What connects people isn’t color or creed or gender or stupid political taxonomies, but the existential despair that comes for us all. How do you respond to that despair once it comes for you? I never feel closer to a person than when they share a piece of their despair with me, and rarely, if ever, does it have anything to do with politics or ideology. It’s always about loneliness or heartbreak or loss, etc. It’s about life. The best art reflects that despair we all face back at us; it doesn’t separate us from other people.

Now I bake bread to stay busy, to not think about dying.

Our dad knew about Surface-to-Air missiles. Our mother knew what we told her.

I’m trying to lose my ego before Coachella.

I, I, I, I, the angel speaks herself

And sure, not all moths were so blindly abiding, but that these grand ideas remained a possibility was often enough to console or comfort the moth. You see, the moth, culturally, was keenly aware of toxic attachments—meaning, they were rigidly open to all possibilities in an effort not to favor one delusion over another.

I finger a ring of keys and wonder what doors they might unlock.

He tells me he bought an ex girlfriend a $500 original copy of The Bell Jar. I say oh wow.

Celebrating the publication today of this year's Best Debut Short Stories: The PEN America Dau Prize, including—among many other amazing and wonderful and brilliant stories—our very own "Them Bones"

There I was on Clement Street in the morning, trying to grow another body.

Sure, he’d miss chewing certain types of wood, the smell of garbage disposal, the indescribable pleasure of being shaded by a tree or large shrub. He could wait until spring, he supposed, to die among the scent of lilacs, one last taste of sweet pansy, a final sting of bee balm.

Hello,

the worst thing about stopping Ambien was that I never did it with anybody else.

I did it alone in my bathtub.

I did it alone, smoking in the water, & when it kicked in I’d let the

As soon as I looked into the faces of my fellow classmates, I realized that we all arrived here by the same road. The most enthusiastic people had their cameras turned off.

It’s a sin,
to desire different architecture, I’m told

I didn’t hurt him, except maybe his feelings.

in a cellar not far from here, wine waits years to peak
before a bottle is cracked open only to empty
a bruise.

Burying me # alive 
in training pants and # rags is my son’s 
# gift of sorts

Coolness is an anchor, a fortress, a cold and remote puritanism.

1.

Remember when you would sit on the floor of my lavender painted room when I was 15 and you were 21? You’d twirl a dreadlock around your finger looking up at the wall of Teen People Magazine

Once upon a time, long before she was on Good Morning America, I met the kindest writer on Twitter. Not only was she a relatable mother-writer, but she also understood Scrivener. This was absolutely

In the low light of dawn, I master—
I conquered
my body and led it / as a slave.

The other day she showed up at André’s apartment in the middle of the night with a red rose and, in the bottom of her purse, a steak knife...

Each day it paints the clearest possible picture of the gulch you’ve driven your life into.

a monstera I brought as a housewarming gift; bookcases betraying a brilliant, associative mind—the LOTR trilogy, a chess board, tomes on capitalism and ecology, The Power Broker, an anthology of gay poetry, more Caro books on LBJ, a poetry book I’d gifted atop the dusty shelves

It’s 2018 and my husband and I are on the couch, watching what will end up being the longest World Series game in history— 18 innings, seven hours and twenty minutes. The Los Angeles Dodgers are

I’m thinking of your fallow tongue,
the taste of what you did and didn’t say.