And for what? Eight hours of prison! (Although I must say that if you manage to sneak off for a little shopping, those hours stolen from work can be among the most intense you will ever feel.) But on the whole it hardly seems worth it. And who, may I ask, decorates the workplace? They lavish money and end up with something ugly, bland, “efficient.” Why can’t an office be pretty? My first job out of college was with the USO, when I leapt at the oppor ..read more

I don’t want to die fat. There would no doubt be whispers at the repast: It’s too bad she didn’t take better care of herself. They will speculate, assume. Diabetes? Heart attack? If I die fat, I hope I die in a car accident or go missing and turn up bloated and bloodied in a river. No one will mention my weight then. I will die without conversation about the obesity epidemic and my family and friends can grieve without the added guilt from flashbacks of every time they wanted to say something about the pounds I was putting on and on but didn’t. Because here’s the thing, I am not thick or big ..read more

I took the Adderall. I took a lot of shit from my ex, Snowball. Then I took some more Adderall and took the class on Marx and took my shit out of Snowball’s room. I like the kind of Adderall with the sugar coating. It must be the kind for kids, the really evil kind, so easy to swallow, so blue, so sweet. When people say they like candy I want to ask them, have you tried Adderall? When people say they like Adderall I want to ask them, have you tried being in love? For fun, I Google “Marx quotes on fun,” but instead of Karl I get Groucho. He says, “I’m not crazy about reality, but it’s still th ..read more

A dream visits me from time to time like a recurring fever. Each version differs slightly from the last. Sometimes the woman’s scarf is made of silk or wool or a very delicate gauze, but it’s always black and white, and very long, with wavy stripes, and very docile to the wind. A man arrives by plane after a short flight and walks towards the roundabout in front of the airport in Sainte Ercienne. Often, I have no idea who the traveler is; often, as is typical in dreams, I know and I don’t know, and even without knowing who he is, I have no doubt that he’s me. Next to the roundabout, where the ..read more

‘A man without a job is like a boat without a rudder, or a ship­wreck,’ said the Very Old Sheep. I loved sharing my happiness with him. This yoke of misery was my Our Father, my Hail Mary, my Dahomey, my four hundred and one lwa, my twenty-one nations, my painful bread, my enraged drums in the heart of bodies, my trance. Imagine a long hallway full of men, not one s ingle woman, half-asleep, bent over, barely supporting themselves, ravaged by the boredom and bitterness of a lifetime, revenants, lost at sea, unravelled. This hallway of goats for the slaughter. There were also young graduates ..read more

June 26, 1997 Someone had spotted something unusual moving in the Red Grove’s cliffs. High up in an alcove, a mountain lion had made a den for her three kittens. Nobody in the community remembered seeing a whole mountain lion family before, as they are secretive, stealthy, and rare. Evidence appeared sometimes—a dried paw print in the mud, a deer carcass, a missing cat—but their presence was mostly theoretical, mythical, the ghost of something lethal that was somehow tied to what made the Red Grove safe, always just out of sight. A news anchor from one of the nearby towns had arrived first th ..read more

Born with a Broken Heart June 2037 I was born with a broken heart. One of the valves doesn’t close all the way shut and so blood is continuously leaking from one side to the other. I only found out about it a few years back, after I fainted while delivering packages in the rain. Rainy days are always the busiest for deliveries. Nobody wants to go out if the streets are flooding, and there’s always something that goes wrong: a package or an envelope soaks through, the food gets cold, the tarp covering you and your scooter starts to leak rainwater down your neck. People are also real assholes o ..read more

I said to myself I think you’re scared of the algorithms, Auxilio, Auxilio wrote, if you call this Antonio individual from your device, I think I thought, which is registered under my name, and you reach him on his device, which is probably registered under his name, you will awaken the American algorithms, but why have you come to imagine the algorithms as mechanical spiders, Auxilio, I said, please give me a minute to consider your question, I said, Auxilio will call Antonio, I think I imagined, the designated algorithm will crawl out of its slot and establish a linkage between Auxilio and ..read more

To what wide, deep, clean, carpeted, deforested multiuse conference room would you compare this valley, this vale, this trench, where the vertebrates, world-weary, checking their wearables, dig in their gutters, their spoons in the loam, to carve out their shelters, their compounds, their holes, their affordable housing for loyal staffers, for thought-leaders, lawyers, data-collectors, their property brothers and land developers, maybe a moldable least-loved son, their man-caves for congressmen only aroused when splitting the field mouse in half in their hands, their he-sheds for those of the ..read more

Designer Like Flavor Flav taking Sweetie to Red Lobster on their first date, during the first season of Flavor of Love. I forget his order. But I learned how happiness comes in small things. I think about seafood tanks in Hong Kong restaurants. How summers ago, at Dim Sum, my grandpa and I watched the tanks together. How the abalone and inches of prawns and lobsters with whiskers and big-lipped-injected fish floated. How summers ago, Grandpa told me he wanted more poems about eels. How he predicted the future. What Chinese Grandpa isn’t magical. As a three-year-old in Kowloon, I dreaded seafo ..read more