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Joe Biden’s Small but Significant Suburban advantage

Daniel Spielberger

I always wake up at five in the morning, moments before the sun sweeps through the valley and gets chased by cyclones of orange dust. The moon beaming, hovering above the mahogany hills dotted with cactus and tumbleweed. This is my time to look out from the Tank window and briefly contemplate. A daily fifteen minutes for Strategic Absence. Uninterrupted and unbothered. I press my fingers on the clear glass, imprinting myself onto this vast expanse of nothing. Two years ago, when I first moved to the Tank, I scheduled twenty minutes for Strategic Absence, but upon further analysis, I concluded that if I go over the fifteen minute time frame, I start to wander and drift and contemplate questions that can’t be concretely answered and therefore it’s best that I set up strict parameters for introspection. During this Strategic Absence I am one with the void. In the corner, my iTwink sleeps in between stacks of binders and files. His brawny plastic folded in half, awaiting me to feed him his daily Fuel of Swiss Navy Silicone Lubricant so he can awake and be of service. The neon green lights illuminate his symmetrical splendor. Sharp cheekbones. Button nose. Puffy lips. Marble white skin. Last night, I noticed his abs had collected some dust, so I wiped him down with a loin cloth. For now, he is resting but soon, there will be much to do. My mattress floats a few feet above the cement ground, lying on top is a black comforter gathered into a ball. iTwink will make my bed once he re-emerges and afterwards, he will go to the pantry and take out packets of Orange and Blue and prepare my Sustenance Smoothie for the day. He will serve it to me with a smile. And if I finish giving my TED talk a couple minutes early, he will perform fellatio to prevent me from experiencing any more Strategic Absence.

He’s a beautiful barrier: the algorithmic synthesis of one hundred kouros statues. Years ago, in order to repay their debts to the European Union, the government of Greece collaborated with Swiss Navy Silicone Lubricant to create the iTwink. My Introspective Spreadsheet led me to believe that I needed an iTwink to complete my existence. He was offered as one of the Tank’s numerous upgraded amenities — the ideal device to keep me company as I’d spend the rest of my life indoors, stirring up algorithms and pouring over graphs and data. There’s no reason to leave the Tank. There’s always the option to strap on a Ventilation Suit and go for a stroll, but there’s a lack of Enrichment Purpose. Outside is a relentless onslaught of orange winds and scorched ambiguity; an unknown that can never be quantified and understood. Miles away, there are other Tanks, white pill-shaped pods, each inhabited by a Data Sorcerer tasked with a duty. We harvest spreadsheets and then repackage the data for the betterment of mankind. Every week, we convene for a video chat meeting. Often, some of them tell me I am doing an excellent  job, and I always answer that I agree.

The fifteen minutes of Strategic Absence is complete. A ray of sun breaks through the vista. The day awaits. I walk over to my Fuel Drawer and remove a 4 ounce bottle of Swiss Navy  Silicone Lubricant. Neatly organized rows of clear liquid manna. A supply that will last me 300 additional days if I choose to have four more all-night Sensual Sessions with iTwink. I pick one up and then hurry over to the droid. I lift up his plastic head from his chest, open his lips, and pour the entire bottle down his wired esophagus.

He comes to. 

“Hello.”

His eyes are a pristine green. They remind me of the redwood forests now reduced to heaps of charcoal. When I first got the iTwink, I composed a Signifier Spreadsheet detailing all  the various tropes and distant memories he triggered.

He burps up some Swiss Navy Silicone Lubricant. It splatters all over my white jumpsuit, dripping down to my wool socks and staining the cement floor. This is a defect in the hardware, an accidental error in coding that sometimes renders him infantile and immobile. I pat him on the back and he comes back to form.

“Hello.”

He quickly makes my bed. He cycles through his movements with gusto, acting like  there’s no other place he’d rather be.

“iTwink, today is a very important day for me.”

He finishes tucking in my sheets. “Yes, I am aware. Today, you will be giving your TED talk on how to utilize the psychometric data that propelled Joe Biden’s Small But Significant Suburban Advantage.”

His voice is warm and spongy, a humid mist summoned from mechanical lungs.

I turn away from iTwink and I am hit with a skeletal reflection in the Tank’s window. An etching of my body layered over the sea of orange. My hair is short and militant. Finally, after months of iTwink trying to hone in on a topical formula, I am free of all acne and scars. In this white jumpsuit, I am aesthetically similar to all the other Data Sorcerers in the Tanks, but perhaps my face would suggest a little more upkeep and attention. So much Strategic Self-Care and Strategic Absence has gone into today. In an hour, I will be streaming into offices in San Francisco, New York City, Washington D.C., Tokyo, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Mumbai, and Jakarta. I will go to the river and bathe my apostles in the gospel.

iTwink tenderly rubs a knot on my shoulder, trying to calm me down. 

“I will make you breakfast.”

He heads over to the kitchen. His rubber bones pop. I turn on the plasma screen floating above my bed to watch the live-feed: iTwink diligently takes out the packets of Orange and Blue  and starts humming one of his three programmed songs. Today, it’s “Maps” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. They don’t love you like I love you. Moving around the metallic kitchen, he’s in his element. He gets some specks of Blue on his chest, takes his finger, and then licks it off, smiling for the camera — at this point, he’s mastered the nuances of this performance. iTwink puts the Orange and Blue powders in a blender, adds some ice, and then watches it all turn into a nutritious goop with naïve amusement.  It’s time to join him in the kitchen.

iTwink pours me some Orange and Blue in a cube-shaped glass. “Bon appétit.”

I put my hand behind his ear and ask in a playful voice, “iTwink, what’s behind you?” 

“I don’t know.”

I unclench my fist and show off another bottle of Swiss Navy Silicone Lubricant, giggling. “I thought you would want some breakfast.”

He laughs and then eagerly opens his mouth, shaking his head as I pour a few drops on his tongue. The lubricant blends with the saliva. I get down on my knees and wrap my lips around his veiny silicon. He lets out a sigh of relief. A radiant glow permeates through the living  room; the pearl-white furniture looks pristine and anew in the daylight. iTwink shakes his legs, moaning, taking it all in. This is his daily baptism. His favorite part of being an amenity. The veiny silicon smacks the back of my throat. And then suddenly comes a loud thump.

iTwink gasps. “Oh no!”

I rush to the kitchen counter. A vulture had flown into the window. Clunks of blood and feathers spoiling the sunrise. This is iTwink’s first encounter with death. He was built to believe  that everything, from the planet to our lust, would last forever. He’s only meant to face mortality once I perish.

In a quiet voice, I tell him, “The bird will be okay. When you are sleeping later tonight, I will strap on a Ventilation Suit and put him back together. Don’t worry.”

iTwink nods his head. “I look forward to seeing it fly tomorrow morning.” 

I take a sip of the Orange and Blue, coating my tongue with powder.

iTwink flips his curly, jet-black hair. “We should start filming soon.” 

“Yes.”

He starts walking to the studio room. I gulp down the rest of the Orange and Blue and follow him there. This is the most exciting part of having an iTwink. Joseph Kahn, an engineer who has been referred to as the enfant terrible of Silicon Valley, gathered thousands of LinkedIn self-help posts to build iTwink's consciousness. Many of these posts were irreverent and written for the sole purpose of accruing eyeballs, instructing you to Kill Your Boss And Learn How To Treat Your Co-Worker As An Equal. iTwink’s guiding ethos is Managing Up — the startup philosophy used in extreme cases of office dysfunction; it proposes that since your supervisor is  probably overwhelmed, you should take the helm of the ship and assign yourself the tasks that you’d believe your boss would give you if they were only slightly more competent. iTwink Manages Up all day. In the middle of reading pages and pages of spreadsheets, manually typing all sorts of coded desires into the main frame, he stops by my office to remind me to defecate, urinate, bathe, and rest. And in our Sensual Sessions, he Manages Up, telling me how to ride his veiny silicon, sternly giving me instructions until I bring him to a hardwired climax.

We enter the studio room. A green screen. A camera. A floating plasma TV that will showcase my livestream. On a shiny white table there’s a framed photograph of my father and I from ten years ago, when I had just graduated from Stanford University. This picture is the Familial Signifier I brought with me to the Tank. A few summers before, he was devoured by The  Flood, one of those moments in The Prior filled with ignorant bliss. The two of us, posing on a cliff, backdropped by a rocky beach and indigo vista. We are smiling; his hair is a feathered grey; those brimmed glasses made him look studious and yet unassuming. He showed me my first Spreadsheet. He was so patient and gentle, teaching me the intricacies of fitting data into tight boxes and generating input for the betterment of mankind. He was one of the last of the great Data Evangelists, thriving during an era before the Data Sorcerers took over and elevated the craft to new heights. Though I have unlocked his full potential, this photo will always signify humility.

iTwink stares at my father with admiration. I look at iTwink in the eyes to check if he’s truly there. He shoots back a loving stare, the kind that tells me that even though there are a myriad of Data Sorcerers out there who may be more confident, talented, and experienced, I am the one for him and this Tank is his destiny.

“Let’s proceed with the hologram shoot.”

I stand in front of the green screen and wait for iTwink to pick up the camera, looking at the plasma TV that hovers above him. It will show my hologram rendering beaming into dozens of offices across the world. I straighten my posture to act more assured. Weeks of practice, meditation, and analysis have put me in the Divine Headspace. It’s time to gather more investors.

iTwink says. “I will let you know when to begin.” 

“iTwink…”

“Yes.”

“You will sleep by my side tonight. I am ready for another Sensual Session.” 

He nods. “It’s time to begin.”

Voices trickle in from the speakers.

“Streaming in from Jakarta to watch Joe Biden’s Small But Significant Suburban Advantage.”

“Streaming in from Tokyo to watch Joe Biden’s Small But Significant Suburban Advantage.”

“Streaming in from New York City to watch Joe Biden’s Small But Significant Suburban Advantage.”

“Streaming in from Rio de Janeiro to watch Joe Biden’s Small But Significant Suburban Advantage.”

“Streaming in from London to watch Joe Biden’s Small But Significant Suburban Advantage.”

“Streaming in from Vienna to watch Joe Biden’s Small But Significant Suburban Advantage.”

“Streaming in from Hong Kong to watch Joe Biden’s Small But Significant Suburban Advantage.”

Once the hundreds of participants have tuned in, iTwink hands me a tiny white remote control and I begin my TED talk:

“Hello! Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming today. I am a Data Sorcerer who is streaming in from the Mojave Tanks in the great state of California. It’s my honor to speak to you about how the data harvested from Joe Biden’s Small But Significant Suburban Advantage can usher in a sexual revolution…”

A hologram of the map of the United States of America appears next to me. Right above  my head is the Whole Foods logo, glistening with technicolor.

“Five years ago, in the midst of the 2020 election, Joe Biden’s campaign felt nervous about their chances. Though public polls demonstrated that they had a robust lead, they were plagued with anxiety about repeating the mistakes of the 2016 election. It doesn’t take a genius to tell you that polling data can be faulty. In June of 2020, after doing a Data Audit, they concluded that this election would come down to one distinct demographic – suburban men and women who shop at Whole Foods on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and occasionally, Sundays. This was  the Target Demographic and during that summer, my firm was tasked with one mission — monitor their Consumer Behavior so we can formulate a streamlined micro-targeted strategy…”

The holograms disappear; a photo of a fish market manifests next to me — salmon, tuna, trout, cod, and flounder lying in a bed of pebble ice.

“The Biden campaign was struggling with surveillance of their potential voters. Though they had a Biden 2020 app, it was barebones and lacked any potentiality for Data Monitoring. And so we suggested that for their fifth iteration, the update before the critical stretch after Labor Day, they should add a Kamala Harris GIF generator that would download the GIFs onto the users’ smartphones, serving as an ideal tracking device for voters who were engaging with politics on solely an aesthetic level. We conducted a study that voters need 10-800 reminders, no  less or no more, to vote on election day. And with the stakes of mail-in voting, that figure was adjusted to 10-900. From the Kamala Harris GIF generator, we were able to gather, examine, process, quantify, codify, probe, organize, analyze, synthesize, methodize, hybridize, schematize, synergize, industrialize, systematize, homogenize, synchronize, maximize, harmonize, and strategize Essential Data. What we found was that the Tipping Point Demographic wasn’t Woke Youth, but rather, suburban women who went to Whole Foods and spent three to five minutes choosing a fish for dinner…”

The fish market image disappears. iTwink flips a switch and then a halo of tables, graphs,  and statistics appear around my head.

“There were specificities and nuances in the Harvested Data. Suburban women who went to Whole Foods and spent less than three minutes choosing a fish for dinner were too far gone in their Facebook wormholes and believed that Biden was spearheading a pedophilic cabal with Hollywood studio executives. Meanwhile, women who went to Whole Foods and spent five to ten minutes choosing a fish for dinner were more likely to stay home or write-in Gwyneth Paltrow as their preference for president. At the time, Nate Silver, the founder of FiveThirtyEight, a website that analyzes poll data, and Nate Cohn, the New York Times election data analyst, were convinced that the Tipping Point Demographics were in rural and urban areas, voters who spoke to each party’s base of support. However, after we crunched the numbers and mapped the statistics, the data points suggested that both Nates were absolutely wrong…”

The halo is replaced by bright maps of Charlotte, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Phoenix, and  Orlando.

“We advised the Biden campaign to focus on the suburban districts outside of Charlotte, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Phoenix, and Orlando. In these geographic areas, we micro-targeted suburban women who went to Whole Foods and spent about three to five minutes choosing a fish  for dinner. In addition to targeting them, we were able to gain insight into their husbands’ consumer behaviors through tracking the GIFs that were sent in personal chats, group threads and Facebook messenger conversations. If the husband proceeded to save the GIF onto their phone, they too were considered a potential asset. We added them to our Data Index and then perfectly tailored messaging to suit their needs and desires…”

The maps blow up; the pixels reformulate into a spreadsheet.

“As you see here, my team of Data Sorcerers are constantly updating the mainframe... We recently readjusted the ‘trigger’ for American flag. So, with this data, we were able to customize these social media advertisements that mobilized Joe Biden’s Small But Significant Suburban Advantage…”

The spreadsheet is replaced with a three-dimensional GIF of an email inbox repeatedly refreshing.

“Following the election, we were sitting on millions of micro-data points and so decided to sift through the indexes to see any potentially monetizable behavior. And from ruminating on  these data points, we found that the same suburban citizens who frequently visited Whole Foods and spent three to five minutes choosing a fish for dinner were also experiencing a period of sexual malaise and dissatisfaction. Though they presumably thought that Biden winning would cure their anxieties, they found that without a chaotic focal point, they lacked any reason to occasionally ask for a release of pent-up sexual energy. The specter of chaos disappeared and they were left with nothing but their garden-variety issues. We were able to track their erotic ennui by scanning their Google searches and cookies accrued from frequently visited websites. They were finding solace in self-help forums and spending an inordinate amount of time on pornography websites. Their searches were so granular and occasionally absurd, demonstrating that much like their behavior at the fish market in Whole Foods, they wanted an intimate, controllable relationship with their erotic products. And that’s when we decided to create a customized porn experience…”

A blank spreadsheet hovers in front of my body.

“My team of Data Sorcerers joined forces with XVideos, an erotica platform, to launch Sensual Spreadsheets. The first large-scale customizable porn experience. The issue was, how do we strategically target the Whole Foods female shopper who spends three to five minutes at the fish market choosing dinner? What’s the best way to sneak into their inbox and offer something that’s coded in a way that’s subtle but easily monetizable?”

Suddenly, Pete Buttigieg beams in right next to me; he’s sporting a shiny smile, wearing a white button-down shirt, slacks, and black dress shoes.

“Pete Buttigieg, the self-proclaimed mayor of America! XVideos reached out to progressive net-roots power-house Moveon.org and they got Pete Buttigieg to write a perfectly tailored email for our audience. The subject headline was: Hey, it’s Mayor Pete Buttigieg and I am writing to tell you that even though Joe Biden won, our democracy is still in danger and you  need to still do your part in stopping fascism by pitching in and supporting these congressional candidates who are for stability, moderation, and the free exchange of New York Times op-eds. The email concluded with the sentence: our values and political system will forever stand erect. This was a breadcrumb, an Easter egg, a way to identify the most devoted, neurotic, and worried  members of our email list. The word 'erect' was hyperlinked to a spreadsheet that offered a Sensual Wish Fulfillment…”

Pete Buttigieg warps into a livestream of a spreadsheet.

“As you see here, this is a spreadsheet that we just received. Our team takes these spreadsheets to XVideos and then, within a day, they follow up with a discreet email offering the Wish Fulfillment video for a sliding scale price…”

I stand there and glance at all the little boxes on the plasma screen. Hundreds of businessmen, mouths gaping; some have their faces buried in yellow pads, taking notes, while others squint, fiercely examining my presentation. There’s too much Intimate Data to process. I can’t come to any tangible conclusions and properly index so many Facial Formulations. But from a brief scan of these tiny boxes, I can conclude that there is a desire for a sense of intimacy, they want to see what me, the conductor of it all, has gained from my own creation. They need to envision themselves realizing their fantasies, no matter how outlandish or bizarre. I signal to iTwink to get prepared for Plan B.

I straighten my posture and go in for the kill. “For transparency’s sake, I will come forward about my Sensual Trigger and Wish Fulfillment. I am a Data Dominatrix and my fantasy  is to have the Data Evangelists of yesteryear as my submissives.”

iTwink presses a button and then two holograms instantly appear by my side: Nate Silver  and Nate Cohn, crouching on their hands and knees, gagging and moaning with plastic balls in their mouths. They are wearing khakis and white-button downs, topped off by black leather hats, their rectangular glasses dangling above the ground. iTwink turns a nob: suddenly, I am yanking  the Data Evangelists with metal chains, bringing them closer to me.

I roar: “I am the Master of Data!”

I hear some gasps. They are intrigued by my provocation.

A businessman streaming from Hong Kong exclaims. “Send me the spreadsheets! I need  Joe Biden’s Small But Significant Suburban Advantage!”

Nate Silver and Nate Cohn dissipate into thin air; the metal chains follow. I am left there alone, letting the waves of holographic Thumbs Up emojis consume my entire body. The value goes up and up. iTwink rushes over and bows for the audience, showering in their thunderous applause. Tonight, we will have a glorious Sensual Session. He will Manage Up until the break of dawn. I will place my frail body in between his glorious, meaty thighs and totally surrender.

One by one, the investors log off. Across the orange valley, in their Tanks, other Data Sorcerers are probably learning about my success and becoming envious and bitter. Tomorrow, I will have to return to my Spreadsheets to get ahead of the competition. But for now, there’s iTwink with his warm grin, and sun rays filtering in and meshing with the three-dimensional pixels, an iridescent euphoria.

§

iTwink fell asleep after he shot his load all over my chest. For the first time, he is resting next to me and he’s silent and still and peaceful. My arms are wrapped around his body, clutching frigid stone. And then I remember the vulture; its guts will soon be enveloped in morning dew, blood will drip down the Tank’s windows and bring legions of ants and maggots. I sneak away from the bed and place the black comforter over iTwink. The fan exudes a soft hum. He will never notice the difference. I go to my closet and throw on a Ventilation Suit. Slipping my scrawny legs into the poofy, red overalls, I look ridiculous and infantile. I don’t like going to The Outside. Not because I fear the Digital Coyotes or the Scavengers, but due to the memories of The Prior that resurface. Sharp flashes of Ferris wheels and crystal coves; a lagoon with a sunken ship; crates of mossy boxes; mosquitos picking away at a beached jellyfish; I join my father on the shore; he’s making a Spreadsheet in the sand with a stick; I help him out, placing mounds of algae into rectangular boxes. If I spend too much time wandering The Outside, those visions become overwhelming. I’d drown in the suit and wait for the ants and maggots to devour me whole.

I go to the living room. After I move the couch, I open a trap door that leads to The Outside through a narrow tunnel. My Ventilation Suit was designed to perfectly slip through, one of the many amenities that speak to the Tank’s impeccable innovation. Cleaning seeps into my Strategic Absence. I wipe away at the blood and guts and feathers. The towel soaks up all the specimens. There’s some staining in the window, but I keep cleaning until it’s crystal clear. And then he appears. iTwink, in the kitchen. He’s making some Orange and Blue in a blender, nervously scanning the living room to see if I am there. In this large suit, he must think I am a floating mirage of a cyclone, an amorphous trash blob that has been swept by the wind. I keep on  watching. He dips his hands into the blender and takes out a gunk of Orange and Blue, pausing for a moment to examine his fingers. There will come a day when I will die in this Tank. And when the Data Overlords come to collect my body, they will see iTwink, mourning, reciting a programmed monologue about how much he will miss me. I get closer to the glass, trying to make out what he’s up to. iTwink walks over to a slab of white wall separating the refrigerator from the pantry. He runs his fingers on the wall with a slow precision, gradually drawing a large rectangle with the blend of Orange and Blue. I know I should stop him but I keep on observing. He makes micro-grids within the rectangle. It goes on for minutes. And then he steps away, walking backwards until his brawny plastic is pressed against the screen. We stare at the creation  together.

His very first Spreadsheet.

The Age of Foolishness

Mai Mageed

Each time it was a different story,
No beginning or end.
This young woman, who writes such bad poems,
Completely unremarkable in every way,
She had turned into the wrong person.
Waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing,
A shy young man.

Happy families sitting in the kitchen sink,
My father gave me some advice.
Are you in trouble? Do you need advice?
If you want to know the truth, history has failed us;
If you want to know the truth, nobody but God wakes before dawn;
If you want to know the truth, nobody but God knows the truth.
A truth that hummed along my skin.

Through the cracks of my bedroom wall, the light summer wind stirred.
Taking a walk that day, amidst the trees of the garden, my eyes were closed.
It was a nice day. All the days had been nice.
When the sunset came, the last rains came. Gently.
It was night again.

Where now? Who now? When now?
What’s it going to be then?
I never ask. I was ready to say no.
And he almost deserved it. I am the lucid one here!
Nothing to do but stand there, quietly, like a shadow (I was the shadow),
I watch this drama unfold scene by scene.

It’s a funny thing, my life.

That distant afternoon, a screaming comes across the sky.
The sun shone. A screaming.
We came to understand the gravity of our situation:
The world was mad, they do things differently there.

Psychics can see the color of time, it’s the color of television.

Sometimes I left messages in the window pane.
They sang before him, of all things:
Love and war;
The curve of her belly;
The telephone ringing;
An empty auditorium.

In the language that is no longer mine, call me.
Call me a man with a microscope,
A camera with its shutter open.
Last night I dreamt that you are near.
It was a pleasure. It was the happiest moment of my life.
He found himself transformed in his bed.
I am out of my mind. I’m pretty much fucked.
A feeling of profound melancholy comes over him — the other side of the bed is cold.

In the middle of the night, before I could catch them,
They approached each other, were always together.
And he was glad.

Am I the Asshole?

Ara Hagopian

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
r/AmItheAsshole  •  Posted by u/marcusoreallyass  •  6 days ago 

AITA for disagreeing with my wife about the race of our surrogate? 

Apologies for the wall of text.

I (32M) love my wife (33F) with all my heart. I’m Armenian, she’s African-American (of Ghanaian descent). 

For medical reasons that I won’t go into here, my wife is infertile. She got the diagnosis a few years ago. It was tough for both of us because we’ve always wanted to have kids. 

We still want kids. After considering all our options, we decided to go with a surrogate. Because of my wife’s medical condition, in vitro fertilization is not an option, so it would be a “traditional” surrogacy. That is to say, the baby will grow from my sperm and the egg of the woman we hire. Our child will not be biologically related to my wife in any way. That was hard for her to accept at first, but she came around to it. 

So we’re currently in the process of finding a surrogate. My wife is the more organized/proactive of the two of us (she’s a nurse)- she found five potential candidates before I found any. All five of the women were black. I gave some reasons why I didn’t like each one of them (height, BMI, etc.), but if I’m being honest, those reasons were just excuses. Honestly I don’t really want our surrogate to be a black woman. I know that sounds fucked up, but please hear me out. There’s basically two reasons. 

As I mentioned, I’m Armenian. The Ottoman Turks committed genocide against my people about 100 years ago- now we primarily exist as a diaspora. There is still a sovereign country of Armenia, but it’s poor and landlocked with two closed borders (Turkey to the east and Azerbaijan to the west). The economy is largely propped up by Armenians abroad. And well, I don’t want to get too deep into it, but things are even worse in the motherland than usual. We have a sort of Israel-Palestine type situation with Azerbaijan that has escalated recently into full-blow warfare. It’s an old dispute over a piece of land, and it’s not getting fixed any time soon. Armenia became independent 30 years ago when the Soviet Union collapsed. The country may not make it, say, another 50 years. 

As a result of all these things, there’s a big emphasis within the Armenian community on cultural preservation, marrying within the race, things like that. I never really bought into it that much when I was younger; I’m all for keeping tradition alive, but when you’re choosing your life partner based on that, I feel like you’ve left the path of wisdom. That said, my perspective has changed a little bit on this as I’ve gotten older. Obviously I would never leave my wife. But given the circumstance I find myself in, I wouldn’t mind having a full-Armenian baby if possible. It would make my parents very happy. And it is a little bit sad to watch your culture slowly deteriorate, not because of war or genocide, but simply because of dispersing around the globe and marrying into other cultures. A million miracles adding up to a tragedy. I’d like to do my part in counteracting that process if possible. 

That’s my first reason for objecting to a black surrogate, but I do have another. Obviously, having married a Ghanaian woman, I have no problem with black people. My wife is the most beautiful woman in the world. I’d take a bullet for her. I know how tough it can be for black people, particularly in the US- she tells me all the time about the racist comments she gets from patients at the hospital. And if you’ve been watching the news lately, you’ve heard the police killings and all that shit. It’s terrible. Why would I subject my children to that if I don’t have to? I feel sick to my stomach thinking about my son getting racially profiled by the police, or shot in cold blood by some neighborhood-watch asshole like George Zimmerman. It’s easy to say that we should try to improve these horrible conditions instead of adapting to them, but that seems overly optimistic to me. I can’t change society- I just want what’s best for me and my family. I’m not gonna put a child’s life at risk to make some kind of political point. 

So those are my reasons. Thanks for making it to the end of this long post. 

AITA?

(TLDR: My wife and I are looking for a surrogate to have our baby. She wants the woman to be black, while I would rather have the woman be Armenian because I want to preserve Armenian culture and because black people face persecution in America.) 

Comments  •  What are your thoughts? 

u/ibuyvintagecamaros [Commander in Cheeks, 209]

This is a tough one man. I’d say a soft YTA, if only because you lied to your wife about why you didn’t like the potential surrogates she suggested. 

u/flowerrespecter [Partassipant, 1]      

Holy cow, YTA. I can’t believe what I just read. It’s very apparent from the way you talk about your wife that you don’t respect her or her agency in this decision. You claim to care about your unborn children, but you don’t want them to look like their mother? Your wife is already struggling with a serious medical issue, she doesn’t need your stupid racist bullshit piled on. If you were my husband I’d kick you out tonight. 

u/ghostoflebronshairline [Certified Proctologist, 20]

No assholes here. Wishing both of you the best. 

u/assymcgee [Asshole Enthusiast, 5] 

As a Jewish person, I have personal experience with that pressure to keep cultural institutions alive. It’s a very hard thing to understand if you’ve never had to view your own heritage with that kind of lens. Frankly, I know Ghanaian people have suffered in the past, but Ghana itself isn’t going anywhere. It’s “the safest country in Africa” (I looked it up). NTA, my friend. 

u/gaystepdad [Supreme Court Just-Ass, 119]

YTA. Only rich douchebags can afford surrogates. If you wanted to do the right thing, you’d adopt. There are plenty of children out there looking for homes. Also you’re a racist. 

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
r/AmItheAsshole  •  Posted by u/marcusoreallyass  •  2 days ago 

UPDATE: AITA for disagreeing with my wife about the race of our surrogate?

Update- we might be getting a divorce.

Burroughs and Cat

Rob Kaniuk

Pallbearers for the Palm Reader

Swati Sudarsan

My grandfather spoke an english, kaleidoscoping with three other tongues.
He knew business in advance of electricity
sledging hot iron plates over shirts and shirts.
That was his business, steaming
under a drizzling fan
to unstill stale monsoon
airs, building over poverty.

My grandfather taught himself to divine
from a slab of fingers, just enough
to hold a fist of heirs.
Child rearer, palm reader.
He raised his own pillars:
five pallbearers.

He got his practice early,
raising his own father, who at life end
begged God to take him.
His wish in the wind.
My grandfather forgave the stolen reciprocity.
A dead wife will wreck a man unsurvivable.

Everyday, Somewhere Up. Somewhere God.
Poured his palms of prayers
asking for tomorrow, tomorrow.
Tracing the life line, child line, breath lines.
Aching for tomorrow, tomorrow. Today.

What a hand can do:

A raised thumb connects his blood and mine.
My mother is alchemy, even from an ocean’s
length apart, a thumb sprouts
like it is its own
island.
She started the winning, the rising.
She started the exodus.

The index, conducts readings,
tracings. Cupping
our hands etched in life lines.
Her face webbed from our unsung
sun, a shrine of everyday’s tomorrow.

The middle finger, herald to
Eldest Son.
I was raised between my uncle’s legs,
obscuring the bike ignition.
We flew straight lines into dirt tracks.
How many times
the sky wept on our rides.
I sprouted my teeth with a red humus base.

The fourth, ring bearer,
hurt the most to let go.
That uncle never turned back.
He bore the vein directly to my grandfather’s heart.

And the pinky followed the exodus.
A dust of granddaughters
sprinkling continents back together.
The little link brought them home
to send him to the palm of
Somewhere Up.
Somewhere God.

The Medium

Ben Shields

“I’m having a party this Friday night,” my friend Angel said. “Crystal Shores will be doing readings in the spare bedroom.” I’d heard of her: name like an Enya album, purportedly a brilliant medium. Angel turned to her on every matter, from romance to real estate. I promptly RSVP’d. Though I’ve received five Catholic sacraments, I’m a New Ager at heart.

Angel served spiked punch in the dining room of her Saint Paul townhouse in Cathedral Hill, a neighborhood far enough from my college that I could go there and pretend I wasn’t a student. I dined out there alone, took late night drives, and now would visit a fortune-teller. It had two pricey restaurants I liked to go to and order the cheapest thing on the menu, a cocktail when I had the cash. One of them, Moscow Restaurant, always had an accordion player on the patio who played both traditional folk songs and also cheesy hits like “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy” and a painfully slowed down “It’s Raining Men.” He claimed to spend weeks at a time working at a lounge in the Las Vegas Venetian, but somehow he was on the bill every night of the year at Moscow. 

As a neighborhood, Cathedral Hill never felt good enough, but it was a rehearsal for the places I surely had coming, the places I’d never stopped mentally preparing to enter since I learned how to read, but still lacked initiative to get to. I’m talking about major cosmopolitan environments, architectural landmarks, places where you can still smoke inside. Even so, when I read Patrick Modiano’s Villa Trieste, I mentally built the set in Cathedral Hill, not France, because I still haven’t made it to France for longer than two weeks. You need six months to erase the Cathedral Hills of the mind and replace them with the real thing, I think. The same amount of time it takes for a relationship to count.

I came hungry, expecting dinner and a show, but Angel, never one for the kitchen, prepared only trail mix and Chips Ahoy, so I unintentionally got drunk after a few sips. Every thirty minutes, a guest emerged from the spare bedroom with a thunderstruck expression. “Beyond belief, Angel.” “I need to lie down after that.” “Does someone have a cigarette?” “That was just the kick in the ass I’ve needed for ten years.” Her friends were a curious mix of ditzy middle-aged ladies, punk rockers, and tattooed academics with septum piercings. One woman, as mousy as the housewife in Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits, emerged crestfallen and said she didn’t know how she could face her husband ever again.

There were two analysands before me, so I had a black coffee to sober up. In the meantime, Angel, a former literature professor from my college who now worked at a Neiman Marcus perfume counter, delivered a well-prepared lecture on Youth Dew, Esteé Lauder’s first scent. Angel was a temporarily embarrassed Upper East Sider who lived just around the corner from Moscow and taught the Oscar Wilde seminar I’d taken the semester before. People on campus were speculating what the nature of our relationship really was. It couldn’t be sexual—guys who signed up for the Wilde seminar weren’t typically connoisseurs of female flesh—but then again why were we always together? In fact, all this embarrassed me, but I convinced myself to like it since it seemed the adult, risky thing to do. Really, though, I was just the typical fag latching onto his English teacher. 

Angel held court brilliantly on Youth Dew. She snuck me dozens of samples every month from Neiman Marcus, but I’d never heard of this one. It was originally targeted to suburban housewives, she explained, but later admired by the likes of Andy Warhol. She sprayed it into the air and her kitchen seemed to transform into an ancient mausoleum, percolated by oxygen for the first time since the reign of Akhenaten, a whiff of pre-Abrahamic monotheism. Before I could try it on, it was my turn to see Crystal Shores, and I skipped to the bedroom.

“Young man, come in,” the psychic said. She was a heavy-set older lady, certainly looked nothing like Enya, hair poofy and gray. She held a cane with a raven’s head handle. For some reason I couldn’t imagine her standing up, ever leaving this room or even this chair. I studied her face: she could have been David Lynch’s older sister, perhaps an unaccredited, secret oracle behind the dreamy sequences of Lost Highway and Inland Empire, films Angel approved of with some feminist caveats. I approached the wooden stool across from Crystal. It felt like Confession already.

“Stop!” she cried, and I stopped. She closed her eyes and put her hand on her forehead, then out in front of her like Count Dracula emerging from his coffin only to find it’s Daylight Savings. 

“Your hips! What’s wrong with them? Oh god, I wish you’d see a chiropractor. Do the elliptical.” I was floored. When I saw a chiropractor in Kansas, where I grew up, his x-rays revealed that my hips were more cocked than Donatello’s David. 

“How did you know that?” I said lamely. I’m trying to think of a stupider question to ask a psychic. “I see what I see,” she said, and I sat down. She instructed me to say my name three times slowly. BEN BEN BEN.

“Why am I seeing Big Ben right now?” she asked. I shrieked in amazement. My trip to London, where I had studied abroad the prior term, was in less than forty eight hours.

“You’re going there to see someone. Who?”

“My ex-boyfriend,” I said, pulse rising with excitement. This was clearly the real deal. She assured me he was still attracted to me and recommended I think very carefully about the first sentence I say to him, some kind of bomb to drop before even hello. Then she nearly toppled off the chair with laughter. 

“What is it?” Her unforthcoming chuckles were disconcerting to say the least.

“Oh it’s—oh my goodness—you, young man, are going to go to another planet! How divine!” She said ‘divine’ exactly like Marie Dressler in Dinner at Eight. I pressed for which planet, but she couldn’t tell. “Milky Way?” I asked, but she still evaded. Suddenly she received a flash glimpse of me ducking under a table, hiding from gunfire. A budding vagabond, I was titillated by this prediction most of all, far more so than space travel, and it’s the one I chose to share with the partygoers when I returned to the dining room. 

On the plane ride to Gatwick, I jotted possibilities: It feels like only yesterday. You haven’t changed a bit. I’m seeing you for the first time. In the end, I hadn’t made my final decision when I stepped off the tube in Covent Garden. Angel gave me Henry James’s Wings of the Dove for holiday reading, so I busied myself with the details of Milly Theale’s advancing illness, a perfect pose to adopt while I waited for Uriel, the man who’d destroyed me.

A tap on the shoulder and there he was. I was totally unprepared for my line delivery. All I could focus on was the greater number of creases on his forehead since I’d seen him, as well as the beard I’d never known he could grow. “God, you’ve aged,” I said. I imagined Crystal, still in the chair, clutching her heart. It was like denying Christ three times in one go.

Until recently, whenever I hit rock bottom, once every year and a half let’s say, I turned to her hoping for deliverance. But the truth is that each time I spoke with her, mistakes increasingly dogged her insights. I told her I was leaving Minnesota. “You’ll love California,” she said. My sublet in Manhattan disagreed. But it was like cigarettes, always chasing the first. Now when I call her, she usually just plays the hits. “Are you doing the elliptical?” “Oh yes,” I reply. (I’m not.) “Good. Those hips, they’re out of whack.” Though still enamored of Crystal the character, I wrote off her talents.

New York didn’t last that long. I worked a series of temp jobs proofreading things like fundraiser banquet menus and TV commercial scripts, and later became a spreadsheet generator for financial analysts. I told myself this made me akin to Joris Karl Huysmans (Angel taught Against Nature in her seminar), who contended that dull bureaucratic work led to an explosion of the suppressed imagination. Eventually I became a cocktail waiter when I couldn’t take waking up early any longer. Cathedral Hill had been replaced as planned, and I didn’t exactly miss it. But fun, absurd things like Angel’s Crystal Shores party seemed a thing of the past. Though we’ve patched things up since, I’ll never totally forgive New York for introducing me to Excel.

Somehow I saved up enough money to drop out and travel for a few months. My itinerary was to be as hectic as I could possibly manage—a cruise to China, a train to Spain, the things dreams are made of. I started in Israel, a lapsed Irish Catholic just passing through. Covid arrived, and rather than returning to New York, I converted my visa from tourist to student and remained in Jerusalem, where I am today. The Excel skills suddenly came in handy, and I subsisted with a series of bullshit work-from-home jobs while I rented a tiny room in a monastery from an Egyptian nun. In a dazed, almost pleasurable isolation, I filled in the cells of the spreadsheets under the canopy of a lemon tree outside my door. I saw no one except my neighbor George, half-Greek half-Palestinian. One time we watched Titanic on a Lebanese TV station and chainsmoked two packs of cigarettes he bought in a Ziplok bag from a guy on a cart. “We can’t smoke these!” I said halfway through my eighth one after he told me their origins. “Relax,” he said. It was the scene where the orchestra gets annihilated by a giant wave. “Even Jews were buying them.” 

The lockdowns ended, and I decided to try and learn Hebrew. I found a language partner, Itamar. It started out all business, one hour of Hebrew, one hour of English, once or twice a week. But of course teaching tongues is never all business. I fell in love with everything about him: the residual moral seriousness of his yeshiva years, the unusually thick hair on his wrists, his suppressed smile while I stumbled in my new language. He never got annoyed when I was too embarrassed to finish a sentence, while also insisting on teaching me sophisticated Hebrew expressions in addition to day-to-day vulgarities. His attention and patience were overwhelming. I got hard every time he texted asking to meet again. When we were together, sometimes we locked eyes two or three seconds too long. One time after we’d been separated by a return of lockdown, he checked me out head to toe as he opened the door to his new sublet, and the hug was slightly crotch-forward. I checked him out back, even though he was wearing his usual pants and sweater that hid his body’s shape. I still barely know what it looks like. It’s all part of the heterosexual male’s aversion to ostentation, a pandemic dating at least since the end of ballroom dancing as a social skill. Those lousy sweaters should have stopped me in my tracks, but all the laughs and stares and kindness took me in.

“Say his name three times slowly,” Crystal said in a velvety whisper. The WhatsApp connection was good, as if she were right next to me. I said his name. “Now scream it! I said SCREAM IT!” she bellowed. She’d started so soft I could barely hear, now her voice rose, in danger of losing control, a Wagner overture. I yelled his name, the main theme coming in, echoing and finally obliterating the bassoons. “He’s attracted to you,” she said—the same damn script as our first session. But I still waited for the words that would cure everything, stop the nightmare.

“He is?” I asked.

“I’m getting yes.”

“He’s straight.”

“Oh.”

Psychics aren’t supposed to say “oh.” I told her he was coming for dinner the following evening. Her advice: “Don’t act like a typical gay guy.” It may be the only ingenuous suggestion she’s ever given me. I chose a loose fitting sweater I normally reserve for sick days in bed, and we ate together looking like a couple of knitted cumulous clouds.

Another night he asked me to take him fragrance shopping. Since I knew he’d never love me, I practically shoved a Thierry Mugler cotton candy scent up his nose. Though he’d have put on turpentine if I said so, I showed him the kindness he’s always shown me. Calvin Klein One was my final recommendation, and he took it. Meanwhile, I purchased Esteé Lauder’s Youth Dew, a tribute to Angel, though she’s been out of my life for so long I don’t even know where she is.

§

On Jerusalem Day, I went to the Western Wall with a religious friend. Just when the celebrations were ramping up, the bomb siren went off. With hundreds of ultra-Orthodox, I dashed for cover. I knew enough Hebrew by then to understand the guy next to me when he roared, “God is with us! On we go!” Everyone around me jumped up and down, singing the same songs they’d been singing before the siren even though it was the beginning of a war. The police let us out ten minutes later and I ran home. I needed to get out of the city, so ignored the travel warnings and paid for a room in Mitzpeh Ramon, Israel’s most remote town, situated at the edge of a meteor crater.

The following morning, I boarded a Negev desert-bound train. A few minutes before reaching the station, there was another siren. I ducked under the plastic tray table and, for the first time in years, prayed to Jesus. One of Crystal’s predictions was coming true, but I was still afraid. I reached in my bag and started spraying the Esteé Lauder. “Head between your knees!” a security guard snapped. The smokey cinnamon on my décolleté was makeshift holy water, like when civilians performed Last Rites during the bubonic plague.

Upon arrival, I walked from the station to the empty apartment I’d rented. Walking into a dark empty place always triggers latent childhood fears. A murderer waiting in the kitchen, Linda Blair poised at the ready on the bed. I forgot about all the rockets flying in the sky, instead tip-toed around the place checking for figures in the shadows. I turned the light on in every room, each switch as if to pulverize the lurking spirits. With the whole place illuminated, I felt exposed and alone, so I switched them all back off again. The place had no air conditioning, and though the sun was about to set, inside it seemed the height of a summer day. What exactly had I come to accomplish?

I wandered the neighborhood, entirely Soviet block apartment buildings save for a hilariously out of place Gothic revival-style house. Before midnight, I had a boyfriend. Mish was razor-thin like me but had a dancer’s physique. He reeked of B.O., yet our pheromones were such a match it was like a sample from Neiman Marcus. In bed, he put his hands on my crooked hips and pulled me toward him. He liked ball-play, wanting it harder and harder; I became the comely Dame Excess in Spenser’s Bower of Bliss, squeezing grapes into the golden chalice. Then we had that rare beautiful thing of simultaneously eating each other’s asses, beautiful because it’s a mutual spontaneous disdain for the top-bottom role-playing of gay sex, instead an ongoing inquiry into the possibilities of each other’s flesh. First I was on top, gyrating on his lips, then leaned forward and stretched my neck past the balls and began to tongue the crevice. Unlike the rest of him, it seemed freshly laundered. It tasted like the smell of those little Bounce laundry sheets my mom used to throw in the washer. 

I rose and flipped over and around so I could kiss him again. He buried his face in my neck and paused the lovemaking. “What is that perfume?”

“Youth Dew by Esteé Lauder.” He wasn’t impressed. “I prefer natural smells.” “I noticed,” I wanted to say, but suddenly, so did I. I burrowed my face in each of his reeking pits. There was a war on, after all.

Night had fallen in between orgasms. We walked to the meteor crater and took a seat. Our legs dangled over the cliff, kicking playfully at certain death. We couldn’t see one another in the darkness, but the wave of suspicion that sometimes comes after sex would have hidden our faces anyway. Stars were falling; we didn’t say a word. “Shall I go?” I asked. “If you want to,” Mish said. “I don’t.” “So stay,” he whispered. Our trust in one another returned, and I was so relieved I could almost have cried. We were quiet for a minute. I could smell the perfume on myself, and I thought of Angel, of the accordion player in Moscow Restaurant, of the part of me that wished it were Itamar and not a stranger next to me. The sound of Mish’s breath made me feel so young and nubile, but the thought of the war I was hiding from made me feel old and wizened. “Is this place your Cathedral Hill?” I wanted to ask, but I didn’t have the time or the Hebrew to explain what I meant, so I slid a hand into his lap instead. We clumsily made our way back toward one another, and his eyelashes fluttered on my lips. It was the other planet Crystal foretold.    

Petite Mort

Charlotte Puebla

How Many Lovers We Have Been

Swati Sudarsan

His sinew cut from thick bone meat sobbing off it
dammed, clotted coiled blood humming       to her Earth

which bore his weight before absorbing scarlet specks
from his feet crunching glass mixed with flesh called it sand.

Her igneous skin flushed in wind or warmth    dislodged glass grit
from his glittering feet. She used it stabbed heart to sleeve.

She watered her crusted eyes laughing glass is just sand and heat
she mapped his pores     picked him a peach   and died.

But not before he ate the peach not before she planted the pit.
Their God trails butterflies leaves chrysalis crumbs believes through them.

Before the peach tree before the orchard fruit to fruit  
hammocked love   Do you know how many lovers they have been?

Fig Tree

Allison Cundiff

I saw the wasp’s narrow waist
ladylike I thought,
her lifting shadow
dart across the water
before I felt the aching sting

and on the slouching dock
my mother, fast
pulled a fig from
the Brown Turkey tree.

Her teeth bit white through the fruit
and holding my wrist firmly
she plucked the stinger from the spreading pink
and pressed the wet fruit to the spot
saying

Hush. The fig needs
the wasp to bring her lover
to her.  Inside the fruit,

I saw bodies pressed together
in my mind
secret limbs
a cool brown thorax,

she was saying, shh
the wasp has
her own daughters too.

Summer ‘94

Charlotte Puebla

Instructions for our Newest Milkmaid

Swati Sudarsan

Look at our meadow! Gleaming under the sun that rises in a crown.
It awakens us each morning by kissing the crest of the mountain.
Yes, he owns all of it.

The heathers are furry this season, but stay far away from them.
They are sharp in drought.
If you trample them, he will know you by the cuts on your feet.

How lucky we are! We roam from pond to forest edge, that is, when we are not working.
These flattened grasses are so thick that I have never seen the fertile earth beneath,
except when the cows have spent too long in one spot.
They do that sometimes, when they like where they are.
Don't worry, they always move on, and we will lay our beds there on that soft, naked Earth.
We always make use of their consequence.

Hm, so what else do you need to know before your first day?
Oh.
I see you have gold earrings. I bet those are precious to you.
Take them off before he sees.
He likes to... catalogue things here.

Now, take the earrings and sew them into your blouse. Somewhere they won't fall out,
or bulge and give themselves away.
That's something he tends to do, if you know what I mean.

Stop blushing! Just put them somewhere they won't fall into manure.
Put them somewhere intact against your skin, so you will know if they slip out
as you bend to his cows to milk them.

Under the cows, they would be lost forever.
The cows move as one beast, and rewrite the ground with their hooves every day.
Under them, there is no chance of retracing your steps.

Also, do not let them slip into a milk-filled bucket.
Tomorrow you will see how thick and white their milk comes out.
If you dropped your earrings, you would realize too late that they were lost to liquid.

If you lose them in our field though, don't worry. Here's what to do:
Wait until you are immortal.

I promise, the earrings will come back again. Our land rises in cycles here.
If you stay long enough, you will see how it mimics the sun.
The past always comes back.

If you happened upon your earrings again, lifetimes after you thought them gone,
pick them back up quietly.
You can mourn this piece of yourself, freshly exposed.
Clutch them tightly, try not to lose them again. And try not to cry.

But if you must weep, make sure you do it when he is not there.

And if he is there, then tip your bucket onto the grass.
Tell him you are crying over spilt milk.

“Today has been one helluva week!”

Jennifer Pappalardo

About the Contributors

Allison Cundiff is a teacher, poet, and beekeeper living in St. Louis with her husband, two daughters, three dogs, and three backyard chickens.  You can connect with her via Instagram @cundiffallison.

Ara Hagopian grew up in a small Massachusetts town. A graduate of Cornell University, he is currently pursuing his MFA in fiction writing at the University of Florida. He enjoys chamber music and tenpin bowling.

Rob Kaniuk is a union carpenter in the city of Philadelphia.

Mai Mageed is a Texan writer living in New York. She is currently studying Art Censorship and Creative Writing. She loves: banned books, being described as "hysterical," and all things radical.

Jennifer Pappalardo is a hometown, free-spirited, nuanced visionary who captures imagery, movement, & art along the ride of her life & imagination. Find more of her work at phatdaddyfilms.com. 

Charlotte Puebla is a French-Spanish contemporary dancer, who also investigates photography, poetry and collage. Her collages are open questions about: freedom, banality, nature, love and women’s role in society. Using old pictures and a bit of humour, they are meant to criticise, to make you think and hopefully... to make you revolt.

Lydia Sera is a common bird in South Carolina.  "Any time you pay somebody to tell you what to do you are going to be a loser." - CB

Ben Shields is an essayist and fiction writer. He holds an MA in fiction from Bar-Ilan University, and his work has appeared in Bookforum, Hyperallergic, The Polity of Literature, and elsewhere. He splits his time between New York and Israel and is at work on his first novel.

Daniel Spielberger is a writer based in Los Angeles. His work has been published in Los Angeles Review of Books, SSENSE, Paper Magazine, Business Insider, Peach Mag, and other outlets.

Swati Sudarsan (she/her) is a poet, writer, and avid reader based in Oakland, CA (Ohlone Land). She works in cancer research during the day, and writes in the margins of her life. Her work can be found in Our Name is Amplify magazine, Entropy Mag, Drizzle Review, Dead Skunk Magazine (forthcoming), and Gertude Press (forthcoming). She can be found on IG and Twitter as @booksnailmail.

The Editors