Every year of elementary school, Wesley O. Cohen’s mom packed her an emergency box filled with the best snacks, the most forbidden: fruit by the foot, little cartons of cocoa puffs or cap’n crunch, syrupy peach slices in their plastic terrariums of sugar-goop. And on the last day of school, when no fire or earthquake or shooting had happened, Wesley got to eat her disaster snack alongside the other safe boys and girls. To this day, she lives undisturbed by flash floods and tornadoes, but knows that when disaster strikes, and it will, certain as snowfall and violence and tectonic movement, it will taste like peaches.
Wesley O. Cohen is a writer and editor from Northern California. Her work has been featured by Joyland Magazine, Entropy, and some other places. She was a 2017 Writing By Writers Newberry fellow. She currently serves as prose editor of Foglifter Journal, and runs the Queer Syllabus in coordination with The Rumpus.
Wesley can be reached at wesleyocohen@gmail.com.
wesleyocohen 