Machine Gun

Emerging Writer Series

Every two weeks or so I am publishing an essay from an emerging writer. This week, we are publishing “Machine Gun” by Michelle Woods. Michelle is a writer and musician in New York. As a musician performing as Michael Love Michael, she has released three albums since 2020. Her latest, BRUISER, was released in 2024 on indie imprint Get Better Records. Additionally, she's worked as a culture journalist for the last 15 years, with bylines in New York Magazine, Rolling Stone, VOGUE, Glamour, Them, PAPER, ELLE, Interview, NYLON, and more. In May 2026, she will receive her MFA in Creative Writing from The New School, where she has been developing her debut memoir, from which "Machine Gun" is derived.

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I.

In a dream I’m having, it’s near the end of summer, early September. The time is now.

I am sashaying down 14th Street arm-in-arm with three of my sisters—“my sisters,” what I call all my best friends, no matter their gender. We are merrily on our way to who knows where, maybe to get some ice cream or go dancing, maybe to see a movie at the old Bowtie Theater in Chelsea that no longer exists. Maybe in the rubble of what was, we’ll catch the matinee of Margot Robbie in Barbie. Outside, the air is thick and balmy, the sky slashed with shades of dreamsicle orange, or maybe the carnation red maple leaves in Central Park turn come fall.

It was sunny moments ago, but in a blink the clouds go steel grey. Not unusual in late summer. It seems possible that rain is coming.

We stroll the streets, people on sidewalks, in honking cars, on belling bikes, in baby strollers, on walkers. In another blink, they are all gone. No one left but me and my sisters arm-in-arm, who don’t seem to notice. We chatter and laugh as if this sudden absence of people is normal.

The absence — and my friends’ nonchalance — reminds me of another old friend, a sister of a different kind, a spiky, white-haired woman named Faye, who looked a bit like Jane Fonda. Faye possessed an eternally cheery demeanor that made me believe she’d survived the Handmaid’s Tale-esque 1950s by permasmiling, whistling while she cooked for her husband and two children, humming while she ran the vacuum cleaner to drown out the news: Murrow was on CBS reporting the McCarthy hearings; Rich was on NBC reporting from the Korean War frontlines.

Faye’s ability to tune out her sorrows and the world’s sorrows with pep never left her. When we met about a decade ago, I would tell her my problems – about a boy, about money, about my fear of Trump’s looming chaos. And she’d just smile and say, “POOF!” with a grand wave of her hands. Poof, and now it’s over, the problem has passed.

Anyway, it was just like that — POOF! — the way the streets cleared, leaving me and my sisters, comrades locked in arms.

And then, the sky dims. I can smell rain, sulfuric, metallic. But instead of descending drops, I see a fireball, hurtling across the horizon.

In the dream I hear the sound of drones. Can you? If you spend five seconds, five minutes on social media, you might hear them in the background, between news about Beyoncé and Jay-Z dining with the Kushners; between posts of bombed-out rubble and blown-off limbs of children; between incendiary Trump Administration soundbites about immigrant-eating alligators or Tylenol causing autism or trans rights and DEI needing to D-I-E. The drones persist through it all, like a swarm of killer bees.

My sisters are still laughing at that funny thing one of us said, talking loud about how refreshing citron gelato would be on this hot, late-summer day. Their joy, my terror: a dissonance. And yet, the drone, louder, closer, a devil’s tritone of dread.

I speak but no sound comes out; I break from the daisy chain of arms and point to the sky. “Look,” I’m trying to say, my face pulling like taffy into a soundless scream, a puckered double-O.

More fireballs in the distance descend at the speed of light, and time is impossibly slow, earth tremors delicate beneath my feet.

It’s so nice to have moments to exhale in New York, a city that never stops, on and on without end like the prayer:

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

II.

I once let a stranger fuck me behind a dumpster in Bushwick after midnight. The late-autumn chill frosting the backs of my thighs. He had big muscles and bigger shame. “Don’t tell nobody,” he murmured between hard thrusts. It was like a rallying cry: each time he said it, he slammed harder into me, grinding my knees further into the gravel, tenderizing them until I could feel my skin breaking, the dirt from the rocks, and scant matter finding little homes in my widening wounds, my bloody knees staining the greyish ground sanguine and strange, like the figures of fallen men in chalk outlines I saw as a child on the south side of Chicago: bullet-ridden on their arms outstretched like little dead Jesuses, me on my knees outstretched like some backroads detour into carnation red, like a flower of God; so when he pulls out and comes where he pleases, it feels like liquid petals in my mouth.

III.

I met Faye at an AA meeting in Indiana, a year after I’d left New York in 2014, needing a break. She had fled her husband who abused her, whom she had been married to since the 1950s, some ten years before I was born, in 1988. She was a young bride, only seventeen. The husband who beat and raped her was probably ten years her senior when they were wed.

“I’d almost shot him to death,” she quipped once in a meeting, to strained laughs, her airy country lilt dropping an octave. “No, really,” she’d say as the laugh track quieted. “I really almost did.”

I can only imagine what Faye meant, seeing as how the conditions of the patriarchal 1950s, the ways women were taught to keep their homes, bodies, and children immaculate. Who wouldn’t snap under such conditions? Why didn’t more women just up and shoot their husbands?

In some ways, Faye’s perfection enforced by religion and male dominance, echoes in so many ways how I grew up, in the church, with a brutal father, being taught that I was inherently riddled with sin, that only God Himself could cleanse me. I was already condemned to hell for being myself.

We were a strange pair as friends, Faye, a seventy-something white woman with a permasmile, and me, a twenty-something Black trans girl with cropped hair dyed marine blue.

We went to a late-summer church picnic that was held indoors, strangely. Something murmured about the unforgiving Indiana heat in September, how it welds clothes to skin, like fire does. At the picnic, I told Faye that I’d moved from New York without a plan. I had no job lined up and no financial prospects. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to feed myself.

“But we all have a plan,” Faye said to me, fanning herself with one hand in the air-conditioned church. With the other, she took my hand, as if I were a child, and guided me toward a buffet of Doritos and ham-and-cheese sandwiches on Wonder Bread. “The plan of God.”

I looked at the food and understood Faye’s magic then and there, the kind that comes when you have escaped death or brutality, so now there is little to worry about. Her joy comes from a perpetual “Why should I worry?” Her storms have passed, save the final hand of death. I looked up at her white hair and noticed how the fluorescent light shone on it, a sort of halo became visible. Now that I’m sober, Faye seemed to teach me, the worst is over. I had my doubts. I didn’t have Faye’s whiteness, though we shared sobriety and experiences with violent men.

But with God’s help, and by accepting His Plan for your life, there’s not much to fret over. This was me trying on Faye’s way of seeing things.

Right, Faye?

Right, Michelle.

Just like that. POOF. We ate together in silence under the watchful eyes of white churchgoers. She retrieved a white poker chip from the pocket of her rose-colored overalls and handed it to me. On one side was the gold-letter inscription: “Surrender,” and on the other side: “Never give up.”

IV.

Say, do you remember?

Dancin’ in September

Never was a cloudy day

-Earth, Wind & Fire, 1978

When I was a 21-year-old coed, I was arrested for the first time. I had been partying at a bar outside of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, a college town a three-hours’ drive from my own college town, Bloomington, where Indiana University has its main campus. The occasion was a music festival, whose name I can’t recall, featuring electronic acts I’d never heard of. Electronic dance music was big at the time. It was some weekend, late-September 2009. I was with my friend Chelsea, a white girl who did duck lips whenever she took selfies and wore cheap oversized sunglasses that practically ate her face so she looked like some bargain-bin Mary-Kate Olsen. Chelsea and I had listened to my $14.99 copy Jay Z’s The Blueprint 3 CD all the way — it had just come out — her throwing up gang signs while faking knowing the words to “Empire State of Mind” and me screaming “Run This Town” through the open sunroof letting in the autumn chill. The glittering, expensive hip-hop beats pounding our ear drums, a primer for the Illinois raves we’d attend that weekend.

We sidled up to some kind of dive bar with a country aesthetic, complete with tacked-up American flags to log-cabin style walls and all. We could hear they were playing “TikTok” by Kesha when she still had the dollar sign in her name and warbled in AutoTune about leaving the house unwashed and gloriously fucked-up from a gnarly hangover sponsored by Jack Daniels. That weekend at IU, some girl would fall off a roof and die from being so drunk, another would get gang raped in a frat house during fall rush.

But we were in Illinois now, which partied hard, though Chelsea and I partied harder, or so I thought. I’d started in the car with Stoli vodka and two-dollar champagne called Andre. I noticed Chelsea drank only a little as we drove, but she didn’t stop me from double fisting both bottles. One tasted like strawberry piss and the other, like gasoline.

“I love this song!” I screamed as I tied the ends of my oversized red flannel shirt into a bow above my navel. For bottoms, I opted for cut-off denim shorts and beat-up black cowboy boots.

Now we were inside, and Chelsea was taking in the scene of red-faced, mostly white partiers. “Yeah,” she drawled nonchalantly with her big sunglasses still on, back when you could keep them on inside and not be called a douchebag. “It’s really cool here.”

I downed a bottom-shelf whiskey shot. “Totally,” I intoned, matching her cool-girl energy. So I thought.

She took my hand, and we started to dance. I let my arms and legs loose, and my head leaned back. I could see a swirl of Christmas lights draped around the exposed beams that held up the ceiling. Then I heard the opening march of “Run This Town,” by Jay-Z and Rihanna. I was singing, or screaming, and I looked over and Chelsea was just mouthing the words, sunglasses still on. She seemed uncomfortable but I was too drunk to really care. I shot her a look of disdain and careened over to the bar.

Ehhhhhhhh, Rihanna sang the song’s hook, as I kept shimmying and singing along. Swirly Christmas lights, reddened and puffy faces in softly blurred focus. I plopped my elbows on the smooth cherrywood edge of the bar and caught myself in the glinty reflection of a chisel-faced bartender raising his eyebrows.

“Let me have a shot,” I said.

“Of?” said the bartender.

“What do you got?” I said.

“OK, pal,” he said.

“OK, pal, what?” I said. “Let me get what you got. A shot. I want a shot.”

“You’re not making any fucking sense, bro.”

“Why are you cussin’ at me? Don’t talk to me like that. And I’m not your bro; I’m a customer.”

“You’re cut off. You’re done.”

“No! I have a card on file. I need another drink.”

“You’re done. You’re acting like a fucking monkey.” (This, he said in a mockingly slow tone of voice.)

A fucking monkey? I could’ve leapt over the bar had I not been so drunk. But the bartender snapped his fingers and one of his barbacks appeared to escort me out of the bar. Suddenly everything came into a sharp focus. I looked around and Chelsea was nowhere to be seen.

We gon’ run this town toniiiiiiight.

“Why do I have to leave?” I said. “My card is still here. I just wanted a shot.”

The man, who was a little taller and stocky, and quite pale, moved to grab my arms and lift me from the floor. As he got closer, I closed my eyes and started to wail and flail my limbs. I could feel him wrestle me to the ground. At that exact moment, the door guy who had carded us swooped in with his glasses and huge muscles. He wrapped me up into a one-arm chokehold and squeezed a torrent of screams out of me as I continued to flail with decreasing force. One of my attempts made contact with his face. I could see his big white, reddening cheeks covered in a thin layer of stubble like he’d forgotten to shave that morning. “Stop struggling,” I could hear him say amidst his heavy breathing. My throat, hot, fevered and crushed under his hard, gigantic bicep, exhaled a whistle of surrender.

My eyes, welling with molten lava tears, slowly took it all in: my captor’s free hand on a shiny black gun in the holster, sirens of at least two or three cop cars, and finally, Chelsea standing in their patriotic glare, doing nothing, because, she later told me, she was “deeply triggered.”

Now and then, when I remember Chelsea, one image endures: her sunglasses off, her steely, unmoving gaze trained on me like a detection dog; her thin arms folded, thin gold rings gleaming on her elegant fingers.

V.

Her eye is the camera

The ampersand a mouth

A muscle

A trigger

Bang

The body curves in on itself

A transit

A thing to step over

A cross

To get to

The next thing

VI.

I once dated a man in the Bronx with biceps so big, they felt like the very definition of guns. Big, sturdy, masculine guns. When I squeezed them once during a wild twenty-minutes of outdoor fucking that left my hair matted, our skins oily, he came suddenly and viciously and let out a yelp like a hit dog.

From that point on I called his guns a “cum trigger,” and would command him to “shoot” inside me each time we fucked, which we did after that for at least a year.

Once he was about to shoot and he missed, the cum going everywhere but inside me. I was plastered in the sticky goo, my face, my oily skin, my sweat-soaked torso, the wide map of my thighs leading to the promised land. He looked dejected, having miscalculated, or perhaps he was relieved, having for once sprayed his bullets at me the way he had always intended.

No matter his intent, I burst into tears, wailing loudly, as if I were dying.

VII.

I keep on dreaming of the end as a series of fragments and images.

First, the bomb:

The rocket’s red glare,

then static

Panicked cockroaches

TVs set on their backs

Armor to armor,

I see the seething fascists

whose eyes and teeth glow

with the menace of jack-o-lanterns

I see trees shaken

free of leaves

Fire falls

and the ground splits

A cavalry of bombs

and the roots untangle

Who does civility serve

When it is forever crushing

me, instantly

VIII.

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

-Amendment II

In 2020, in the wake of the state-sanctioned, or citizen-led lynchings of:

Oscar Grant (last words: “you shot me!”)

Trayvon Martin (“you got me”)

Tamir Rice (“I’ve been shot”)

Michael Brown (“I don’t have a gun. Stop shooting!”)

Sandra Bland (unknown)

Eric Garner (“I can’t breathe,” eleven times)

Walter Scott (“they tasing me”)

Freddie Gray (“I can’t breathe. I need help.”)

Philando Castile (“I wasn’t reaching for it.”)

Alton Sterling (“What did I do?”)

Stephon Clark (unknown)

Atatiana Jefferson (unknown)

Botham Jean (“No, please don’t shoot.”)

Ahmaud Arbery (unknown)

George Floyd (”I can’t breathe,” more than 20 times, and):

“Mama”

“Please”

“My stomach hurts. My neck hurts. Everything hurts.”

“I need some water or something, please.”

“They’re going to kill me, man.”

“I’m through.”

“Don’t kill me.”)

And far too many others, unnamed, unreported, and unnoticed, many who were children, many of whom were killed by guns or some other form of excessive force, many of whom are still being killed this way:

Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old Black medical worker, was shot five times in the hallway of her apartment by Louisville Metro Police Department officers. The officers fired into the home after pounding on the door to gain entry, on suspicion of drug possession. Her boyfriend stepped out to protect her, but she is the one who took every bullet. The fifth shot was the one that killed her. It took five years for just one of the three officers involved in the shooting that night, Brett Hankinson, to be brought to any sort of justice (thirty-three months in prison for the charge of excessive force.) No drugs were found in her apartment. Breonna Taylor was shot five times in her home. The Louisville Metro Police Department (LMPD) is primarily funded by the Louisville Metro Council through local taxes, with the city’s annual budget allocating significant funds for police operations. In the fiscal year 2025, the Metro Council passed a budget that included $242 million for the LMPD, an increase from the previous year, demonstrating a commitment to “public safety.”

Breonna’s last words, to the officers who shot at her: (“Who is it?”)

In 2024, in occupied Palestine, Hind Rajab, a five-year-old Palestinian girl, was fleeing Gaza City with her family by car during an invasion by the IDF. An IDF tank shot into the car, killing her aunt, uncle, and three cousins. Hind’s fifteen-year-old cousin Layan called the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS), stating, “They are shooting at us. The tank is right next to me.” Gunshots were then heard, and Layan’s screaming abruptly stopped. Hind stayed on the phone with the PRCS for hours, pleading for help. The PRCS dispatched an ambulance to rescue her, but it was also attacked. When rescue workers finally reached the area on February 10, they found Hind, her family, and the two paramedics dead. The car was riddled with bullet holes, 335 of them. The guns used to kill Hind Rajab, her family, and the paramedics sent to rescue them were supplied by the United States. The United States is the largest supplier of weapons to Israel and funds much of this military assistance through taxpayer dollars.

Since January 2023, the U.S. has provided Israel with at least $21.7 billion in military and security assistance, which is the highest annual amount ever recorded. At the time of this writing, September 2025, the death toll from the current US-funded genocide of Palestinians is estimated to be 65,000, though this is considered an extremely conservative estimate by various independent watchdog organizations, considering how many bodies are likely still under rubble, disappeared, vaporized, uncounted.

Hind’s last words: (“I’m so scared. Please, will you come?”)

In 2024, President Joe Biden gave a speech to mark the 25th anniversary of the Columbine massacre. In that speech, he said more than 400 school shootings have taken place since Columbine, exposing more than 370,000 US students to gun violence. Here’s a bit of propaganda from the National Rifle Association, part of the gun lobby which spent $10 million funding Republican candidates in the 2024 election cycle:

“Gun control supporters in the public health field claim that gun violence is an “epidemic,” but gun violence is alien to most people’s experiences and the nation’s murder rate has been cut by more than half since 1991, and in 2013 fell to perhaps an all-time low, as Americans’ firearm acquisitions have soared.”

In 2024, in Manhattan, a 26-year-old scion of a wealthy white Baltimore family and Ivy League graduate named Luigi Mangione is said to have shot and killed Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare, citing the United States’ healthcare system’s enduring corruption and greed in a “manifesto” addressed “To the Feds” found upon his arrest. Thompson was walking along West 54th Street toward the New York Hilton Midtown hotel, for a meeting with United executives. Mangione, who had been staying at an Upper West Side hostel for ten days, waited across the street from the hotel for several minutes, then crossed over when he saw Thompson. He stood twenty feet away and fired three shots from a suppressed, 3D-printed nine-millimeter pistol. The fatal shot was to the back of Thompson’s torso. One of Luigi Mangione’s charges (in addition to first-degree murder) is carrying a gun without a license. But that charge stands in stark contrast with the fact that as of 2025, almost all US states allow for open carry of guns either with or without a permit.

Three bullet casings found at the scene of Thompson’s murder were engraved with the following words:

delay

deny

depose

And on September 10, 2025, Charlie Kirk, the thirty-one-year-old alt-right pundit and founder of Turning Point USA, a nonprofit advocating for conservative politics in American high schools and on college campuses, was killed on the campus of Utah Valley University. Known for his willingness to debate students in the name of challenging them, he also espoused a poisonous patriarchal rhetoric that included anti-Blackness, anti-immigration and anti-LBGTQ sentiment, white supremacy, and evangelical Christian values. This, emblematic of his life, is what he said right before he was killed:

ATTENDEE: Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?

KIRK: Too many. [Applause]

ATTENDEE: In America, it’s five. Now, five is a lot, right, I’m going to give you — I’m going to give you some credit. Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last 10 years?

KIRK: Counting or not counting gang violence?

At the exact utterance of the word “violence,” a single gunshot rang out, scattering the crowd of students, and other attendees and onlookers. Kirk was shot once in the neck, and the accused assailant is 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, a white, male, Utah State dropout. Robinson’s family are both Trump supporters and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Childhood photos show the Robinson family on trips shooting guns and visiting weapons displays. The gun used to kill Kirk was reportedly a decades-old, German-made rifle built for use by the military in both World Wars. The gun was so old that it was likely in the US before laws requiring serial numbers to enable tracing. Apparently, there are millions of such powerful guns in homes across America.

Three bullet casings found at the scene of Kirk’s murder were engraved with the following phrases:

“Hey, Fascist. Catch!”

“Oh bella ciao” – a reference to an antifascist Italian song

“If you are read this, you are gay LMAO”

At the time of Kirk’s death, Robinson was reportedly in a romantic relationship with a trans woman, who was also his roommate.

IX.

Maybe I’ll be defenseless

But I don’t think I’ll fight

The night I meet

The man with a gun

-Stina Nordestam, 1996

I’m in the East Village where I live. It’s the evening of an eclipse, September 13, 2025. I buy myself a bundle of red carnations and sunflowers and am heading to the bodega near my apartment for a sandwich. I have been boxing since 2022. That year, I was sexually assaulted and took up boxing as a way to cope. I later wrote an essay about it. Within the piece, there are scenes of me on the sweaty wooden floors counting my way through planks and breathing into the fire in my belly when I want to give up. I was called a tranny by another person who attacked me with a switchblade months later while I was waiting for the F train home. I continued to show up at the boxing gym to build strength. In the years since, I have learned to metabolize my grief in such a way that the weight I’d been carrying from taking hormones for my medical transition, and from the way grief can lead you to swallow entire packs of Oreos in one sitting, gradually started to fall away. I feel stronger than I have in years, in more ways than one.

On the night of the eclipse, as I pick up my turkey sandwich, a Black man approaches me: “Are you a boy or a girl?,” as if he were a small child tugging at his parents’ pants legs. I look at him and he continues, little boy-man grimace, lips curling into a smug smirk. “I want to know what the fuck I’m even talking to.”

I think about what I’m wearing: a blank tank top and a pair of polka-dotted cotton shorts. What gave it away?

“Why does it matter to you what my gender is? I’m buying a sandwich, leave me alone. Fuck off,” I finally respond.

“You wanna fight me, you fuckin’ faggot? I’ll kill you dead right now, lay you out where you stand.”

There in the bodega, your dull eyes like dirty pennies, your smile a moldy jack-o-lantern, I know you are trying to fuck with me, get into my head, charge the pit of my guts with fury. Your condemnation speaks just loud enough for me to hear what you said, and as if unsure, you shuffle close enough that I could feel your hot breath on my face. But your stance is wobbly, your lust palpable. I know I could have you. I could either fuck you or I could take you down, though you stand ten inches taller than me. Your impish demeanor, the way you insist on knowing what kind of girl I was, helps me know I am something infinite: bigger, quicker, stronger.

My flowers clench in my left hand. Out of the corner of my eye, a Tostino’s salsa jar throbs, a glimmering lure filled with a chunky sauce the color of freshly spilled blood. I remember I am a boxer with power in my arms, and my strongest arm, the right, is free. Before this man can say another word or move an inch closer, I hurl a salsa jar his way. He ducks and the glass shatters on the floor behind him. I grab another, throw it, he backs up, trips over his own foot. Conk. That one connects with his left temple, but adrenaline keeps him going. I see the boy in his face. A momentary look of acute shock and fear, then rage as he picks up the jar that hit him and tries pitching it back at me. I duck, the glass shatters somewhere behind me. I throw another, it hits the glass door to the bodega. He trips again; the men working behind the deli counter rush forward, usher him out.

“Fuck you!” I howl. “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!”

I stand heaving for a few moments. To my surprise, no one else is in the store. As the jack-o-lantern was gone, the glass and all the exploded bloody sauce was swept up by the bodega workers in silence. I paid for my sandwich before a stunned cashier and left rather quickly. My fury subsided almost as instantly as it had come.

Outside the bodega, ambulance and police sirens interrupt the silence. Somebody’s always in crisis in New York, and thank God this time it isn’t me. I let the cavalry of noise fall onto me, zoom past me, I bathe in the kaleidoscope of patriotic light. I check my skin for cuts or bruises. Only my arm and hand hurt a bit from the sheer force of throwing jars I didn’t expect to throw. Something’s bleeding inside me, though. Some unseen wound, it’s always there. Tomorrow I’ll deal with it, a deep-down hurt to try to excavate. Tonight, I’ll stay up till nearly dawn and cruise until I find some man I don’t care about and let him use me for sex, as if he’s the one in control. But I’ve set it all up, my cum trigger. When I’m ready for it, I’ll tell him where to shoot. I’ve even picked which rooftop, the one down on Avenue D overlooking the Manhattan Bridge twilit skyline.

Tomorrow, I’ll put my carnations and sunflowers in a vase of water.

X.

I used to float, now I just fall down.

I used to know, but I’m not sure now.

What was I made for?

-Billie Eilish, 2023

“What else is a bed for, other than an object to be taken to?,” my professor tells me once over the phone, and she’s right. A bed is to be taken to, for hours if not days at a time, far past the REM cycle and wakefulness, past lethargy, and into a doom that never quite goes away. It rumbles deep down in the dark inside like a ceaseless drone above me. I can feel my comforter swaddling me down. It is midnight blue.

I feel like midnight, like pitch black in the pit of my stomach. I listen to the air conditioner for a way to calm that bottomless storm inside. It sounds like rusted metal parts scraped together and squeaking. My stomach is like this air conditioner, as if some bone, like metal, is scraping in the inner folds of my guts.

I wish the bone would push out and then my stomach might get some air, even as I spill blood all over my hardwood floors and eggshell walls, my laptop’s screen. This morning I saw the most disturbing things online, and I swear I was only online for five minutes. But I saw, in no particular order:

1. A doctor in Gaza posted a video of a small Palestinian child covered in debris, maybe no older than four or five, marred all over by chunks of brick and shrapnel and glass, his stomach exploded open, his entrails spilling out onto the white paper covering an operating table. I could see his chest rising and falling. He was still breathing but would likely not make it.

2. A video clip of Charlie Kirk gaslighting a young Black man at a college event hosted by Kirk’s Turning Point USA. The young man confessed to Kirk that he was raped and called a nigger by a group of white men, and Kirk said, “and did you call the police?” When the young man said “no,” Kirk said, smugly, smilingly, “I don’t believe you. I don’t believe that happened. I think you’re making it all up. It sounds horrible, but we need to get you some justice if that’s what really happened to you.” Onlookers with white faces nodded in agreement with Kirk, and the young man’s face, in that exact moment, once hopeful, publicly bore the mark of shame.

3. And then a video of Kirk’s wife, Erika looking out upon the masses (nearly 100,000 people) gathered at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona for her husband’s memorial service. “I forgive him,” she was saying about her husband’s killer, as pyrotechnics went off behind her, her blue eyes tearless and cold. “I forgive him.”

4. Intrepid social media users pointed out the similarities between the black-and-white memorial imagery and staging posted on the White House’s official IG account, and a Nazi rally of 20,000 people in Madison Square Garden in 1939.

5. Britney Spears posted a still image of baby pink roses and carnations, with the caption: “Good morning, good night.”

Later that night, I’d dream again of being arm-in-arm with my sisters on Fourteenth Street, walking up to Chelsea. We’d see Barbie in the rubble of the Bowtie Theater and cry about the dolls we didn’t get to play with as children, and how we might start to play with them now as grown-ups. Would we preserve them in their plastic boxes of origin? Or would we dismember them, then place their parts into tiny coffins wrapped in silk and velvet? Where then might such coffins be buried?

Where the bombs falling from the sky might bring a fresh hell to earth, that is, hell to this side of the earth, the West, the US. Scorched Earth. I wonder if I then I might ascend, if then, if my sisters might come with me. I wonder which prayer could save me, if any at all. Prayer doesn’t save so many elsewhere. I am not special because I was born here, on this side of the earth, and I didn’t ask to be born at all.

I wonder if, in those final moments, when the body vaporizes, returns to the earth or to God, if I will see images of all the most beautiful, utopian things, like all liberated people; a rehabilitated earth; the fertile soil in which I planted carnations in my grandmother’s garden every year for Mother’s Day. She absolutely adored them, these carnations, in colors of baby pink and lipstick red and dreamsicle orange. She’d gather them into the palms of her rough-but-tender hands and make little bouquets.

Carnations are often thought to be the Flower of God. Its scientific name, “Dianthus,” comes from the Greek words “dios,” meaning god, and “anthos,” meaning flower. I remember a story I heard in church many Sundays ago, back when I used to sit in the old pews with my grandmother, who wept as the choir sang. This story was about the Virgin Mary. How, when she cried for her son Jesus, who carried the cross to his own crucifixion, carnations bloomed like abundant spring upon the earth. If I close my eyes, I can still see the rows and rows of them. In my grandmother’s garden, and also on rolling hills of them near the cross at the much-disputed site of Jesus’ death.

I can hear them, too. They sound mostly like my grandmother’s voice when she sings. Wispy, delicate notes carried away in the breezes of Indiana spring. A feeling of freshness wells in me, their fragrance trickling down from my nostrils to my hands, my hands in grandmother’s hands, hers in Mary’s hands, hers in the hands of Jesus. It’s all quite nice to think about even if, in the end, it is just some story, some myth told on and on, passed down, like a prayer without end, which we shall never forget, a prayer evoking a heavenly dissonance. And what if they are in my mouth? Do they then stave off my hunger for a world better than this one? Can their dewy petals whet something so insatiable? It’s nice to think about sweet, baby pink carnations, or to smell them, to hear them, to taste, to touch. It’s so nice to imagine myself surrounded by them, and nothing else. Sometimes I dream of drowning in a sea of carnations, disappearing.

Poof.