Ginny

My grad school professors called me Sour Patch Kid, and I never knew why. I only knew myself as sweet. I love the people I meet wholeheartedly. And I was gentle with my students. They were my flower garden, each with different watering and sunning needs. Intense and delicate beauty; repotting constant growth. But they feared me sometimes, and I never knew why. My family is hard to deal with. My parents were kind to everyone except for us. We are a peach with an ugly pit that

Right outside of Branson, there's a Museum of Failed Inventions. It costs five dollars to go in, and they give you a sturdy brochure. There are five floors joined by a mid-century atomic floating escalator. You have to walk up the escalator, but the entire apparatus is made of glass. On the third floor, there is a 24k-gold digital clock in a thick crystal dome on a vibrating gold plate with a small hole drilled through for the wires. Underneath the metal plate is an intricate

The bright balloon floated in today. It was stuck under an end table, shielding itself from dust. It's odd. I had deflated it almost to extinction myself, bit by tiny bit. Lord knows you have to respect helium these days. But the problem is, every time I opened up its little--how else to describe that puckery hole--to let some air out, when helium escaped, more must have gotten back in. I've noticed my voice sounding funnier around the house. I thought it could have been my p

As a kid, I would break into and scavenge the Hebiors' farm. Not during growing season; usually during the fall, when things were freshly tilled and bald. Dense trees and coyote shrieks surrounded the farmland. Shotgun blasts snarled across the flat terrain. You had to go when the sun shone high and the grass glowed. The Hebiors' horses would turn their ears from the homestead and switch their tails with intolerance. I'm pretty sure John was always watching from his window. H

The sun knocks on my door. I let him in; he was caught in a downpour like in a Brontë novel. He sinks into my couch cushions pretty deep. I mention that neither of us ever wants to start a conversation in each other's presence. The candor catches him off guard, so I say nothing more. That's not true. I need to bring up something to fill the silence, usually Cosmos or another biographical text. The sun goes on about how much of a god Sagan was, and I go blind staring at him. I

I just called emergency services to check on my disabled neighbor. I was alone in my apartment, and I heard a throaty rattle coming from the ceiling. I hung up with 911. I felt terror lift the feeling from my feet. Then I was in my grandmother's bedroom, her hand in my hands while she was dying of cancer. She looked asleep. The walls shook. The floor drew farther away. I had recently traveled to Vegas for a convention. The guy in front of me at the airport car rental was in t

Bioremed Engin.: Lake Michigan Strata, North Shore. [Healing the Land with the Lushkis? [Provisional Title]]* Gintare Lushki, UChicago under Dr. Petro Hirnyk Anthropogenic Fill mineral matter My dad called me last 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 he

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 This poem is about my not being able to hold on to Betty after her breast cancer diagnosis.

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 ACCOMPANYING PLAYLIST

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

ACCOMPANYING PLAYLIST