Michael Abraham-Fiallos is a writer of critical and lyrical prose as well as poetry. He is currently a PhD candidate in the Yale English Department. His critical writing is forthcoming from Modernism/modernity. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Palimpsest, storm of blue, The Minetta Review, and Poets Reading the News, among others. Michael's writing revolves around issues of queerness and queer love, mental illness, whiteness and its reactionary politics, the occult, and the occasional philosophical problem. He lives in New York City. Email: michael.abraham [at] yale.edu
by Michael Abraham The shower is running. It has just begun to steam up the little bathroom in my little apartment, and I reach into it, turn the dial from all-the-way-hot to almost-all-the-way-hot. I step into the spray of the water, and I discover that, instead of almost-all-the-way-hot, I have turned the dial to nearly-tepid.…
by Michael Abraham I wake with the dawn. It is January the sixth, and I have spent the last two days languishing in bed, oppressed by an inexplicable ennui that made it quite impossible to get up. So, today, I wake with the dawn. The sky is all blues and pinks, with tufts of cloud.…
by Michael Abraham It has all gotten too technicolor for Dorothy Gale. The trees and the grass are too green—not to mention the Emerald City (she had to take the glasses off several times to rub her eyes)—and the slippers are much too silver, or were they ruby? There are so many colors she is…
by Michael Abraham I wake early—not with the dawn but not long after it—and I stare out the window at a little conglomeration of Brooklyn backyards, severed from one another by brick walls and dotted with deciduous trees holding out their last against autumn. I am all wrapped up with the man I am dating,…
by Michael Abraham It was in the midst of thinking about my own childhood and friendships, of thinking about faith and magic and the End of the World and the World to Come, in the midst of reflecting quite deeply on these things, which for me are so profoundly interwoven, so profoundly interwoven because, in…
by Michael Abraham She used to roll up to my house late at night, in her green pickup truck, smoking a Parliament out the window and blasting The Strokes. I was seventeen. I would climb in, and we would drive through my neighborhood much too fast, her weak, amber headlights illuminating only the nearest spot…
by Michael Abraham I want to write about Christ and the End of the World and how queerness will usher in the World to Come. I want to write about these things immediately, right up front, but, instead, I will begin by telling you the story of two tattoos on my own body. I will…
by Michael Abraham Imagine a boy, and then call him Oliver. His eyes are olive, and this is why you will call him Oliver. Oliver is not his real name, but this is no matter. None of the names in a fable are real names. In a fable, characters are named things like Fox and…
by Michael Abraham I have been told it is a bad thing. I have been told this by doctors and friends and my parents and lovers. They worry over me, worry over me the way a Catholic worries over her rosary. They insist on the medication and the therapy and anything but this feeling, anything…
by Michael Abraham My mom always told me if I didn’t separate my lights from my darks, I would ding my white laundry. I always thought this was nonsense. And, in fact, in the fancy washing machine in the apartment I shared with my husband, this was nonsense. Oh, I was absolutely reckless! I would…
by Michael Abraham Take a star of anise and a pinch of lavender in either hand. Hold these to the chest and whisper out a little prayer. Splash clean water on the face. Brush the teeth. Fret over little details in the bedroom, whether the paintings are hung straight, whether the posters are in the…
by Michael Abraham I am leaving, and I am taking nothing. I am leaving, and I am taking nothing, and there is a void inside me—a round, black sphere, like a planet, or like the absence of a planet where a planet should be. I am coming apart in the stress of it. I am…
by Michael Abraham-Fiallos I was sixteen years old the first time I went to a drag show. It was an all-ages show in the Capitol Hill neighborhood—the gayborhood—of Seattle. My two best friends, Nalani and Shreya, bought tickets for my birthday. The performer was Jinkx Monsoon, who would go on to fame as the winner…
by Michael Abraham-Fiallos When I am not doing well in my own head, I turn to the tarot. While no substitute for therapy or psychiatry, the tarot has an ancient function that is symbiotic with these modern methods for coping with the wild unruliness of the mind. I know it sounds silly. But before there…
by Michael Abraham-Fiallos I knock at the bathroom door. “You alright, hun?” No pause. “Yeah, I’m fine! Just bad today.” I try to keep any sign of pity out of my voice—nobody likes to be treated like a patient—“I’m sorry. Can I get you anything?” No pause. “No, I’m fine! Love you.” “Love you, too.”…
by Michael Abraham-Fiallos I am a messy person. I am a messy person, and I don’t like to clean. My house testifies to this: cups in the sink, mail on the counter, books spilling off the windowsills, too much laundry in the bin, a scattering of incense dust on the coffee table alongside burnt out…
by Michael Abraham-Fiallos [This essay closes a loose trilogy of essays, which I did not quite comprehend as a trilogy until I finished it. The first can be read here, and the second can be read here. In closing the trilogy, which is focused on love and the queer, this essay acts a kind of…
by Michael Abraham-Fiallos I am sitting at a coffee shop downtown. It’s a nice Friday morning, not too hot and not too cool, not quite autumn and not quite summer. I have eaten, so I am no longer dreaming. And, I am reading “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg for the first time in at least half…
by Michael Abraham-Fiallos “The Iliad, or The Poem of Force” is a now-canonical lyrical-critical essay by the French anarchist and Christian mystic, Simone Weil. In it, Weil critiques the Iliad to arrive at an understanding of what she calls force, something just beyond human action, alive in and ruling over the interactions of persons. “In…
by Michael Abraham-Fiallos I sit across from my husband at a Chinese restaurant downtown. We sit outside, in one of those wooden outhouses that Covid has made into a mainstay of New York dining. It is his lunch break, and I have come downtown to meet him, to talk things out. Frankness and care sit…