I rotate my foot like a hot dog and I dare myself not to scratch. I let them land on collarbone skin, thighs, the sponge under my left eye. I’ve always been like this. I’ve always had small tits. You know what they call those.

I’ve always wanted someone to tell me what I want, to sell me on a life I want to live.

Wafts of ancient loam and wet wood. He had viewed it all with sickening fascination, the swiftness with which something so solid could be torn asunder, cored completely.

Literature is happening all of the time, all around us, all at once.

I was driving down the freeway listening to Third Eye Blind way too loud

Bobby was going down, not on a woman or a man but fast and with extreme force into the frost covered asphalt of a Holiday Inn parking lot, five minutes from the Detroit airport.

My father is talking fast, telling me how the redhead is waiting for him.

Once her parents were reliably asleep she helped herself to a long hot shower, a respite which was what she imagined drugs must be like.

“Must have been rich kids,” says Al. “A lot harder to make money staying anonymous.”

It all started with a wrong clap. I remember that because Dave was saying that when she was born, her dad got mad that she clapped on the 1 and the 3 and not the 2 and the 4. He was clapping weird.

The thing about Grandma is that she seems to show up unannounced and she doesn’t care about the substance of the prayers, just that they end in Amen.

 I know Max is probably hard by the time we get to the overlook at the dam. He puts the car in park and tells me he mixed a cd, just for me, because I’m so special.

- I can’t believe this is

As a young boy, I lived in the Bronx in the mid-1980s during a time when it was infamous for its squalor, a third-world dilapidation captured in movies like Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver. I remember

The sleet has stopped but the cold is something unthinkable. It lends a deathly permanence to the still, heavy darkness. I stand shivering on the sidewalk and look up at the Hollywood sign. I try to

The boys stood in the vacant lot outside the convenience store, which was closed today due to a special occasion. There was even a sign on the door. Armando was getting high again. Stew was quiet.

He’s still rambling about my womanhood, my untapped, ethereal potential, when I reach for a tissue and blow his hot load out of my nostril.

Dolphins are too good for this world, I think, as I reluctantly, fearfully, kiss one on its domed rubbery mouth while someone snaps a picture.

One day her daughter says to her mom, in front of you, that she wants to go to art school, just like you. And it is the first time you realize, her mom does not want her daughter to be like you.

He looks at me a little like how the alley cats look at the mice behind the house, but I don’t mind.

Walking through the dense forestry of unrefrigerated 24- and 30-packs, Pete was in search of something that would stand out from the rest.

When the angel came I was young.

He had lost his virginity to nothing less than the beast of the swamp.

The great neon calamity of his own life exhausts him.

I’m not fat exactly, not fat like an orangutan or avocado, but I’m also not thin. Not thin  like those women on commercials, with bodies like Coke bottles – all dipped and smooth, tastin’  somethin’ like cherry. I’m lumpy like expired cottage cheese.

The currency of self-loathing is everything you’ve ever said.