I understand this. This is what made me psychic. This is what makes images arrive on the doorstep with a bindle over the shoulder made of red bandana. Each man is the last man.

I got my period the moment we got to the hotel. Getting my period wasn’t going to affect any of my plans, and was no big deal, really, aside from the fact that I refuse to pay attention to my body so am always completely surprised when my period comes. As such, I had brought no supplies to Miami with me.

Christopher Boucher’s new novel, Golden Delicious (Melville House), is a kind of referendum on all we presently hold dear in fiction. Its emotional hold on the reader is very strong, but its avant-garde methods critique those special effects by explaining what they’re doing to your feelings while they do it, which somehow only makes the book more sad.

I have a thing for droopy-eyed men.

For the past few years J and I have lived next to a grocery store. It glows at night. If you listen you can hear the hum. 

I won’t apologize for trying to forget the days I spent with you, riding pillion on your Honda, inhaling Bombay’s foggy polluted streets, sitting on rickety wooden benches of hole-in-the-wall Indo-Chinese joints, slurping Szechwan noodles and sipping Tom Yum soup, strolling on Juhu’s wet sandy beaches, letting the ocean wash our feet.

I make him coffee, I make hot chocolate for his kids, and sometimes I buy his weed.

start with the word catholic and an image surfaces—what first? Brother Aquinas adorned in black robes, his large gold cross (or was it silver) swinging from hip-to-hip, his cloaked arms holding tight the Bible to his chest, in reach of his heart.

A girl on my train is watching Kylie Jenner’s snapchat. I lean in and watch over her shoulder. I can't hear, but it doesn't really matter.

I found out I was pregnant in the bathroom of a wine bar. 

I try to turn everything into a metaphor so I don’t have to face it straight on.

Things to remember:

Ghost Deer, Ohio

Ray St. Ray

The walls, statues, and shrines of the New Orleans Historic Voodoo Museum are covered in offerings to the spirits—or loa—represented within. Plaques have pennies and dimes resting on their frames; there is a wishing stump filled with dollar bills. And there is lip-gloss everywhere.

After watching the TEDx Talk, I initially thought, “I wonder if everyone who watches that video will try to write a memoir.”

There’s an episode of The Outer Limits where Alyssa Milano plays a college student that eats men whole with her vagina.

[1] Titles of this essay’s previous drafts included “On Déjà Vu and Getting What You Asked For,” “He Said I Wasn’t Queer,” and “Still, Apparently.”

A fleet of pickup trucks and a white panel van have taken all the shady spots outside my parents’ house.

His first sensory seizures were like a passing light-headedness.

They stopped my mother’s heart four times.

I definitely gained traction in my twenty-ninth year. At twenty-nine, my skin cleared up, I sold a book. But the biggest accomplishment for me was that I stopped working retail and made my money solely from writing and teaching writing.

For ten years, General Motors knew about faulty ignition switches in its cars but concealed this information.

When I lived in Michigan, I ruined baseball. I recorded every Detroit Tigers game only to fast-forward between pitches, so I... more

I wanted this essay to be about love. I wanted it to also be about my grandfather and Arkansas and my copy of Ain’t Doing Too B-A-D, Bad, a live jazz record by The Bobby Bryant Sextet. 

I was wearing my home-made Giants uniform, as I did every day that week, laboriously sewed by mom who was not enamored of sewing. 

If you didn’t learn how to have sex with Prince playing, you might still not know how. Everything about Prince... more

It is 5:30 in the morning. I am standing in the lobby of a midtown Manhattan hotel, judging the distance between me and a planter... more