That summer was like a movie or waiting for a movie to start, stuffing yourself all through the previews and when the movie came it was always a rag...
> One of my favorite reading experiences was a book called "The Silent
> Woman" by the journalist Janet Malcolm; it was about the biographical
> treatments of Sylvia Plath and the impossibility of biography in general.
She combs her hair: I love her. She throws up on a Thursday after drinking at a new club spot on a Wednesday night: I love and love and love her. She spills her coffee onto the floorspace between our desks and laughs, Black Cup Down: What can I do?
Hobart and HAD contributor Rebecca van Laer's debut novella How to Adjust to the Dark (Long Day Press, April 12) weaves together poetry, fiction, and criticism to follow the narrator Charlotte as she
“He just picked up a Nerf gun one day and shot his bottle right off the table from twenty yards out,” Dad would tell reporters, with a practiced shrug/grin combo that played well on television. “We knew he was something special then.”
I started working on an essay about Fernando A. Flores’s Valleyesque in early May. Time got away from me—as time often does—and while I was working on the piece, the Uvalde school shooting
The stench of my high school ID lanyard hung around my neck like a noose for the rest of the school year, reminding me of my capacity for self-destruction.
Fuck an infographic — where’s the paper?
Operation: Get Paper to hand out paper,
‘cause all my people needed was their papers.
Who could trust those colors? Smears of scarlet molting into pert lavender.
You might be reluctant to try liver mush. You might think it’s not for me. But you are at a party, and you’ve been cornered by a stranger, and there’s nobody else there you really want to talk to, and
Not long after the bugs started crawling out of my sink, the diamond on my engagement ring fell off.
The Day I Drove to Dubuque (an Hour and Fifteen Minutes One-Way) to Find Out I Had $1.09 Left on a Books-A-Million Gift Card
poetry in real life is January in Iowa,
watching from my
If a middle-aged man sobs in a dark room and nobody is around to hear it, does anyone say, “It’s just a cat. Get over it?”
When I opened my eyes, I noticed something large there lying on the ground beneath a half-fallen tree.
Ten years ago, I made a temporary move from New York to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a research fellowship for my novel. Within a month, I met Gino, a tall lawyer with a pronounced Roman nose,
Regarding my best self, she’s referring to yours truly, the one who keeps Michelangelo and Caravaggio from canceling each other.
We will have an easy drunken conversation I won’t remember.
And at its core, it’s a book about candor and creation and intimacy and talking about things that often go unsaid.
She said she made boys fall in love with her. I said I was above her manipulations but I cried when she left. When she posted pictures with other guys I felt awful. I tried not to talk to her. Her messages came less and less until finally the feeling calloused.
i impart resonance on the amber zen
in a manifestation of waterford
and drink down the vacuity to expedite
enlightenment:
a numb tongue and thawing cheek and the ringing reaching
As a baby dyke, I’d waded into sex and romance like a kid at a water park, slowly and then all at once. Now I was on the sidelines.
He’s from Modesto, which is clear without him telling everyone in his row and ours that he’s from Modesto. “Takes me only an hour to get here…because let’s just say…I don’t always drive the speed limit,” he says...
Let’s say you go to the beach. And let’s say it’s on your own for the first time. And let’s say you’re 13 and look 15. Maybe 16. And let’s say your mom doesn’t know you’re going alone, because Olivia was coming, but the little chickenshit went and told her mom, that stuck-up bitch from Scarsdale, who said why the hell does your father even bother paying for flute lessons?
