Q-tips; under-the-tongue thermometers; ear thermometers; once, a meat thermometer; a Neti pot, swiftly rejected; toothpicks; anal beads; lollipops from the doctor’s office; lollipops from the bank drive-thru; upwards of 57,000 pounds of food; 43.5 gallons of alcohol; needles; the lip of a pipe...

Still, there was something—a spark. Are you fruit or vegetable, I wondered?Decades later, you are still mysterious to me. And a bit of that in any relationship can only be good.

The orgasm that is like an escalating inwardness
having stopped throwing up after four days of sick,
which is like a Joy Division drum track.

I look out the window at our once-bustling city that is now stuck in a perpetual state of Sunday. It’s only been six months since our microwave died, but we’ve both aged so much more in that time span.
“It’s not safe,” I say.

"Where did he get those gorgeous blue eyes?" The rudest strangers asked Carson the question directly. "Honey, where did you get those blue eyes?"

The exhibition “The Moon Represents My Heart: Music, Memory and Belonging” at the Museum of Chinese in America offers us an opportunity to study the enduring silence-cum-visibility. Co-curated by Hua Hsu, staff writer at The New Yorker, as well as Herb Tam and Andrew Rebatta from MOCA’s curatorial team, the ensemble of over fifty artists surveys a Chinese American history in which a disciplined muteness can be felt: from Yoyo Ma’s perfected recitals of Western classical music to C. Spencer Yeh’s rebellious improvisations against this tradition. But this weight could just as easily apply more broadly to others not in the show; I also thought of Mitski’s escape into ulterior identities (“Be the Cowboy”) and Rina Sawayama’s stylized cyborgian fit (“Cyber Stockholm Syndrome”).