I had runoff all over. I hadn’t escaped the heartland.

I was staying with Nicole during the semester of the break-ins

I’d pony up the midnight sun for a pulled pork sandwich.

My friends told me they’d introduce me to May, but only if I understood that she’d been through a lot and didn’t need any more bad things to happen to her.

As dusk approached I lit an M80, tossed it across the lawn like John McClain on a mission to reverse engineer Nakatomi Tower. 

His family was there. My family was there. My bouquet was made of flies. 

Nothing Works: 1

-New York City 2005

I should be through thinking about it. Ok, but I remember just going batshit, breaking... more

I keep finding medium length blond hairs on old shirts I haven’t worn in two or three years. My hair is short and black, and my lover’s hair is long and brown. 

After the Bombing

Santa did not know how to react to the sight; he only stared. At the granite block, there were three rows filled... more

Focus too much time on watching Amanda make cappuccinos.

In times of great dissatisfaction, you will occasionally find yourself dating two men.

I was afraid the security guards would stop us, but they just shrugged when I took the plane out and put it on the field.  One of them even said something nice like, “Whoa, that is a cool.”  I taxied it from the end zone; it took off and buzzed up into the sky. 

We’d do it with whatever was laying around: a jump rope, an extension cord, stray fistfuls of fishing line. Down in the basement, while the babysitter watched Spanish-language television in the living room, we pulled these things taut, secured wrists, ankles, and torsos to my father’s old recliner. Toby was a boy scout, so his knots were better than mine, but I was by far the more skillful interrogator.

And when you play pickup and three-on-three and one-on-one no one keeps track of wins and losses, except for me, so no one else knows that I have never won a basketball game of any kind. Since I started keeping track, when I was sixteen, I am zero and six-hundred forty four.

I upended the bottle of Seagram’s gin I always carried with me to poetry readings and cut off my penis with Kemal’s X-ACTO knife.

I first called her “querida” via text, years after we both escaped that desperate city. She sent a smiley face in response. I smiled along.

To hack through the tail of a porpoise and free him from your gillnet, you’ve really got to have a strong steady hand. You've really got to try and find your faith. 

1. Mental aberrations include: feeling ‘ants’ beneath the skin.

Memories are like Asian pears. Store them cold and they will keep.

She climbed shivering out of the river. The Taigan smeared its... more

Angélica, who is always setting me up with the entirely wrong type of man, invited the raw foodist to lunch. In the crowded restaurant, he sat rigidly upright, munching on sesame seeds, waiting Zen-like for us to decide on a dish.

On the nights my father brings home a new howl my mother prepares a feast and adorns a whalebone corset like a rib carved from the moon. On these nights I love my family because we are together and in this way I have come to worship the wolf.

Faced with the swirling chaos of three days ago, I must hold fast to certain truths. 

I realized that my son’s vocabulary, though impressive, would not help much with anything he was likely to encounter in everyday life, now or in the future.

Is there anything more adorable than a drunk toddler? I don’t mean a slurring, stumbling, falling down, cursing toddler, though we often enough found ourselves in that state, but an evenly buzzed toddler, whose mother can offset whiskey intake with soothing butter, maintaining her toddler’s perfect, moderate drunkenness.

Another family story. I can’t get away from it. As Easter approaches, I find myself thinking about one of my aunts who, when it... more