silence thirty students and laptops along the room's perimeter a pile of backpacks between the door and a bookcase fingers on keyboards like rain on a sidewalk warm, stagnant air of early afternoon five heads on desks between hoods and forearms cold coffee in a thrift-store mug by the keyboard on your desk a pencil eraser on a desk 120 beats per minute a whisper a nod silence
Tag: literature
The World Is Ending
Each section is based on the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the day from April, 2023.
I. smittle, v.
The world is ending. The world is ending and you want to go get groceries. You want to "Keep Calm and Carry On" the apocalypse. The world is ending and you "just need some cold medicine." The world is ending. My world is ending.
II. schlafrock, n.
Wrapped in your robe, you lie on the couch under a fleece blanket, a cough drop skating around your mouth. Snow falls fast, mixed with audible rain outside the sliding glass door, blinds turned toward the opposite wall. I turn the stove off as steam erupts from the kettle, whose water I pour into a mug shaped like a camper van. The bag of chamomile bobs to the surface looking for air; exhausted, it floats in defeat, waits for the end.
III. naumachia, n.
That was the last time before
the news broke. Before
the apocalypse arrived
as a push notification
on your phone. “Worst Case
Scenario,” you say. “Go.”
I reply, “Worst Case Scenario:
You cough so much at night that
we’re up all night and I fall asleep at work.”
“Worst Case Scenario:
I wake up so covered in mucus,
you realize I’m too disgusting to be with.”
“Worst Case Scenario:
You die and I end up starving to death,
because I forgot how to cook anything.”
“That would be pretty bad,” you laugh,
cough into your blanket, place your phone
face down on the coffee table.
IV. supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, adj.
You like to watch Mary Poppins when you’re overwhelmed. An escape when no other can be found.
V. grass line, n.
During the movie, you sink below the hem of your blanket. Your breathing is heavy, labored through bubbling mucus. You say, “A spoonful of sugar wouldn’t do shit.” These things help me know you’re still here.
VI. paenula, n.
Priests visit our house three days after the apocalypse began, sent by the hospital. The doctors assumed it would help. The priests left Bibles and crosses on the dining table. They live in denial of the end of days already being here — delusional.
VII. shishya, n.
We met at a training for new teachers the district required, even though we had both taught for several years prior. We sat at the same table in an elementary school library. The instructional coach lead us in too many icebreakers; we complained about our wasted time instead.
VIII. om mani padme hum, n. (and int.)
In the morning, after work, or after your daily walk around the neighborhood, you sit on the patio in a camping chair next to pots of tomatoes who refuse to grow.
IX. singeli, n.
It’s hard to breathe
when the world is ending.
Smoke envelops the sky
in a gnarled yellow hue.
My heartbeats as intense as
when the bass drops in an edm song.
X. anago, n.
I insist on going to the store for cold medicine. I walk through the aisles like a red-tailed hawk after its prey. I stop by Trapper’s when I’m done to surprise you with your favorite dinner.
XI. ristra, n.
I find you on the couch surrounded by used tissues under a garland of peppers your mother sent for luck after she heard the world is ending.
XII. ogogoro, n.
You’ve been drinking more since your diagnosis. Soothes your throat, helps you sleep, helps you escape your body.
XIII. volksliedjie, n.
I remember our first concert. You told me about this band I’d never heard of who played a genre I’d never heard of. You told me their songs were full of magic.
XIV. wax comb, n.
We walk a bit further each day to build up your endurance. You want to climb Tiger Mountain one more time.
XV. plámás, v.
You scoff when I tell you you’re getting better. You argue when I say you’re not gross.
XVI. quotingly, adv.
You read articles about recent studies, checkout medical journals from the library. You tell me about the many branches of if-thens in our future.
XVII. nemorivagant, adj..
We start our hike up Tiger Mountain around dawn. A slow pace with many breaks in our ascent. Once at the summit, you sit on a rock, watch the afternoon sun crawl over Fall City.
XVIII. coursable, adj.
My paycheck goes to various bills and groceries— integers and decimals losing meaning each day. All we have is time.
XIX. ventilary, adj.
I’m sorry, but sometimes, when you fall asleep before me, I listen to you snore, the rhythm, where it becomes irregular.
XX. omen, v.
It’s difficult to not think about the number of tissues in the trash, the amount of wine you drink, the increasing hours you sleep.
XXI. yum cha, n.
During your afternoon nap, I clean up dishes from brunch. Your tea empty, your plate still covered in spring rolls.
XXII. novaturient, adj.
A spring breeze rolls through our house. You sleep the whole night through, wake with a zeal not seen in weeks—maybe months? You make us coffee, eat breakfast, begin tidying the living room, washing and folding blankets. Feels like the sun emerging from behind a storm cloud.
XXIII. squaretail, n.
You’re mostly quiet as you walk around the lake by our neighborhood. But you still say hello to every squirrel, every crow and goose.
XXIV. pad, n.
The world ends
the 24th of April.
I wake up
around 3 am.
You are cold
and still.
I hyperventilate through
our address with a dispatcher.
XXV. ombré, n.
I watch the sunrise
through the sliding glass door
of the hospital lobby.
Stripes cut through the clouds,
sections that aren’t ready
to move on yet.
XXVI. manhwa, n.
When a doctor calls my name, tells me about the apocalypse in a calm tone, my vision is stuck on The God of High School playing on a kid’s iPad.
XXVII. flag-off, n.
It starts— the forms, paperwork, phone calls— so many phone calls. I have to keep saying you’re dead. Present tense. Forever.
XXVIII. queachy, adj.
Our house feels uneven— a slow-motion earthquake, or maybe a blackhole ripped through the living room.
XXIX. spaza, n.
Our neighbors and coworkers set up a meal train on some website. Someone’s knocks echo through our cavernous house at random intervals, leave casseroles, gift cards, plastic bags of plastic containers, on the doormat.
XXX. bodega, n.
The world has ended. The world has ended and people stand in line at the store. They want to carry on like nothing’s happened. The world has ended and they need something to take the edge off. The world has ended. No one seems to care.
A Logical Conclusion of Hypochondria
Floaters crawl across an overcast sky. Maybe your retinas are about to detach. One day, you won’t be able to see anyway. A cramp in your calf wakes you in the middle of the night. Feels like a mountain lion’s teeth ripping meat from bone. One day, you won’t be able to walk anyway. Hollowness erupts in your wrist halfway through typing an email. You bend and stretch to fill the void. One day, you won’t be able to type anyway. A feeling in your chest like an icepick in your heart. Each breath hurts. Is it your heart? Your lungs? One day, you won’t be able to breathe anyway. You can’t remember the word that describes this feeling. It’s behind a fog rolling over a harbor. One day, you won’t be able to remember anyway.
every tree on the coast
every tree on the coast leans inland, stretches their branches toward the hills away from shore. what do they know?
On a Beach in Astronomical Twilight
It's just so improbable, you know? Those stars are thousands of lightyears away. That would mean these photons flew here, voyagers, trillions of miles, from a home they'll never return to, and nothing got in their way. They didn't stop at another planet, get eaten by another star, collide with an asteroid, or freeze in a comet's tail. These photons sailed right here, into our eyes, uninterrupted for millennia. Light bent in the right way for us to see remnants of an ancestor whose name is probably a series of numbers in a spreadsheet. And, we get to see these photons, but not the ones who arrive later or earlier, not the ones caught by an overcast sky. We only see the ones who flew from those stars to this specific spot, as our planet corkscrews around a different star whose eye is currently caught mid-blink. It's infinitesimal, these odds; these stars, their light, and us, lying on a beach in astronomical twilight.
i feel like a ghost town.
i feel like a ghost town. empty buildings with shuttered windows around a patchy courtyard. no wind, no rain, nothing here anymore.
the big game
sun crawls toward a snow-capped ridge. someone’s built snowpeople on top of the frozen pond. the moon hides behind trees doing their morning stretches. a fire pit, half-buried, watches the sky change from blue-black to peach to grey. engines from the highway mix with the yawn from the forest, mix with the whisper from the stream underfoot.
Have I always been this way?
Each section is based on the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the day from January, 2023.
I. wardour street, adj. and n.
Back in ninth grade, after our English class read Romeo & Juliet, Dom kept speaking in fake medieval diction. She’d spend lunch telling me about the latest episode of Riverdale with the occasional ‘ye’ and ’t’was,’ a smattering of ‘-eth’ suffixes.
II. Ideogenous, adj.
Dom used to write stories all the time. During class, her laptop would be open for ‘note-taking,’ but she would be deep into her latest Reylo fanfiction.
III. collabo, v.
The first time Dom spoke to me, she asked me to help with a piece she wanted to play for the solo and ensemble contest. She was taking a mute out of her trumpet; I was putting the marimba part of “So What” in my folder. The hollow sound of her emptying her spit valve filled the time it took me to understand. I never thought I was that good or noticeable. I accepted the opportunity.
IV. amigurumi, n.
I have a squid on my desk, small, purple, a tiny grin, that Dom knit me before she moved away. I think about messaging her every time I see it, but get too afraid to type anything.
V. groceteria, n.
The morning of the solo and ensemble contest, Dom said we needed to stop at the Haggen by my apartment complex to get AriZona Arnold Palmers for good luck. She walked across the store like her life depended on it. The cashier complimented our suits. We chugged them in the high school parking lot.
VI. misogamous, adj.
Dom texted me during winter break our sophomore year upset her mom got engaged to her boyfriend. She didn’t understand how her mom could happily participate in such patriarchal traditions.
VII. y’alls, pron.
When the judge announced our performance of “Take Five” won the small ensemble category, the audience erupted.
VIII. roscidating, adj.
I sit at my computer, doomscrolling, alone. Dom’s squid stares at me. I need to talk to someone, but what would I even say?
IX. red queen, n.
She always wanted to get better at whatever she was fixated on. She encouraged me to do the same. She even showed me her earlier fanfiction, which was so terrible she swore to never share it. But she trusted me.
X. cabinet able, adj.
I used to eat lunch in the library. Well, I’d sit in the library during lunch. But Dom invited me to sit with her and her friends after we started practicing for the contest. It was like starting a series halfway through the third season, piecing together names and plots everyone else already knows.
XI. ajangle, adj. and adv.
I remember the sound distinctly: the chime my phone made when Dom texted me to tell me her stepdad got relocated; they’d have to move during spring break. I remember the sound distinctly: the chime my phone made when I learned my best friend was leaving in the middle of our senior year. My phone has been on silent since.
XII. coachy, adj.
Junior year, when my grandpa got sick, Dom drove me from school to the hospital. She refused my offer for gas money, said it’s what friends do.
XIII. blankety, adj.
I don’t have another way to describe it. When I was around her, I felt safe. She understood me in a way most people don’t.
XIV. galdem, n.
For me, it was hard feeling part of the group. I always felt outside, apart. When Dom invited me to her lunch table, she made sure I was part of the conversation. It’s because of her I was able to make the friends I had, the memories I have. She made it so easy.
XV. satoshi, n.
Is this what distance does? Does the past live behind rose-tinted glass? Does she remember me this way: emphases on my positives, whatever they are? Or, does she remember how much she did for me, how little I could return? Does her mind filter me through the windows of an abandoned home?
XVI. cyberslacking, n.
I don’t even know what I’m afraid of. Sometimes, when a professor’s lecture is slow, I search Dom’s name on Instagram to see what she’s been up to. I don’t follow her, too afraid of her seeing the notification with my name, remembering how I disappeared, then blocking me.
XVII. mindstyle, n.
Have I always been this way? Has it always been the case that the walls around me were constructed by me? Am I to blame for my own isolation? How couldn’t I see it before? Why can’t I change it?
XVIII. barnstorm, v.
In the spring of freshman year, our jazz band did several performances at nearby memory care places. Dom was so excited to be a traveling bard, she memorized several sonnets and monologues by Shakespeare to recite between songs.
XIX. bumble broth, n.
The week after she moved, she texted me, asking how I’d been, apologizing for not reaching out earlier overwhelmed with travel and unpacking. Words flooded me. Where would I even start? I couldn’t even find the words for what I was feeling.
XX. cruyff turn, n.
For a while, I tried diversion: ask about her day, ask about her mom, ask about Euphoria. Much easier to read and listen to her than find words of my own.
XXI. booze can, n.
I remember the first time I felt the fractures grow. It was a month after she moved. My dads were at a school counselor conference. I raided the liquor cabinet in hopes it would loosen my lips, find my words. The words that came were hurt, full of confrontation, resentment.
XXII. dumbsizing, n.
She didn’t text me for several days. I didn’t blame her. It was never the same afterward. Time between messages grew like moss after a rainstorm.
XXIII. kitbash, v.
The way she’d play trumpet, write her stories— she’d draw connections between unlike things, create something I’d never seen before.
XXIV. durex, n.
We were inseparable once. Each afternoon at one of our homes, homework and horror movies, walks through the parks at our neighborhoods’ edges. We’d share AirPods and secrets before school, at lunch, at games our boyfriends made us attend.
XXV. ramfeezled, adj.
I’m standing at the end of the bread aisle staring at the everything bagels, her favorite breakfast. I miss her so much. What’s the worst that can happen? I already have nothing. I already am nothing.
XXVI. skyrgalliard, n.
There’s a beehive in my chest. Words fill the windshield on my way home. I activate the wipers to sift through them.
XXVII. shockle, n.
We did a morning hike at Franklin Falls the last day of winter break senior year. We packed two thermoses of hot chocolate, drank them at the base of the frozen waterfall. We talked about our families, the future, decisions we would have to make.
XXVIII. chup, int. and adj.
My natural state is silent. It’s easy to listen to other people talk. It’s much more difficult to say something, to be open and vulnerable to someone else.
XXIX. mopery, n.
On her last day, I couldn’t drive home from school. I sat in the parking lot on the hood of my car. She said she had to go, had to finish packing. I watched her drive away, then sat and cried until security came to shoo me away.
XXX. send-forth, n.
I helped organize a party to tell Dom goodbye. We marathoned Star Wars movies, ate bagels, drank Arnold Palmers. It was the last time we were in the same room, the last time we laughed together.
XXXI. navel-gazer, n.
Stare at the ceiling for an hour, dig my phone out of my bag, take a deep breath, open Instagram, find her profile, hit follow, open a message, type the first words that come to me, hit send, enable sound, throw my phone across the living room. It dings.
breakfast with a bald eagle
downed spruce trunk under green water a steady current rain drops on their cloud’s reflection on the riverbank a bald eagle beak-deep in a pink salmon carcass under its talon thick fog in the tree line at the foot of the mountain slow as dawn a call from a nearby fir the rhythm of a playing card between bicycle spokes frantic brown wings into the air forsaken salmon flesh on the shore for the seagulls
Feminist Masculinity
After Feminism Is for Everybody, by bell hooks.
You are 32. On your way to work, you listen to an audiobook where bell hooks talks about how difficult it is to teach boys feminism, how feminist masculinity is often ignored for simplified narratives of blame and finger pointing rather than rebuilding society. You are 27. During an English department meeting, a colleague from another school remarks how good you are at being the only man in the room. You are 25. On your daily walk around your neighborhood, your dad calls. He tells you about his family, the latest news about your cousin, how nonsensical it is her best friend to be a man. You are 17. You work in the kitchen of a restaurant. You mostly interact with servers, most of whom are women. It is taken as a truism: women get better tips than men; you belong in the kitchen. You are 12. During your sixth-grade class’s sex ed. unit, your teacher talks about biological differences between boys and girls. She singles you out for being a boy with long eyelashes, a trait associated with girls. You are seven. Your mom is driving you home from daycare. You ask her about her day. She tells you about work you don’t understand, coworkers that frustrate her. You ask her if her coworkers are her friends. She tells you men and women just can’t be friends.
M. Espinosa 