He Woke the Beast was first performed on May 29th, 2016 as part of The Arrow Cracks with The Neo-Futurists. Brian put his hand on my thigh and said, “Don’t worry, I won’t let that happen to you again.” I wanted to take his hand off my leg and slap him in the face with it repeatedly, while saying, “Stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself.” Brian and I were both studying abroad in Morocco for the semester. […]
Inner Adjustments was read as part of Miss Spoken’s May 2016 show, Birth Control. You can find Christina at the 40:56 mark. The decision to get an IUD was almost spur-of-the moment. I wasn’t thinking about it when I went to see my gynecologist for my annual checkup: I was thinking about birth control pills. I’d been taking the pill on and off for about 10 years, which started making me nervous when I hit 30. I’d become inconsistent about taking them, and paranoid […]
I found my mom’s old diaries in our attic the other day and I read them all. Cover to cover. This was pretty scandalous. I want to point out that my mom isn’t dead or anything. My mom was downstairs doing the dishes. I was just committing a severe breach of trust. Would I be angry if the tables were turned, and my mother was reading my diaries? Hell yeah. Did this stop me? Nope. I decided that it was […]
The muffler could be heard from down the street and I knew he was here. It was a little past midnight when I snuck out of my house. Matthew picks me up in his jet-black 1965 Mustang Convertible. I snap on my seatbelt, ready for our next adventure, and he asks me, “Do you cruise?” Cruise? I had to take a second to think, Hmmm…do I “cruise”? Matt was 27 and I was 17 because I don’t know, daddy issues, but […]
I hope Nicole is okay. I hope the weight of being this age at this time doesn’t crush her. I hope her life is easy (much easier than mine) and that she is ascending. Because me, her doppelgänger, was descending, and quickly. “You look really familiar,” people tell me when I’m in public. The longer I live within city limits, the more often I hear this. Whereas at first I assumed it was something white people said to black people […]
I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri with my mom, dad, three brothers, and two sisters. My parents wanted nothing less than the Midwestern dream for their Irish-Catholic brood: quarterbacks and prom kings for sons, dance team captains and homecoming queens for daughters. They dreamed of future lawyers, soccer moms, grandchildren galore. And who’s to blame them? Who wouldn’t want what’s best for their kids? Unfortunately for my mom, I didn’t fit into her idea of Midwest perfection. While my […]
No Way, Cupid was told as part of Miss Spoken’s November 2015 show, Online Dating. You can find Gina at the 1:07 mark. It was a typical Saturday night: I was on the couch eating peanut M&Ms and watching a show about murder. I stared at my open laptop, anxiously gnawing through a thin candy shell as I hovered over the cheery green button in front of me that oh-so-innocuously encouraged me to “Join!” I took a deep breath and clicked. I began […]
In 1995, an unknown writer published a book of self-help musings. This book contained 365 entries–one for each day of the year–and promised to “transform your life and help you excavate your authentic self.” It extolled the joys of simple pleasures, like “the smell of fresh laundry” and “porridge with warm apple sauce.” It promised that by appreciating the simple things in life, you would have “more.” The author doesn’t say more what. Just more.
My freshman year really sucked. My only friend switched schools, so I faced the Catholic high school alone. Without that automatic Best Friend confidence, I prayed to just be ignored, lest I say the wrong, weird thing. I was nervous and bookish and also 6’1”. I wore black pants and a black sweater and never raised my hand. I did not care that my quiet, detached attitude just seemed stuck-up; it kept me from having to talk to people. I […]
