Ginny

My dad called me this past Monday. His mom Enlé hasn’t been well. Aunt Rasa cares for her. She noticed Enlé get unusually weak, and two weeks ago there was the fall. It was on the first landing, where they display some of their acrylics and marguçiai. Enlé's knees feel like jello. She's in her nineties. The ER doctor didn’t show my dad the x-rays at first. He just insisted she go in for a retake. My dad called him a quack and snatched the images. The cartilage and even the mu

Once upon a time in the city of Chicago, my parents didn’t have any money for Tylenol. When her migraines showed up, my mom slipped Excedrin from her friends’ purses during lectures on legal precedent. My dad would lift more Excedrin from cabinets at residency. We didn’t have Walgreens money: they were students. Back then, acetaminophen was the forbidden herb in the witch’s garden from Rapunzel. You had to scale a wall to score it. When my mom was pregnant, the Chicago Tyleno

In local myth there is an old machine that resides with the Moai spirited back from a beach in New Berlin locked within a rusty metal shed at a friend’s house. If you peer deep into the machine’s ocular lenses, past the little tree that tells the doctor your refraction— keep your chin down on the chin pad, please— it will show you your final thought. (The one you have right before you die.) No, it won’t hurt. I sat at the machine on a dare and gimlets: I launched my head righ

There is a bright room deep within me (I carry it always): inside the room is a specimen. Man, yes, but no man at all: an iridescent beetle. The beetle is in a dome terrarium suspended on a pin, mounted on a mound of mossy flock. Every day my phantom footsteps ring on warped floorboards in an imagined Eyreian attic when I fling open ungreased doors to The Specimen Room. I breach the dusty threshold and observe the specimen from a distance. I couldn’t bear to scare it into fl

A bromeliad in my apartment is dying. “Water it in the cups,” the plant guru had said. Now it is rotten from the core out. How many of my plant friends have I told to water the cups? They haven’t texted me in a while, and now I think I know why. The florist guru from Milaeger’s will deadhead me for this. I obeyed every interdiction. It never propagated. The core reeks, a moldy elephant’s foot. I wouldn’t go near it. What the guru doesn’t know is that the giant ric-rac fern ha

Branwen and Enid had nothing to do. The dark sky lurched with rain, and water had begun dribbling into the den. Saoirse, their mother, had been tilling peat since that morning. Their father hadn't been present in weeks. The girls returned from collecting what they could off the forest floor. In their search they found a bramble-bush, their tongues blazing fuchsia from berries that tumbled from their clay bowls. They had completed every task. They cracked hazelnuts drying on t

Adam was a physics kid whiz. His older brother Andrei and I listened to him talk and nodded. It was our bond. Wait for him to come to you. Make sure the waters in his tank are cooled before the columns begin to pump. He will use a lot of energy to make it. Andrei is no longer here, but Adam has been keeping a secret from all of us. He kept mum about what he was doing on the West Coast in his science kibbutz, collecting employees from UBC. Today Natalie told me: “My son can tu

The shading on the upper lip took me like three hours…it’s pretty much the best drawing I’ve ever done. We’ll keep it up for the textures

Flash painting done the night my grandmother died

Drew some live flowers with my eyes closed and colored it in with them open. Had a sketch night with a friend and drew their goober cat, Mitch.

Two space dudes looking space drippy in some space duds

Short-term projects from a long-term hospital stay. Any drawings you see before April were done without access to many references

first it sleeps Lëtzebuergesch He was born on the coast of Brazil but grew up in a small European country. We met while living in the same London apartment building when I was nineteen. I brought him to a museum to collect one of Ai Wei Wei’s seeds. We spent four summers with his family: his mother interpreted languages for a living and insisted I speak German in the house. In silence, they all watched me slowly gag down a slice of a traditional aspic meat pie. We carved our

Take a long walk in a third-world capital. Touch each building like you own it. Take a slow, deliberate pace, as though you plant your flag with every step. Approach a busker. Take his instrument and play it the worst you can. If he played the fiddle, play with opposite hands. If it’s a wind, remove the reed altogether.

ACCOMPANYING PLAYLIST: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5Jq8YtzjCahHacFkriCp0e?si=QlaR4EITTve5rDA3mDrpxQ&pi=Csy1o7uUTtioe

ACCOMPANYING PLAYLIST: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1BcJ2bzmxveE5xRsvdaMuw?si=PvO-nMAERKG2diggTgvmiA&pi=MJmbqHirRzS8S

Backyard barbecue babes ephemeral like cicadas, air thick and dank with smoke. Chicago people don’t scare easy yet they tread the streets in fear for years, altogether an unsocial species. Don’t want anyone labeling their children. Don’t want to be ridiculed for profoundest moments, those associated with near- paranormal consensuses. Lake Michigan hauntings murders of the Midwest cemeteries of O’Hare: they do not compare. But to ask a real Neighborhood Man would yield, like t

Upon answering a lobster phone, a small-biz Detroitian kinetic artist found himself speaking to Yoruba orisha Oba Oduduwa who asserted he admired the thought , but then politely asked for that tradition back. " And for the metal arokin , which really just a talking piggy bank , isn't it? A naked Furby - Pez for colonizer money? 'Ah-AH. Need food.' " Oduduwa engorged his eye sockets and blinked twice mechanically , pursing his handsome lips over his white teeth and chomping li