The Offing

a lyric essay in one paragraph, repeatedly revised (edits indicated in blue)

I have been teaching my students that humans are storytellers by nature, and then one week I tell them about ChatGPT and artificially generated stories. ChatGPT writes clean prose—no typos, no grammatical errors, no awkward syntax in English—and I have no qualms mocking this text for what it is: a pastiche of natural language, meant to serve whom? I cherish my students. Truly. They write the first layers of stories that they must rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite, to figure out what it is they really mean, and there is no time, there is no money in the world that shows them what they do is worth something.

We’re trying for a babysitter. Angelina shows up in white pants, a gauzy blouse, and delicate sandals; even the condensation on her iced coffee looks curated. I walk her into the yard to meet my children, who are playing restaurant—filling Tupperwares with mud, leaves, sticks. They delight at the new patron.

The Porno King key fobs his way into the gym at 3:43 AM. It’s the best amenity in the apartment building and he takes full advantage. He doesn’t know we can hear him.

Among lesbians, butches are men and femmes women. But at the center of the butch, too, is the uterus—the 자궁(子宮), that is, a “palace for the son.” It’s a disconcerting absurdity that makes me cringe before I’ve even reached the end of this sentence, but one that I felt the need to shape into text before it was too late.

Undergirding these advantages—but spoken of even less than our country money—was the Get-Out-of-Jail-Free white race card that never left our hands. Throughout the generations, we could play it again and again and trust that it would always be replenished. The card was so light in hand that it was easy to convince ourselves we had never reached for it in the first place. Instead, we could tell ourselves that we were just that good at playing the game.