What bothered me was that up until human lives were involved, I hadn’t thought any part of Holmes’s activities, nor Balwani’s, were especially out of the ordinary for a tech company.
All tagged Literature
FICTION / Penance / Olivia Loccisano
“It is Juanita,” she continued. And Father Henry told her he was sorry but did not know the woman. She continued, “You committed a sin against a child long ago. I have come to forgive you for this sin.”
And then the conversation turns to sculpture’s curves, forcing me
from the false trail I’ve been following. Perhaps one day I will stop
writing poems about Godzilla-adjacent things, which will be very sad.
The Emperor looked upon his reflection. “Oh no! My hair looks hideous,” he thought. “It looks to be in the shape of a poodle. I cannot see the beauty in the hairdo. What does this mean? I cannot be racist. I must lack exquisite taste!”
Rumpelstiltskin took Prince Florian home, and loved him, kept him warm, and fed him well. Florian traded in his gold jumpsuit for a cloth diaper. Rumpelstiltskin’s magic did not involve making breastmilk, so he did need to hire a wet-nurse with some gold he had spun from his rhododendron.
Mom said, Some things can’t be fixed.
And this was a blow I did not accept so I scotch taped her back together
along with a leg I took off when I couldn’t make her bend.
But this time was a little different. Younger me wouldn’t have understood the dedication from Suzanne. She wouldn’t have understood the song lyrics in the song Suzanne wanted to dedicate to George, which means she also wouldn’t have understood what kind of “good times” they shared if the song choice was any indication.
TRUTH THESE YOUNG LORDS HOARD DOUGH
Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice
Heather hooked her thumb in once,
Into the cavern of Heather's pink velvet mouth,
Just to see if she would let her.
who is in service of whom and how much
they paying? I imagined it wouldn’t take
long for people to see Clark is special.
Sally loved telling people about Donald Turnupseed. Get a couple drinks in her at a party and she'd be off. It was at one of these parties, one we hosted at our place a couple months after she moved in, that she got to telling Craig Sommerson about Donald Turnupseed in the kitchen of our apartment.
When I hiked a segment of the Pacific Crest Trail,
a little ways outside Seattle,
it was blazingly beautiful the whole way.
Looked as good with my bare eyes
as it would in a frame.
Why, oh why did you sing that heartbreak solo through the empty halls during lunch period? Probably wasn’t the best move for someone trying to keep it low-key, but you couldn’t help it. Blame the hormones. Blame the trendy outfit and kitten heels begging to be paraded around. Blame the boy making you feel these things that can only be expressed in a slow female ballad.
While more decent and responsible audiences should connect the dots between the skinheads’ deeds and their bloody fates, several others have missed the point. But it takes an overwhelming amount of cognitive dissonance to pretend that Russell Crowe as Hando, leaning against a fridge with a skeleton-bone arm tattoo and holding a glass of milk against his head like James Dean in “Rebel Without A Cause,” wasn’t supposed to look sexy and cool.
Cameramen watched and filmed as contestants cheated on their boyfriends while perhaps too drunk to realize it, were nearly pressured into having sex with discomforting foreign men at parties, and sobbed after being given no other option than forfeiting, to kiss an openly racist male model while filming a commercial.
The teams are sorted, and the sentiments on the fourth graders’ faces range from this is the best thing ever in the world to I’d rather be sitting in front of my Atari playing Combat. Nina is right smack in the middle of that neon spectrum—she’s way more athletic than most of the girls in her class, but she’s wearing strapped sandals and her too-tight pair of culottes, so it will slow her down for sure.
The lack of Black women’s vantage point on the issue is curious. After all, Timberlake’s apology was addressed in part to a Black woman and referenced racism and misogyny. (I am guessing neither Timberlake nor his publicist know the term misogynoir.) And, Timberlake fell out of public favor partly because of his actions towards a Black woman.
Those eyes, those eyes. We get drunk
and conform to views
of how a pep rally
should be. It should be
cherished, like a skeleton.
She spent hours sitting on park benches listening to the Red Hot Chilli Peppers with her legs crossed. She watched people with tote bags wander aimlessly, falling in love with trees and birds. Billy Collins was right about so many things.