The Opinionist

  Henry:  did you know they  make dummies with tear ducts now? 1. In 1999, the Chinese author Liu Cixin published the science fiction short story “With Her Eyes,” where the male protagonist uses sensor technology to transfer his experience at the surface of the Earth underwater—to the eyes of a female researcher trapped in a deep-sea exploration vehicle at the center of the Earth. I don’t want to be closed in. The unnamed male protagonist remembers her saying. She names the flowers in the prairie. Her voice swelled with rapture. 2. Iris (Merriam-Webster): the colored muscular diaphragm at the front of the eye, which controls light intake; genus of sword-leafed flowers; Greek goddess of the rainbow. 3. I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. (Neale-Hurston) 4. They learn to see things twice. Don DeLillo, on the unnamed girl of “Videotape” whose eyes through which we see the murder. 5. Seeing Les Mis in the school theater made me feel hollow. 6. In 19...

*All the strange line breaks, punctuation, and grammar inconsistencies are intentional. After Don DeLillo. It is a frayed painting. The edges, fraught, where the fine watercolor paper tore in soft layers like scissored pieces of flesh. Perhaps that is what it is. An organ cut from the fine pigmented lines of the artist’s eye. Messy color— not even framed? — What will be your mother’s inquiry at the mummy-wrap file folder, creased in half, the casket-exoskeleton; you, a collector now, perhaps—newly minted; the yellow-peach framing still and cool where a wet mud footprint wraps around its front. Owning this feels like sacrilege. Words are your primary craft ( thing ) and they (you have never thought of this) elude possession. That the imaginary and metaphorical red velvet rope is not here, naked and alarming blankness. You can touch it, you can fray it, dirty with your mud-stained shoes, spill innocuous liquids, ownership is permission, ten million ways to kill what exists in preciou...

I grew up alongside ants. My sister and I sometimes left our snacks carelessly on the floor of our first-floor apartment. The next day the ants would find them—cracks between carpet fluff blooming with moving clusters of brown. At Mom and Grandmother’s orders, we hunted them down, coating the bottoms of our slippers in brown sugar. They always came back. There were always more to kill. It was a thrill to be so colossal—so powerful, gargantuan. In the summer of first grade, my sister, our neighbor Tony and I created an Anti-Ant Club to purge our neighborhood clean. We poured water into the anthills, swollen brown blisters in sidewalk cracks, watching them deflate and darken like punctured balloons. Our list of crimes went on. The balcony teemed with tiny, restless footsteps. Tape dispenser in hand, lure them onto the adhesive quicksand, where the small black bodies stuck like sesame seeds between teeth. A newspaper sheet of wriggling fine print. Prepare the scissors, the surgeons. Cut. ...