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 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…
by Michael Abraham-Fiallos The day is a collision. The day is a collision of the body with itself, of the body with the space in which it finds itself, of the body against the sunlight which only ever heralds bad news in a mind like mine. Restlessness seizes all four limbs (an inconsistent phenomenon, brought…
