Articles

When I sit here alone, notebook lying open on my writing desk, I find I become someone other than the person I am when walking about or sitting in company or even sleeping.

I did not expect a novel about a bisexual Latinx conceptual artist in Los Angeles to hinge on the question of whether art-making is compatible with motherhood. Then I read Yxta Maya Murray’s dazzling Art Is Everything.

Ambulatory, patterned hours, the cell’s
circumference, countable cinder blocks, the darkness,
the lock, the tick of a wristwatch through midnight and beyond.

What he saw both entertained and startled him:
his head and face repeated in a corridor
of bizarre, ever-shrinking iterations,
a duplicate geometry of selves

After they bury me I suppose they will toast
my unparalleled capacity for wasting time or
proclivity for spinning wild yarns. Of my soufflés
they will say what they must.

Nothing will die when we’re together.

Until he leapt four stories toward death
my father didn’t believe in God, he said,
but himself, yet the tech in the medevac

swore, as the helicopter lifted, he asked
whether Jesus loved him.

It may come
that I don’t

make it out.