Writing

A Stunted River

Scorched Earth Press

Essay in Under Waters: An Atlas of Buried Rivers (forthcoming, 2024)

A Different Way of Being Dutch

Astra Magazine

Hans Lodeizen lived a joyful queer life and made a singular contribution to the Dutch literary landscape while standing outside it entirely. To me, he was a signpost, an augury, a gentle guiding spirit.

Translated into Arabic by Ali Al-Badri for Shamal Magazine

Mind the Gap

Guernica

Even the terminology riles me up. “May-December relationship is such a dumbass term,” I complain to Dori. “How do your fifties equate to December? That’s, like, October at the most.”

Featured in the Memoir Monday newsletter
Featured in Autostraddle’s NSFW Sunday roundup 

I Think About This A Lot: Britney’s British Accent in ‘Scream & Shout’

The Cut

The way she croons “all eyes on auss” reminds me of playing dress-up as a kid, wearing my dad’s XL white T-shirt as Cinderella’s wedding dress. It’s reaching for a half-understood idea of sophistication, a dalliance with a different self. But it’s also unapologetically goofy, her equivalent of a Dollar Store fake beard and sunglasses. It’s clear that it’s an act—we never lose sight of the American Britney underneath. I like that, because having an utterly convincing foreign accent has often left me a bit confused about where I belong.

Safer at Home

LA Review of Books

The process of learning about this country has been the process of learning that any bliss is a stolen bliss, deluded, perched on the brink of disaster.

Featured in The Rumpus’ Weekly Essay Roundup

That Voice Again

The RS 500

You feel plump with secrets, smug and exalted, striding down the long dark hallway in a seashell-shimmer cream silk slip, the apartment seeming to undulate toward you like a coral reef. You are the mistress.

Room in DTLA

Queen Mob’s Tea House

I look at the back of her head and her curls falling on the pillow. Over and over again I think: you are beautiful, you are beautiful, come to me, come. And she does.

Dorissey

The RS 500

“I feel like such a caricature of English rebellion,” I say, “sitting here in my stompy boots listening to the Smiths.”

“I know! And thirty years too late!”

Love in the Time of the Wall

Word-o-Mat

When, later that same night, Dori makes me come, it makes me cry. She presses her worried forehead against mine, and I struggle to articulate the sense of dissonance—at experiencing such bounty in a time of such incredible restrictions; at being so wide open while outside, the world clamps down its steely mechanical jaws on the most vulnerable.

Rooted and Restless

The Collapsar

It seems I’m always playing homes off against each other. Wherever I am, at some point I find myself thinking in bewilderment, “I can’t wait to tell everyone about this when I get back home.” Wherever I am, I’m the foreigner, constantly asked to recount what lies on the other side.

Dream States

Rivet Journal

It’s a scary gamble, uprooting yourself. It’s so easy to slip through the cracks, fall off the map. I think of that gunshot ringing out in my family’s American history: the cost of trying to gain a foothold in this wide, wild country.

Los Angeles, Seen from a Tree

Shooter Literary Magazine

Being in this landscape feels different from the mawkish masochism that has characterized many of my past decisions. It feels like being at peace with my own wildness, my hawk-talon self.

Living Off Land

Morning Stories on Sky News

Blues for Kathleen

The RS 500

After they’ve gone out, you walk around the house, looking at his bathrobe hung from the hook in her bedroom like a sloughed-off body abandoned by its spirit. Is this really the life she wants for herself?