At sixteen, life is supposed to be safe. Things are supposed to be beginning. We are supposed to be weaning from the care and guidance of people who have raised us. We are supposed to be on the brink of our adult lives. We should be taking the reins and figuring out how to care for ourselves, and we should have our most basic needs met so that we can care for others. It’s a volatile, dizzying, restless age. It is not always sweet.

A cupboard is just asking to be opened. A cupboard doesn’t ask a question, but is, by its very nature, an entreaty. A cupboard says it did not ask to be a cupboard, did not ask to be an entreaty, is not, in fact, a cupboard at all.

Pinball takes place in a more liminal environment: those may be your physical fingers hitting flipper buttons and your real voice cussing out Bride of Pin-Bot, but your vision, your concentration—everything about you that’s more consciousness than body—moves outside of yourself and behind a thin layer of glass.

This is the fantasy of self-sufficiency: healthy in a closed loop, without needing anything from anyone else.

Budapest Pale, blonde phantom / In sleeping gown, I am Barefoot at the precipice, / A cloud of invisible Long-haired, white rabbits / Leashed, to me. I am drowning...

The only Korean word I know is oma,/meaning mother. I sit across from her in the low light of the Korean restaurant/downtown. We hold rice paper menus/up to the candle's glow...

he dials and dials his best half, / fingers moving like pretty / please, like knock on wood, like long / prayers, like rain dancers bright / in his loneliness who stomp

Throughout my father’s life, people often described him as a sage or clairvoyant, a blind man who could see beyond the visual.I was seventeen when I noticed the pattern. When an admissions officer at a small liberal arts college called me in for an interview, she spotted my dad and his dog in the waiting room.

In their entry on love, Berlant writes that we tend to (mistakenly) use the objects our desire attaches to in order to assume an identity— “you know who…

For Berlant, part of the problem of politics is that marginalized people have to accommodate the feelings of their majority counterparts in order to successfully…