First, he ARRIVED – like the swans at Capistrano, or aliens in the desert, or, more likely, a flaming dessert.

“Who is that?” my friend Noelle said, poking me in the ribs; her inflection, a

You don't know it yet, but I gave you bad directions, and now I can't find you. For this, I am truly, truly sorry.

We’re all going to be late, for everything, and the people we keep waiting will add this to their mental list of evidence that we are not careful or observant or accountable.

I dream myself into a field that is lime green. There is a branch in my lungs, and I can’t love like I used to. This is a ghost story.

Welcome to Hobart Photo Stories, a one stop shop for photos that will excite the brain, the eye and the heart.

—Tara Wray, photo editor 

"I Believe (In None of This)

They may even remember that while the game licensed team names, logos, and stadiums, and specifically licensed Ken Griffey Jr.'s name, statistics, and likeness—they did not license the names of Major League Baseball's other 699 players.

After thirty days in rehab, you are “coined out.”

Dress Code

I’ve got this friend who’s passionate about dress codes. Her name is Sharon. Most of the jobs I’ve had, when it’s come time for a boss to enforce the dress code, they do so

When I stay over at Amelia’s there is a poster of Devils Tower over her bed and we trace the volcanic neck with our fingertips instead of sleeping. I give Amelia a Xanax and floss between each of her teeth.

For instance, I had the line “But I was talking about lightning” in my head for the first line of an essay, but I had no idea what that essay was about. So I started to write about lightning and do some Wikipedia-ing, and eventually the idea of looking at trauma and human relationships through the metaphor of lightning started to emerge. From there, I just followed my brain around as the essay started to form.

Radio Tower, 4yrs old

The radio tower had big cones on top. We were in the car and I said to mom, “What are those?” She didn't know so she said, “Oh, that's where Mickey Mouse lives.” I was

Cave In
Album: Jupiter
Released: August 8, 2000
Hydra Head
Length: 44:10

My friend Beth was blamed for everything I ever did wrong. In my grandmother's eyes, it was all her fault.

texas was underwater, florida had been evacuated, and the eagle creek blaze—started by fireworks in September of the hottest Summer on record—filled the skies for hundreds of miles with the forest’s ashes.

A sister in place of a father wasn’t an exchange. I’d had twelve years with a father and none with a sister, and I’d preferred it that way.

I protested with my body, such as it was. I felt the need to explain. “I’m staging a protest.” I fluttered hard. The foe smelled of gas.

The Gemini

It would be a lie to say I always went to bed with one brother
and woke up with another—that at night he placed pomegranate
 
seeds on my belly, making constellations on my

I sip red wine and weed / and deface anything that looks like me

Had a little accident last night Stevie, my boss yells. Tote fell over in the back of a truck. Someone's gotta clean up all that fish. I turn my head from him. Stare off out passed the end of the harbour. Where the horizon and Lake Eerie meet. Dissolve into one another. The breeze in my hair. Thinking why me?

It’s enough just to know that they’re out there. .

People became a mob and the mob circled her, gnashed their teeth and lashed their arms as if to say, Dance! Dance! Dance! They wanted a concert! Another song! Dance, Connie, dance!

montreal

in the seventh month of winter
my hair was orange, an apricot
graffiti zig-zagged along broken
threads you parked on atwater
avenue and screamed at your
hooves, rubber hands

Tongue hasn’t left its .276 square foot efficiency studio apartment in three weeks. To discourage visitors due to lack of space, this space was rented. Tongue is going through a break-up. This

There Never Was a Mainland

We burned fast that summer. The boats had stopped coming. The water kept us there. That’s the thing about islands.

We bathed at low tide. We ate shells and weeds.

In the bag the child swam and twirled and stopped long enough to meet the eyes of the camera. 

After I finished the reading, I waited a couple minutes, browsing books, until I left the bookstore - alone. All the women who’d watched me, who were so supportive, so attractive, were huddled in a group. They were friends, they were a community.

Thank you for calling that curiosity “innocent.”  I like the sense of “innocent" as “guileless,” rather than “not-guilty,” since the poems sketch both our ignorance and our complicity.  I