The Two Denvers by Rebecca Starks

The first thing they had to do was name us, as if we were rescues or strays. As if they would need a way to gossip about us, to get our attention. We mostly did not like our new…
The first thing they had to do was name us, as if we were rescues or strays. As if they would need a way to gossip about us, to get our attention. We mostly did not like our new…
“I like your look,” you say, cradling your laptop, maneuvering past the jutting armrests to sit next to me. “Thanks.” I put a limp bundle of shoestring fries into my mouth. The armrests, you explain, are to keep people…
Sometimes Mrs. Bowman rode the school bus to her jobs. She’d be waiting on the road with her children—her daughter, Suzette, and son, Buddy—both of whom I knew to be in High Levels of reading and math, as were…
My first time in Miami is tiny cups of sweet Cuban cortadito; and going to the Miami Open with my husband to join the crowds cheering for Carlos “Carlitos” Alcaraz, the Spanish teenage sensation and World #1; and rainy…
Essay by Rachel León • I met Nora Decter over Zoom when we were tasked to outline her forthcoming novel, What’s Not Mine. We were both fellows in Stony Brook University’s BookEnds program, paired to work together on our…
Snap Not when your mother makes you go to the dance. You tell her you’re sick. Really sick this time. See? You’ve broken out in hives. Not when she slathers you in calamine lotion & stuffs you into tights…
When Ford made love to Calla, she felt something in him fight. It wasn’t against her ugliness. That matter was settled business, though Calla, in her youth, had held onto the idea that she was a winter-apple sort of…
We arrive in the raspberry fields when it’s dark. It’s dark when we pile out of our secondhand pickup. My father, my mother. My brother and me. It’s dark when we start walking the rutted, sopping dirt road that…
BAŅUTA RUBESS pioneered feminist theatre and contemporary opera to national renown in Canada and Latvia. She has lived in four countries and writes in two languages. She has written plays, libretti, radio drama, television biopics, stories, and…
It’s all a blur. It can be separated into two five-year periods: using alone and using with Haley. Haley had piercings everywhere: the bridge of her nose, her septum, her nipples, her belly button. She had stretched lobes—one had…
In “What I Do and Don’t Remember from the Days and Nights of Endlessly Smoking Crack and Shooting Heroin,” I wanted to give the reader addiction. I wanted to transmit it like an STD. I am aware of my magical thinking as it pertains to writing, and so I settled for the lesser hope of writing about my addiction in an experiential way. I wouldn’t expect a reader to have firsthand knowledge of the world this essay inhabits and so I attempt to impart it through structure: a list.
I’m nearly finished writing a memoir-in-essays and for the sake of the collection, I needed to introduce the reader to addiction. I needed to build a world that I could call back on in later essays. Obviously, this essay isn’t about recovery nor does it explore my using relationship with Haley. Instead, I was attempting to siphon my experiences, create a highlights reel, something detailed but crackling enough for a reader to leave the piece with an emotional experience, a movie in their mind, a sort of transference.
“How do I give the reader addiction?” I asked my gut. Understandably, these are my memories and they span a decade of time. From a craft perspective, I knew momentum would be important, and the list-like structure accomplishes that goal. Also, the list allows a sense of place and time to be captured through a collage of dynamic details and scenes. It’s not like I sat down and calculated all of these particulars before writing. I simply asked the questions and began to remember my own addiction.
CHRISTIAN BODNEY lives in New York City. He/they is an MFA candidate in creative writing at New York University. He is currently nearing the completion of a collection of experimental essays/memoirs. He has work appearing in Hobart, Ninth Letter, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Sonora Review. Find him on Instagram @sisyphus.is.happy.