Kyle Channing Smith. At the ticket counter of the bus station in Austin, I cleared my throat and conjured the dignity of a thousand proud women in distress. Black and white women with wide-brimmed hats and slim skirts. I arranged my face in an earnest yet proud expression. My eyes would connect deeply, hopefully, with the ticket seller, a woman who was ignoring me. She was a little jowly, her hair either wet from her
Every Secret is a Little Casket When we got to my father’s grave, my mother apologized. Anthills puckered at the seams of the grave. Crabgrass hemmed in the nameplate. It was a flat grave, not high but deep. Another beside it with her name and single date seemed to wait, undisturbed. Seemed to wait. Tending was what she thought she hadn’t done: tiny minutes unstitched . . . Subscribers Only Keep reading this article This
Illustration by Mike Perry I surveyed his dorm room. Black comforter with matching pillow shams, athletic trophies above the bed, Narcos paused on the TV, a musty glass of water on the bedside table (dust gathered around the bottom), a bottle of CVS-brand lube. I catch a whiff of BO covered with something tingly, woody, irritable: Old Spice NightPanther, uncapped, on the floor at the foot of the bed. I could’ve been in my own
Mrs. Dalloway realizes she left her wallet at home. Dorian Gray keeps his skin youthful by using a daily SPF, and also by having a cursed painting in the closet. Clytemnestra obsesses over true crime podcasts. Lady Macbeth gets period stains out of her favorite outfit. Finding himself transformed into a giant insect, Gregor Samsa is relieved to have an excuse to cancel plans.
In 1991, a fat teenaged girl with a prosthetic leg named Nomy Lamm wrote and distributed a xeroxed-and-stapled, passport-sized zine called i’m so fucking beautiful. Part manifesto, part personal essay, it offered a nuanced critique of Fat Is a Feminist Issue, the 1978 self-help best-seller that theorized the psychological and political context around women and eating. That book’s glamorous British author, Susie Orbach, the co-founder of the Women’s Therapy Centre, was therapist to none other
Certainly not the Angel Red I might try, Fire and Ice was my mother’s one and only, flaming her lips and smooching my father’s. Faithful to her favorite shade, she lived her creed of right and wrong. She did not convert to a miniskirt or wear pants, except for hiking, and never applied pink by any name. The click when she capped the sleek cylinder was as distinct as the tap, tap of high heels
DAWN IS BRIGHT DUSK IS DIM DOOM IS INBETWEEN You are not asleep. You are a photograph of sleep. You are in a movie of actors acting as if asleep. You are in a movie of actors really sleeping. You may be dreaming of sleep. You may be a person dreaming that he is a person sleeping. You are in a state the locals have convinced you is sleep. This is imitation sleep. Passing itself
Tachycardia Tachycardia all day yesterday faint 8 a.m. by evening a fast thud-thud insistent as if someone is trying to tell me something in a language I don’t know the sign language of a being that expresses itself in beats and is becoming impatient with my ignorance we used to understand each other perfectly or so I thought I thought we were like sisters
Yes, I saw them all, saw them, met some, Richard Hell, Lou Reed, Basquiat, Warhol, Burroughs, Kenneth Koch, and it all left me feeling invisible or fucked, fucked sideways, fucked by a john who stiffs you on your fee and doesn’t leave a tip, it wasn . . . Subscribers Only Keep reading this article This article is available in full to LIBER subscribers — or buy it on its own as a PDF. Subscribe
Ellen Willis with typewriter, giant headphones, and bag from Eli Zabar WHEN I LEFT Ms. magazine in 1997, one of the first people I called for advice was Ellen Willis. I was having an identity crisis. Ms., which had been my way into New York and journalism, was a dream job for five years, a place where editorial meetings entailed discussing the butch-femme dichotomy of Tonya Harding vs. Nancy Kerrigan, where even working the reception
