New one-sentence essay out now!

A few weeks ago, I read the excellent Dinty Moore’s piece “Pandemic Rant”—a single-sentence rage against this pandemic, against himself, against All Of This. That alerted me to the wonderful new magazine, Complete Sentence Lit, where they only publish single sentence pieces. I love the single, freight-train sentence as a way to channel rage, or panic, or fear, so now I have my own piece about when my daughter was 8 weeks old, and I was afraid I’d accidentally hurt her. Check it out here, accompanied by a beautiful original watercolor by Zach Schwartz.

Here’s just a piece of Dinty’s piece, for your ragey pleasure: “Day 56 and I hate my hair, my face, my hands, my hands touching my face, my hands touching my hair, wearing a mask, my neighbors who don’t wear masks, my neighbors who wear masks incorrectly, my neighbors who wear masks smugly, like some fucking statement of purity, or wokeness, myself for thinking that very thought, myself for knowing the word wokeness, smug people generally, the lady who sews 25 masks a day and posts pictures to Facebook, every fucking day, my neighbor who has a hot tub, my neighbor who has a greenhouse, my neighbor who probably hates me because I have a garden, yeast, the lack of yeast, people talking about yeast, the word yeast, sourdough starter, toilet paper, Netflix, people who hoard toilet paper, myself for buying too much toilet paper, my neighbor who walks his dog every 30 fucking minutes, and he’s thinner than me, by a factor of roughly 2,000, if that is even mathematically possible, math, math professors, math problems, problems, droplets, airborne droplets, how hard it is to get beer, the Kroger employee who thinks social distancing is pushing up within two inches of my face to put my birth date into the cash register so I can buy my beer, cash registers, self-checkout lines, grocery shopping, being afraid of grocery shopping, being afraid to read newspaper articles describing the symptoms, being afraid to read newspaper articles about what the world might look like two months from now, two years from now, next Tuesday…”