It’s after midnight and Jason is awake, trying to ignore the suspicion his twin sister is masturbating on the... more

Nobody knows Ralph has a flask tucked in his front shirt pocket. His blue Hi-Mart vest hides the bulge it makes beneath the fabric.

We ate dinner with our heads down masticated silence Mom slathered hot sauce on everything including Dad’s words and the ones he... more

I’ve started to clench my teeth before falling asleep. 

A conversation with Patrick Coleman, loosely around his new book, The Churchgoer (Harper Perennial).

This is a story about... more

FANTASIA FOR FOUR HANDS

Hello. This is my body. 
It makes me terrible. 
Someone opens it... more

He was super into God. He was super into church. And he was super into me

We amass, aquatic, shoal of the legless. The one grown webby with appendages pads onto the raspy sand, and we surface to see: gleeful and aroused... more

after Britney Spears

The camera pans—is this... more

Precarious Poem

I’m craigslisting again and this time, 
I’m in Portland hanging plants

next to... more

There was a Help Wanted sign at the florists. I had a car, so I walked in and applied. This was a time in my life when I’d decided anyone could do anything. In other words, I was an artist.

He had one of those cool lighters – brushed metal case, tiny chimney with a pattern of holes, bright heat when flint... more

When I was young, I never kept a journal. Instead, my understanding of the world—and myself within in it—got wound up in 500-plus battered tapes that have followed me through life.

We’re practicing doing timed tests for the AP Language and Comp exam, and the prompt Ms. Anniker gives us is “What Are You Proud Of?” I think immediately, “my chin” 

"Honestly, I don't care if language overtakes story." 

Amy lives right off Pike beneath a fire escape in one of the many alleys that connect to the street. She’s fifteen years old and loves Madonna.... more

The thing I can't wrap my head around, when it comes to the 2003 Detroit Tigers, is what it must have... more

I was standing in line for a movie and a movie played in my head.
I was standing in line for a movie and the movie I was waiting to see... more

This was the summer after seventh grade, and all my thoughts were sinful, according to the church. The year before I had confessed all my crimes and a man in hip waders held me under water until all the evil in me had fled the power of Christ’s approach, but now, in the early stages of my adolescence, I was obsessed with the opposite sex.

Dear Naomi,

Please find enclosed some clippings from the local fishwrapper.  I’ve underlined the... more

Most nights I would take communion with Willis Alan Ramsey, a one trick pony like me, but I hadn’t even run yet.

You need to know
the world used to be softer.
This new color sharpens & blinds.

When it arrived,
people crashed their cars,
stumbled... more

My first boyfriend collected knives. He was the kind of boy who listened to Metallica and Ozzy Osbourne, who liked to draw superheroes... more

My senior year of high school I kissed a boy in the parking lot of a supermarket and found out the next day that my grandmother had died of liver failure.

Soon after I received my first eye injection a decade ago, the movie list began. “It reminds me of that scene in... more

Amoral Impurity

Picking at ingrown
pubes on the porch swing
in the sun on the first
summery day... more