December 24, 2017
If you poured pepsi and coca-cola and asparagus and avocado and wasabi and samosas and sushi and pasta and Little Caesar’s pizza all into one massive bowl of water and salt and sugar and left it there to boil and burn and melt, after 3 days, everything will be spooned together, but that doesn’t mean it tastes good, and, besides, it’s hard to guess everything’s that’s in it because other than the buttery nut-tang of the avocado, the faint waft of the watery, earthy mushroom, everything’s lost its face.
December 25, 2017
Nodald and I wed today. Though he looks like a mix of Jim Carrey and O.J. Simpson at age 41 and is elitist enough to think I will rush for the blueberries at Costco because he accidently ate a blueberry with his Taco Bell burrito and really liked it, I tell my mother that I can breathe him. But mammy refuses the scent of Nodald, says that only the whorish type of woman marries a boy like that, and nothing will extend her arms to feel me. It’s not the end of the world and the promised coming of the messiah but sometimes (with mammy) it can feel that way. At least dad made the effort -- only because Nodald’s into tennis and dad was a Penn State tennis team walk-on though.
December 27, 2018
Went to America’s Mall. The stripper gorl is nine and a half and she says that it’s okay and it’s okay because she said it is, so I walk away to the standing seagulls on the bench outside to eat my peppered red bell pepper sandwich fresh from the restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen. But when I sit on the long, needled parchings of a snow-slapped bench, a seagull lunges for a stray pepper from the wheel of a kebab stand and secures it in the point of its lemon-orange bill.
December 29, 2019
The objective is to sit on the stool behind the bar and try not to break the pop-top of the beer can -- and don’t disturb the gorl from behind the beaded curtain with the Coca-Cola ad either. Avert eyes and breathe. She is an anti-nihilist punk rock without an eyelid piercing and without pastel, neon hair. She is an Instagram poet, an almost American, asian New Yorker. She stares at me hard like mammy would until I have to turn my body to the street windows to drink like I want to.
December 30, 2020
I chased flies to kill them one evening, running after them with a frying pan and cornering them against the brick walls of the courtyard to squash them because I’m bigger. It’s fascinating how the blood of flies can be orange and green, reflecting what weed they recently forced down their throats.
December 31, 2020
Nodald is particularly annoyed by the incessant buzzing of house flies; they have wronged him many times in plaguing his food. But I still tell him that he’s sour when he wishes that all house flies die of fly cancer. Mammy hears and says that she wishes he die of Nodald cancer.
January 1, 2021
A fresh new hope. New year, new me, new diet, new cardio treadmill, new tactical masterpiece to get Nodald to eat the last bits of brown rice, to stop filling silent pockets of conversation with debates on abortion and marijuana during gentle Sunday picnics. He says in broken whispers that he doesn’t really know how to be a husband, that this is all he’s ever known, that he wishes he could be the chocolate Valentine type for me, for prosperity.
January 2, 2021
Mammy came around today. Said she’s noticed that Nodald hasn’t burned down the neighborhood yet. Said it’s that damn stupid foul tongue, but, she should have flown to Barbados for the wedding. Good intentions, it’s a hunch your gut just has, I tell her. She says I know -- it’s not like I had MRIs or brain scans to confirm anything. You didn’t either.
January 3, 2021
Before a cousin’s birthday party, the melting pot boils crimson and rose and sapphire: red and pink and blue. We tip the milky confetti batter over onto parchment paper layered in the jointed curves of a Savarin mould. The mould is pushed into an oven to crisp. Nodald has a dotted wax candle, mammy the nutella (no one knows how to make whip cream that doesn’t taste like butter), dad the silver powdered sugar, me the forks and knives, and we watch 7pm Jeopardy in the basement while we wait. This could have been us since four years ago.
October 31, 2021
The strata has collapsed into itself a thousand times over. My swollen belly, more delicate and intricate than his swollen belly -- he’s had a hard time controlling the amount of Mountain Dew he drinks at night. A part of me longs for this all to be over -- I could walk away -- another part of me is sad that the neighbors and mammy and all of those things finally burned his core, so that he’s sitting here in this shack of a home, telling me that a man never cries, when his eyelids are pooling with the tears belonging to the shell of a man. I hate him for all these things he’s done, yet, not exactly, because there is a lit spirit in him that I wish could be breathed into me, that I support because no one else is truly, honestly better.
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