Monday, October 20, 2025

Pretty Little Brain by Noah Bracale



Pretty Little Brain

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Noah Bracale

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Sertraline, Melatonin, Magnesium supplements, amphetamine-dextroamphetamine, Priadel, aripiprazole, Buspirone, Bupropion, Hydroxyzine pamoate, Escitalopram, Mirtazapine, Venlafaxine, Fluoxetine, Paroxetine, Lorazepam, Trazodone 

My bedsheets smell like tequila, and I’m wrapped around myself. Wallet, phone, keys, cigarettes, lighter shoved under my pillow. There’s blood too—on my bedsheets. Blotted in the same pattern that is carved across my back.

I’ve been given this pretty little brain, and I am determined to live through it.  

Psycho-therapy, Al-anon meetings, EMDR, TRE, DBT, CBT, Puppets? At one point? Sandboxes, 72 hour mandatory stay. It costs $50,000 to go to a ranch and pet a horse, and I wish I had the money to go to it and fix me. I’m not sure it even would.  

I was eight years old when I first remember hurting myself. Truly hurting myself.  

I tried to break my own hand. I took one of my father’s ten pound weights and slammed it over my left hand over 400 times. I only know this number because I counted. I was punishing myself for something, the same thing I still punish myself now for—and it is completely elusive to me.  

Vodka, Tequila, Green apple Tennessee Whiskey, Weed, Molly, Mushrooms, LSD, Xanax, Cocaine (once on my gums), Adderall crushed and snorted in a hotel bathroom, Black Marlboro shorts (Cowboy killers,) All of them—mixed together.  

I came up with shorthands, comical ones: ones that let my buddies know that something was going wrong. I’d bray like a donkey when my brain began to get loud—when I couldn’t find the words to say “I’m seeing that memory again.” “My hands have gone numb.” “I’m stuck in a loop—I can’t find my way out.”  

They all reacted different. Aidan was the first to hear it. Diego knew my pride—how to distract me, to ground me, to ease me back to earth without doubling my shame. Dom would ask before he held me, and then he’d hold me. Alaska knew instinctively to check what was wrong.  

Diego, Aidan, Dom, Alaska. 

There’s this story I tell sometimes, almost like an apology—or some kind of explanation to my friends and lovers who had stayed up with me through all of the nights I cannot sleep. 

Awoken from nightmares, tortured by thought. The nights that my safety plan deems a babysitter necessary. They’d sit with me, and I’d tell them: 

“Sometimes, I think, before I came here, I had a conversation with God. And he told me that he’d make a deal with me. He told me that I would come back, and I was going to suffer, really suffer. But all of that suffering was going to be worth it because I would get ‘this’ in return.”  

I’m sure I said to them, “Maybe it’s you. He told me that there would be rape, and torture, and pain. But at the end of it, there would be you. You are God's apology to me.”  

General Anxiety Disorder, Major Depressive Disorder, Panic Disorder, Agoraphobia, Complex 

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Dissociative Identity Disorder, 

Substance Abuse Disorder, Bipolar Depressive, Borderline Personality Disorder  

Treatment Resistant.  

I was told that, 

‘Whatever you have—it may be time to consider that it is treatment resistant.’ That maybe there would be no stop to it.  

I was given choices no kid should have ever had to make. I was given memories that will never find their way into an essay. I was given the role of a sacrificial lamb who is now being asked to reply to two of my classmates’ discussion board posts. I was given a pretty little brain.   

And he is kind, lord. And he is empathetic, and patient. He is merciful. He is gentle, and he tries because he knows it is important. And he was given a pretty little brain.  ƒ

He was given a pretty little brain with no cure.  

Thursday, October 9, 2025

Things That Fade by Aditi Ghosh


    Aditi Ghosh: Things That Fade



1. Daisies on a gold chain. Provenance: exact details forgotten, but most likely Francesca’s, La Encantada, 2905 E Skyline Dr #143, as one of a two or three part sale deal. In my first year of college, I wore it nearly every day, small daisies strung around my neck, a sort-of matching set of daisies on my ears. The chain, once gold, has since darkened into a warm copper, worn down by the oxidation, the time, the love. 



2. Adjustable rings, one embedded with a (likely fake) pink stone. A gift from my mother. Provenance prior to gifting: Unknown. I stopped wearing these not because of the tarnishing, but because they hurt. The corners on the adjustable ends are sharp. With fingers clasped around a pencil, or around themselves into fists, the metal bites, digging traces into the soft skin at the corners of my palm. There are no cuts; still, under running water, the edges of my fingers sting, slightly blue, with all the annoyance of the smallest paper cut, invisible until noticed, then unable to be ignored. 




3. Stylized silver rings. Provenance: two different sales at pop-up tents on the University mall. After a few uses, the salt in the sweat between the rings and my fingers started to eat away at the metal, staining it. Now, they’re shaded all around, not quite tarnished, not to the point of ruin. Mixed-metal, perhaps, liminal. Not quite silver, not quite gold. 




4. Sterling silver and turquoise linked bracelet. Provenance: Arequipa, Peru. This one is, admittedly, completely my fault. Over the summer, I left it in a bag with a tarnished necklace, and by the time I opened it back up again, the pristine silver had turned dull and grey-ish, brown-ish, black-ish, a clouded film at the edges, blurring into the bright turquoise. Ruined not by time or love, but by neglect, quieter, final, a kind of damage all its own.


 


5. The only remaining ring in the first set of jewelry I ever bought for myself. Provenance: Claire’s, Outlets North Phoenix, 4250 W Anthem Way. Senior year of high school, a quick stop off the highway on the way to the senior band trip to Disneyland. Bought while waiting for one of our drum majors to get his ears pierced for fun. On impulse, I grabbed the pack off the shelf, gold-ish, coughed up 15 dollars for them, and walked back out into the cold, December evening air.

I lost one ring the next morning in San Diego, stolen by the surf, salt-tongues sliding the thing off of my index finger and swallowing it down into the belly of the ocean. The rest tarnished in barely a month. They were probably gold-tone: made of a base metal, only plated to look like gold. Underneath, after my skin and sweat had eaten away the plating, they were copper-ish, rough, and left an embarrassing ring of blue at the base of each of my fingers. 

This one used to be the simplest of the set: gold all around, a single, uninterrupted band. Now, it is eaten away, chipped, its core rough and exposed. 

Two unspoken, broken promises: I never wore the rings again. He never got his ears pierced.  


Wednesday, October 1, 2025

Campus Flowers by Hanna Wilkens





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Campus Flowers

Hanna Wilkens

A few weeks ago I was studying late at the library and decided I needed a break. It was nearly 10pm, and the dense heat of early September had loosened and made way for a warm, comfortable 80 degrees. It’s my favorite time to walk around campus—the freshman skittering around in going out clothes, headed to University with fake IDs, feeling jittery with excitement and rebellion. Leisure bike rides and walks and a few students throwing a frisbee back and forth. I headed aimlessly back to my old dorm on Highland Ave, the walk still engraved in me although I haven’t lived there in two years. Walking through the pathway between dorm buildings, I looked up at my old window. I wondered who lived there now. If they were adjusting alright. I hope they’re adjusting alright. I turned to look at the Hibiscus plant growing in direct view of my old window. It’s bright purple petals folding inward on one another. I used to find such comfort in them. Those first months away from home, I’d look out at the flowers when I was feeling lonely and tell myself they were a sign. A sign that I was in the right place. 

That year I’d taken a liking to using flowers as indications that I was making the right choices. It started with a visit to Arizona my senior year of high school. My favorite flowers are poppies, although I rarely see them in real life. We used to have a big painting of them hanging outside my childhood bedroom and I suppose I’ve always associated them with home. Then, somewhere on the highway between Phoenix and Tucson, I spotted them, sprouting along the black tar in daring patches of gold. It felt like a message.

The hibiscus flowers, though, belong to a different memory. My grandfather used to grow them in his garden in Florida, and every time I visited he’d pick one of the flowers and place it behind my ear, and I’d wear it there for the rest of the trip. The last time I saw him he picked two: one for behind my ear, and one that he placed on the dash of our rental car before we left. It wasn’t until we were pulling out of the driveway that I noticed it, and I turned around to wave goodbye to him. That was the last time I ever saw him. Later, staring at the hibiscus outside my dorm window, I liked to think that the flowers were a gift from him. A symbol that I was doing the right thing—that I was moving forward and making a life of my own.

That night, walking around campus, I picked one of the hibiscus flowers and tucked it behind my ear. Then I proceeded to walk all around the south side of Old Main, pocketing flowers in my jeans. When I got home I pressed them in a book and later made them into cards I plan to give to my friends and family on their birthdays. Maybe for them, the flowers will mean something too.


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Wednesday, August 27, 2025

Untastables by Ander Monson

 Untastables (Fictional Chips) by Ander Monson









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Bags of chips in chronological order:

Let’s Potato Chips, Community (and so many other television shows), 2009

Potato Crisps, Fallout 4, 2015

Potato Chips, Control, 2019

Zalgitos, Omega Mart (Meow Wolf Las Vegas), 2021

Judy’s Potato Chips, Sea Monster Spice, Open Roads, 2024

MAI** (MAINE? MAIZE?) Potato Chips, Lost Records: Bloom & Rage, 2025


WTF:

Since 2021 I have collected bags of new-to-me chips. I have hundreds of empty bags now, flattened in binders, each of which I have tasted. I only keep the first bag of each chip I try. But I’ve started seeing untastable (because fictional) chips in television shows I watch, in the video games I play, and in the Meow Wolf Las Vegas Omega Mart. Only occasionally (in the Fallout games) can they be eaten in-game. They cannot be eaten offscreen. I’ve gone to significant efforts to procure bags of two of these inedible, untastable chips, including the Let’s Chips that have appeared in at least dozens of television shows, most notably (because they made a bit of it) Community. Is a chip that cannot be eaten a chip at all? Is an object on a screen an object? Am I a sad person for wanting to taste these untastables? What does collecting these things accomplish? Do I win or have I already lost?


Friday, May 2, 2025

Ellen Tracy, Raffle Fundraiser

This week, TINY CABINET presents a one week raffle fundraiser.




Prizes include a cardboard Ford wheel hub, half of a highly sought after railroad marble, famous New Orleans exotic meats poster, mystery biscuit, and many more and may all be viewed at the CABINET. 

Please consider buying a 5 dollar ticket in person at the CABINET, or via venmo (@ehtthe)

Or just donate directly to @louisianahotsauc3 who is currently facing serious legal trouble in Alabama. 

More information about how to participate below.  

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raffle to help a young trans activist stay out of jail in alabama


all proceeds going towards legal fees

tickets $5 each

cash in envelopes or venmo ( @ehtthe )

specify which item(s), and your name/contact in your message, so we can get prizes to you

there will be more (and better!) items added throughout the week

prizes shown are an approximation

prize drawing to happen Tuesday 6th


direct aid venmo to @louisianahotsauc3


for more information email theeht@protonmail.com

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Thursday, April 24, 2025

Cameron Carr, Penguins and Gifts










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My parents got me my first penguin because I had read Mr. Popper’s Penguins and decided that, like that fictional Minnesotan family, I too could raise a penguin in an American suburb. They were too gentle to tell me outright that this idea was stupid, that a penguin in Ohio in the care of an unprepared elementary schooler would quickly die, and maybe because of that gentleness my half serious pipe dream became a real attempt at persuasion. I knew that it was fiction and meant for children, but in my child mind I secretly wondered if the rudimentary logic might work. Out loud, I asked with the tone of a child knowing their request is absurd but pushing anyway. In my memory, before my mom said no, she hesitated for a moment after I explained the walk-out freezer in the basement, the strategic avoidance of the sun, the regular shipments of fish. She probably meant this as a small gift from parent to child so that I might keep believing in the great possibilities of the world, but I didn’t understand her hesitation that way. It was into the hesitation that I dove.

I did not succeed in convincing my parents to adopt penguins. But I put up a long and serious campaign that my mom still likes bringing up today, and come Christmas, I found my first penguin underneath the tree: a four-inch-tall, Santa-hatted Jingle Beanies named Zero, according to the tag.

I gave up my dream of housing a penguin, but the penguins came nonetheless. First there was little Beanie Zero, then I received socks, ornaments, a snow globe, a nutcracker, hand towels, more socks, a letter set, kitchenware, a two-foot-tall wire light-up penguin with arms tucked inside a fuzzy muff, and even more socks. The thing about gifts is that they beget more gifts. When I visit home for the holidays, I wear my penguin socks dutifully to show appreciation for the gifts, and then my family observes how much I love socks covered in penguins, so I receive more socks covered in penguins. Soon, my partner’s family notices that I’m always wearing penguin socks, and so they start getting me penguin socks too. At some point I had to place a moratorium on penguin socks, even as gifts (family members, if you’re reading this, I’m down to my last couple pairs and will accept penguin socks once more).

I have always liked gifts. Loved gifts. Giving and receiving. I love the element of surprise especially and have a temperamental distaste to giving preselected items from a list. For me, gifts, at their best, are things given as part of a relationship rather than as part of a negotiated exchange. When scholars define a gift economy, I often find they focus on the possibilities of giving without promise of return, some celebrating gift economies for offering ways of living in reciprocal community. I love that idea of gifts. But I am thinking now, as I look at a gathering of my gifted penguin collection, about how gifts allow for giving that may have nothing to do with the wants or needs of a recipient. Gifts, sometimes, are all about the imaginings of someone else. How we can press our desires onto another. How we long for someone to like the same things we do, to become the being we imagine they should be. 

I have never bought a penguin for myself, but the ones I have been given fill a plastic bin that uses up a not insignificant amount of closet space in the one-bedroom apartment I share with my partner. If it were up to me, all my socks would be plain white or black. But the gifts I receive mark me. They checker me from toes to calves in tuxedo-clad flightless birds. This is another thing that gifts can do: mark us. At their best, gifts might mark us with the remnants of the people who have cared for us. And to receive a gift then is at times not only to willingly take but to willingly be taken by the giver, to step into their imagined ways of being. To step into a pair of grey socks so that scarved and beanied penguins might ski down the slopes of your legs. I am willing to do this. I could live without the penguins, but I am willing to keep on living with them—happy even. In fact, I am wishing now that I had not gone through that penguin letter set. How nice it would be to write this on paper with penguins decorating the other side.


Wednesday, April 23, 2025

Astrid Liu, what was left







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what was left: 

hydrangea. orchid. camellia. 

trumpet flower. hibiscus. ylang ylang. 

i made a book of dried flowers that made me think of her each day i was in asia, wrote little notes, arranged each flower carefully on the page. we broke up before i could ever give it to them. i burned that book. this is the haphazard copy, the reject and the excess flowers, the second thoughts that were the only thing i left for myself. 

what was left:

creosote. maple leaves. plumeria. 

memories cradled in recycled pulp

pressed firm. 

use the ephemeral 

make something new. 

what was left: 

lilies. daisies. carnations. 

moth orchids. roses. 

alicia and kara and dure sent baskets and bouquets of white flowers in anticipation of the way your body slowly became more frail, more fragile. i never used to bring lilies home. it doesn't matter now. 

i can't bear to throw them out, though their blooms are wizened and dry. i can only sweep the litter left over. the soughing of broom bristles over the floor sound like the wheezing of your last breaths, your little head flopping over to my hand and away, unable to find comfort. 

this is all i have left of you.