All the Glamour in Bein’ Sad
Giving Life: A Thank You Note to Jinkx Monsoon

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…
The Tarot: Narrative, Therapy, Self-Making

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…
Adjacency
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.”…
Keeping House
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…
A New York Love Letter
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…
On No Longer Liking Allen Ginsberg
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…
Simone Weil on the Beach

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…
Fletching
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…
Ennui at the Public Pool
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…