poem
The Likely Histories of Paul & Paige
Northwest Review 🔓 paywall
Today, on this slippery mountain
people will look at us
and be reminded of a Bollywood movie
they were forced to sit through
on a flight / to save a friendship—
they will relive
the saccharine revulsion of witnessing
immigrant newlyweds holding hands.
In us, they’ll see a woman floundering on uneven stone
a man holding her hand, grasping it
like the rudder of a boat that his parents bought him
novel excerpt
Animal Behavior
The Johannesburg Review Of Books
In the beginning, I’m stepping off a plane, hobbling on scrunched-up legs toward the arrivals hall of Hendrik Van Eck Airport. Twilight has washed the tarmac purple. A breeze moves in from the lowveld. The scents of a great many trees. The date is May 29. The year is 2010. It is the first day of my new job.
At my back, a year-long tryst with unemployment, the soupy remains of my college education gathering in my parents’ basement in Princeton, New Jersey, along with the rest of my things: my piles of books approaching the slit of the hopper window; my gym shorts shed like snakeskin on the carpet; suitcases lying unpacked; and, on the nightstand, a succulent with a lone purple leaf.
essay
Frequently Asked Questions
Wilderness House Literary Review
Day 1. Why am I leaving?
It is summer in the high country, and the air is charged with dandelions and smoke. Snow lingers on the highest peaks. Horseflies gather to drink my blood. I am moving quickly, too quickly, away from a life that was perfectly good. Perhaps I am escaping tedium, predictability. I tell myself there is a flight to catch, an apartment to fill with new essentials. The mockingbird outside my window in Oakland learns new songs each year. Perhaps I want to learn new songs too.
poem
Damn Straight
Scapegoat Review
I knew
I had a thing for him
when I tried peeing in the next stall
and couldn’t
not in love, exactly
but a kind of goose-cooking
ninety-nine knobs groaning as they turned
there was no bug to fixate on
just forced visions of octogenarians
falling to the scent of shampoo
distilled from the navel of a unicorn.
essay
Good Designers Borrow
Benchling Engineering
In the summer of 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic threatened to swallow the planet, Martin, a molecular biologist at a London-based startup, sat squinting at Microsoft Excel on his computer. That’s the software he used to map out his research, which focuses on modified RNA, the same technology that would give rise, in just a few months, to the life-saving vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna. His own work involved cancer, specifically the development of treatments that would restore normal function to tumor cells. It was an approach that flew counter to the vast majority of treatments on the market, options such as surgery, chemotherapy and radiation therapy, which aim to cure cancer by killing diseased cells rather than healing them.
essay
The Re-education of J.K. Rowling
The Wire
It didn’t take me very long to accept my own sexuality, and J.K. Rowling’s books about the freak-turned-celeb boy wizard get only some of the credit. The rest goes to a pair of pets – two brilliant-yellow budgies who had the hots for each other.
Both were female, as far as the nine-year-old me could tell. Every afternoon, they would take a bath in the water bowl, and then, after drying off, they would hump each other, taking turns, in the frantic, blink-and-you-miss way that birds often do.
“You are not alone,” they seemed to say. “One day, you too will hump a person of your choosing.”
video
Suddenly Visible
The New York Times
hybrid text
Six Issues Of The Hornbill Monthly & Other Evidence Of A Crime
🚧 In Progress
Early October in Kruger National Park, in South Africa, and the wilderness is ripe for burning. The trees quiver with crinkled leaves. Shafts of tall russet choke the clearings. Throughout the woodland, creatures are moving, hunting, eating, fucking with a singular urgency. Squint at the swarms of flies, at the dust kicked up by thirsty elephants, and the signs are clear. A great purge is coming.
In a small camp deep in the woods, I awaken on the morning of my twenty-first birthday with a headache. It’s a familiar feeling for a freshly minted college grad, but on this occasion alcohol is not to blame. I have moved here from America for my dream job, and things aren’t going quite as I expected.
novel
Most Of The Day And Most Of The Night
🚧 In Progress
