I’ve always been this way: open, friendly, disarming, talkative. Whatever you want to call it, it’s an act. I'm as calculated as a new student on the first day of school. See, I’ve trained myself to ward off dangers with words.
All in Non-Fiction
My sister called me that night. I sat on my bed, with the lights off, as she talked. If I couldn’t see anything of my room, I could imagine I was home and she was talking to me from across the bedroom we’d shared all through our childhood. I could imagine she was telling me secrets about the boys she had crushes on and the teachers she hated.
When we returned for breakfast, she watched with surprising disinterest as dog food bowls were filled on the counter. I guess she’d never been fed from a bowl. But when it was her turn to eat, she devoured it as though she’d never been fed at all. I noticed when we were outside that she ate dirt, and wondered if this is how she’d been surviving. “What a life,” I told Bill. He just stared quietly.
Jessica returned with Justin’s drink. Neither one of them noticed or seemed to care that Ruby was whimpering. I couldn’t wait to get out of that apartment, but knew that I had to repeat my instructions to Justin and Jessica.
I enjoy a good dose of Leslie, Ron, Donna, April—the whole gang—on my best days. But on my worst, this show becomes an unbingeable nightmare.
Because Leslie Knope makes me feel like shit.
I don't remember where Mrs. Harding, our club sponsor/art teacher, was during all this. Probably in the art department's ventilation room. But I guess she needed to be high or whatever to deal with a bunch of fourteen to eighteen year olds singing in broken Japanese and wearing Naruto headbands.
It was weird. I was weird, as any of my classmates would have attested. Everything was weird, if you thought about it long and deeply enough.
On the day of Loki’s last class, it all clicks. We perform all the tasks correctly and pass the test. Loki gets a Fozzie Bear toy and a certificate, and I take some pictures of him in a little doggie graduation hat. I’ve never been prouder. We did it! Together. We are a team.
I didn’t quit acting because of a bad director, bad experience, found the career to be useless or self-indulgent. I quit because of an eating disorder.
At its peak I am confident. I’m attractive. I’m funny. I sparkle and dazzle. Everyone likes me at the peak. Everything is possible at the peak.
In the wake of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, M.G. Poe examines the complicated issue of gun control in America.
M.G. Poe braves the mire and muck of Fire and Fury, Michael wolff's gossipy exploration of the Trump White House.
Running across the living room, heart pounding, I’d imagine if I was quick enough, I could outrun the Big Bad Wolf. He would duck behind the armoire and the Steinway. It was thrilling and terrifying. I was fast.
The contamination, however, extended beyond the physical conditions. There were many things we did in high school that most people would readily identify as hazing.
A silver-haired woman with still-taut cheekbones smiles from the ad. A pitch for magic potions aimed at women with crow’s feet and creases. A woman like me, experienced in flutters of self-doubt and twinges of loss. Vulnerable to the seductive pull of junk science and sly text—serums with proven clinical strength, the latest in anti-wrinkle technology. Sweet-smelling fruit extracts to moisturize, rejuvenate, illuminate. Who doesn’t want to glow with renewed vitality?
I want to be clean. I want to be clean in the way that birds are when they molt, shedding their feathers to grow newer, brighter ones. A snake grinding against rough wood to slip itself out from its old skin, leaving it in its slithery path. A hermit crab, buried underneath the sand in the early morning, eating the exoskeleton that it sheds.
Growing up, I went to a private Christian high school that leaned heavily toward Southern Baptist fundamentalism, that was 95% white, that considered the law of God above all other laws, that stated, as per both Christian Bible and Judaic Torah, that the man was the spiritual and physical head of the household, all others subordinate unto him; he, of course, subordinate unto God. There was a specific moral code of “dos and don’ts” to which we were expected to adhere that included how to dress, how to interact socially with the opposite sex, what to believe and not believe, even what to think or not think.
“Officer Holmstrom, can I please talk to you a minute?” The voice was smooth like butterscotch, sweet and oversugared.
Inmate Gary Phoenix stood at his cell front, his figure barely illumined by the light of an underpowered reading lamp on the shelf above his single bunk.
On election night, November 7, 2016, when ABC Election coverage announced that Donald Trump took Florida, I actually went into the bathroom, closed the door, lowered the toilet lid, sat down, and cried. I know quite a few of us who did the same; we knew something we could not explain, something hitherto unprecedented had just happened. When North Carolina and Ohio went red and finally, Iowa, I wretchedly watched George Stephanopoulos, clearly nonplussed, ask his co-anchoring panel of pundits, “How could this happen when a solid majority of Americans said that Donald Trump wasn’t qualified for the job?”
INTERVIEWJohn Grochalski
"What Trump does angers me but never surprises or shocks."