So We Can Glow: Stories

by Leesa Cross-Smith

I had lived long enough and been married long enough to know men were always telling women what they already knew.

snapping to normal in the way that only women can when they’re holding up the Earth.

Men are most powerless when a woman pretends to be vulnerable because she is pretending and they are not. Be Josephine Baker or Beyoncé or Rihanna. Or Sylvia Plath. And really, aren’t we all Sylvia? Brilliant, horny, misunderstood? Brain-zapped and punished for our sadness and obsessiveness as our girlishness widens and blooms and blooms and blooms until we fucking split all the way open? Well, here we go! Let’s give them what they want. Our rosewater-breath secrets, these parlor tricks.