It is impossible to tell which features of the river were made by nature and which were made by us, who are also nature.

O, I don’t get wet for / the Hot Dads of US Weekly or the dad / bods of Star, but give me Frank Sinatra’s / voice crooning in a Hong Kong cab, and I’m hooked

USE THE SCREAMBOX

‘There are so many damaged birds,’ he said, spreading jam on his sourdough toast. 

‘I haven’t seen that many,’ I said. 

‘Well, I have,’ he said. ‘And I was just too tired to do what we did for that seagull.’

Spoilers

 I wish I had that glorified high school / experience— where some boys / are chugging expired strawberry liqueur / and everyone, I mean everyone, / is sprawling on the grasscarpet

 "I was thinking about how famous we were as kids."

     "Who?"

     "All of us."

     This was why she liked having him in her bed, Alice thought.

I don’t have any goals except to make the reader think and feel. What they think and feel is up to them. 

When I exhaust all other forms of exploration, / this landscape will deny me at the border; / & I will turn my gaze toward a darkening / sky filled with stars I no longer recognize.

On the way home from picking up my brother at the airport, I stopped for a hitchhiker. I’d never picked up a hitchhiker before. I think I did it because my brother was with me, Julian. It was the kind of thing Julian would do.

We’ll have more in common than you’d think—after all, we’re both main sequence stars, I’m just a few million years ahead of you. 

In 2007, I was catfished by a homely woman from Arkansas masquerading as a 5’10” blonde bombshell named “Jenn.” Before you judge me, remember that this was ten years ago.

Sometimes I say novels ruined me in the way they ruin all young bookish girls, slowly and tenderly rotting out the light and making room for the sweet dark.

And tbh, I seriously doubt Jesus wants me to die a virgin. 

You’re always told to do the right thing and stand-up to evil, but can a, old dying woman who lies about being offered pie constitute as evil? I thought yes.

On Wednesday, I find my teeth / have sharpened over the night / It’s a strange thing to get used / to

I read the first half of Dust Bunny City (Disorder Press, 2017) at a party, while I was sober. Men were playing darts, making tiny dart holes in the rented apartment walls. I watched them throw darts and cheer and try to teach me how to play, and then drunkenly play with the dogs in the house and then went back to my reading.

“Go outside,” I say, and I settle in with my coffee and my laptop. “Notice how real-world birds aren’t actually angry.” 

In the afternoons, I stripped off my boyish clothing and watched back to back episodes of Saved by the Bell, feeding my unhealthy obsession for Kelly KAPOWski. The perky brunette with her slim ankles and come-hither hair tosses was the ultimate teenage bombshell. 

“Fine, but I get full custody of the mustache,” I said, once we’d finished dividing up all of our things: him Chipotle, me The Red Hot Chili Peppers, him macramé, me black clothing.

Remember, there’s a light emitting from you and it's not just your cellphone. / The Internet is a scorched wasteland. / But you've walked through worse places / on your way to work.

Danielson sells his dirty socks to perverts on the internet. 

She’s going to be an artist, he told your parents, and he wasn’t wrong, even if you couldn’t hack it in New York. 

Mom says new husbands are like circus peanuts. They go stale after a few weeks, and she wonders, Why the hell do I keep buying these things? I don’t even like them. 

When we first met in the early ‘90s, we had stage names. She went by Kali and I went by Olivia.