 She worked as an editorial assistant for On Our Back and toured North America with Sister Spit. She regularly blogs at lesbrain.wordpress.com. You should look at it. It's so weird and great. The first piece I'm going to read is called Twinsicle. I was sitting at my fake wood and real metal desk while one of my thin, lesbianic students stood across from me. The teen was surveying people for her health class and looking down at me, she asked, when you think of sex, what comes to mind? Amoebas, I blurted. The teen made a face as if I'd answered immediately. She snarked, they don't have sex. I know, I replied, isn't that amazing that they can just vomit themselves out? Imagine vomiting and then looking to see what you've barfed and it's you? Don't you wish you could give birth to yourself by eating expired guacamole? You could rescue yourself from the toilet and dry yourself off and hang out with yourself and see what you're really like. I didn't ask my student this next question, but my friend Fish and I used to discuss it a lot in high school. If you were walking down the street and you came across yourself, what would you do? Stop and talk with yourself or make out with yourself. We intuited that the other self would have these two options in mind too and Fish always picked make out with herself because she heard she was an excellent kisser though in a breakup letter an ex once accused her nipples of being unresponsive. That was devastating. Unlike Fish, I had little to littler interest in talking to or swapping spit with myself. What I wanted to do was sip lemon flavored water across from myself at a sexually shaded table, preferably one along the banks of a French river and examine myself so that I could achieve what women's magazines call a realistic body image. Women tend to have the wackiest body images, but if I bump into my doppelganger or clone, I'm ready to stare at her from ten million angles so that none of you bitches can accuse me of not understanding my own aesthetic worth. Learning my face from outside my face will probably make me better at putting on makeup too. Score. Sweatsuits of the Damned. My parents took my twin brother and sister and I on day trips to relatively desolate California missions where Spanish priests once enslaved native people and forced them to tend heirloom goats, make candles from rendered fats, contract poxes, and bury one another in mass graves that resembled capirotada, Mexican bread pudding. I rejoiced during these childhood day trips to the missions. During them, an odd quiet felt touchable. The smell of anciency seeped into my sweatsuits. I walked through oatmeal cookie crumbly chapels and across bishops sleeping dreadfully beneath altar tiles. I looked out tall doors along Stone Veranda to our minivan parked alone in the parking lot. I looked at the wooden crucifix standing in the parched crab grasses. Its lumber would burn if it got any hotter. Indian ghosts rubbed against me. They were welcoming me psychically and whispering into my brain that they had suffered and died and that they liked my shoes. Velcro. Very innovative. Georgia O'Quief. I don't think she would have minded being called that because look at what she painted. All those flowers could have done it. At parties that I was never invited to but heard about, the popular girls in high school did it. This voluminous girl whom I suspected was a dyke, functioned as the quiefe teacher. I heard she coached the interested to get down on their sleeping bags with her legs over their shoulders so that their knees were touching the ground. She encouraged them to rock so that the garages between their legs sucked in air and then whooshed it out in a way that managed to be both silly and succulent. Things not that hard. I wonder if guys are jealous of our ability to do it. I can quiefe the entire alphabet. Vowels are easiest. One of the most avid queefsters was this skinny white chick who lived across the street from my friend who was half black and half Spanish. I can't tell you this avid queefster's name but I can describe her enough so that if you're from my hometown you can figure out who this bitch is. When we were still in elementary school she used to come over to my friend's house and make my friend scratch her eczema till it bled. Did that bullying? The white girl would also shove my interracial friend down onto her bed, leap onto her and roughhouse with her till they were wrestling. The wrestling morphed into dry humping. I didn't want any part of this pseudo sex so I sat on the rocking chair in the corner pretending to be an old lady. I was worried about catching the eczema. I told myself ghost stories in my head. I imagined I was wearing a shawl. I felt wise. The girl with the eczema owned many dolls and she invited us over to her house and standing among the dolls in her bedroom she announced, I've got a pee. We followed her to her kitchen where she pulled down her pants, hoisted herself onto the sink and peed into it while smiling at us. I refused snacks at her house. The last piece that I'm going to read is titled, Nacho cheese is another way of claiming what's yours. It's nachos, it's yours, mine and ours, everybody's nuestro queso. My chicanones drips into everything like the aforementioned cheese. Like, while writing about high school slumber parties turned queef parties, I wonder what if they'd eaten beans? Latino children picking out on hot cheetos have frequently served as my muses and I've rarely been artistically moved by white trash folk and their delicacy, the Wacken taco. That abomination, commonly served at county fairs, is a sack of Fritos with ground beef plopped onto it. And if you ever offered my petite mother, who's from Guadalajara, a Wacken taco, she'd ask in her thick accent, can I eat, eat, seating down? As a descendant of Aztecs, she's required to turn her eyes into ease. As a descendant of cannibals, mom eats her eyes. Thank you. Maryam Gerba came all the way up here from Long Beach. I could just listen to her read her poems for like eight hours.