It lies in their souls. That Earthly promise of life beyond the flesh and ascent into the sky along an arch formed by rain. It is only the drowned—buried under the seafoam corpses of our ancestors—whose souls remain in the sea.
Alien Chatter
My dissociative self is sadly not a witness to my world but a captive to my mind, chained to the fear that the minute I return to the restaurant floor, my body will cave into a carcass and dissipate into dust.
David In The Dark
For years after Arturo’s death, Robert lived as a recluse, conspiring with David in the dark. David understood what it felt like to be modeled after his maker and his maker’s desires, only to become something far greater, lonelier, the romantic genius always looking over the precipice.
“You Haven’t Lived Until You’ve Died In New York”*
New York had become my campus, or so the flyers advertised. In subway stations, at museums, on trains, in taxicabs, outside restaurants, on street corners, I found myself asking the question: What makes a New Yorker?
What follows are my observations.
Why I don’t drink
I am often asked why I don’t drink. Everyone asks me: people in Pakistan and people in countries that are not Pakistan. I like to joke that I do drink—water, lemonade, coffee, chai. If I didn’t drink, I would likely die. No one ever wants to know why I don’t drink carrot juice or why I don’t eat hard-boiled eggs, but it is of utmost importance for them to know why I don’t drink alcohol.
HBO’s “Our Flag Means Death” is A Masterpiece in ‘Fuckery’
Putting aside the scurvy, wooden fingers, and telepathic seagulls, Our Flag Means Death is a show about outcasts for outcasts. It’s silly, sometimes irreverent, but brilliantly tender. It’s not just a rom-com or situational comedy; it’s a queer elegy—honoring those outcasts in history who chose to risk their lives for freedom and perhaps even love.
Seeing is Believing
Is this how it ends? Does she have my face? Am I gonna die? Why is it that a simple thing like going to get food and trying to eat healthy spirals into something where I don’t feel safe? Cops could be involved.
CANDY SHOP
In my worst nightmares, I’m standing outside the Candy Shop,
crying on the sidewalk in Brooklyn.
A moment in time—
where only I could remember
the night you refused to come out and talk.
Our Mess
“Mommy, why is our house painted different colors? No one else’s house is like that.”
“Because honey, your father likes chaos, and I am an artist.”
The Ewe’s Blood Trickles Down Mazant
I feel pulled towards the earth, not the concrete, but below, as above, there’s only pigs with wings squealing incessantly to raise your hands up though they’re still shittin’ on your sty, chortling at us foreign bodies stuck ruttin’ on stolen land, buried land, land that rears its ugly head and seeks its revenge in paroxysms of passion, land I always feel swelling below my trampling feet.
Every Spotlight Has A Shadow
Showing teenagers, regardless of their identity, dealing with complex and messy situations isn’t innately a bad thing. But when these nuanced stories are only told by older cis-het creatives like Sam Levinson, they tend to become a spectacle of voyeurism
Subsisting and Social Distancing with 12th Street
At the end of the Fall 2021 semester, some of the 12th Street editors got together online and wrote some thoughts on how we keep ourselves amused and healthy these days. And from all of […]
Notes from In Between
The volume alone/
slurred over tones of defeat/
should be enough for you to know/
we’re not as discrete as we seem
It’s Not Kind Of A Funny Story
For Ned and all the books that helped me. Seriously because. . . “I’m smart but not enough—just smart enough to have problems.”-Ned Vizzini TW: depression, grief, suicide, mania, mental illness, drugs, alcohol, mentions of […]
Love Of A Sniper
I’m convinced. Relationships just aren’t for me. Every time I try to cultivate a relationship with someone, it always ends in a gut-wrenching, mind-boggling, what-the-fuck happened, and what was it all for kind of […]
Dreams Like
Hostage to circumstance/
try to affirm that I’m magic
Dead Name
It was one of those first days of fall, where the light suddenly feels more distant. Golden hour and Greenwood Cemetery had an ephemeral glow, a stark contrast to the detritus of our lives collecting […]
An Interview With Claire Potter
I had the pleasure of sitting down with Claire Potter, author and Professor of History at The New School. Potter is the Co-Executive Editor of Public Seminar, she hosts the podcast Exiles on 12th Street, […]
Fables
A girl runs away from home, hoping to see her boyfriend. It’s the middle of the night. She gets in a car with a stranger. They share a beer and things get weird. She jumps […]
Obituary of an Ice Cream Sandwich, or “The Monks and the Trees”
Tuesday, September 21 2021 The grain of the wood floor pulls me deeper as my feet find theirgrounding and my head extends toward the ceiling. I stretch myarms wide, halting the rotation of my right […]
Holistic Pharmacy
At the boundary between East Harlem and Carnegie Hill, my class and I were challenged with creating a food pharmacy that could fuse the needs of two communities, while keeping in mind the imposing problems of gentrification in respect to novelty creation.