On a bench outside the classroom on our fifteen-minute break, I close my eyes and practice the grounding exercise my therapist taught me earlier that week. Facing the rush hour freeway, I try to
(Iowa City 1995)
What I think I want, is Inez . . . Fuck! Now it’s a blur. Drawing. Rather, a dream in which I’m drawing.
Canada Goose — the age-old adage of
whether or not a ton of bricks or a ton
of feathers is heavier & the fact that it’s
always the feathers because you have to live
with the guilt on
I came from the city, was sort of swept away by the bristles of time and love and bowel-upsetting uncertainty, and I am now in a dust pan called Mora County, New Mexico. Dust pan is not derogatory; it’s a just a place where things end up.
On the tip of my tongue, the shadow of your incomplete rebellion
a riverine blister ; a city-street broken into brick-brats,
glued together again to fashion a ceramic gnome, its
rickety
“Hey buddy, are you alright?”
The husband looked at me with a smile disguising mild alarm.
“I’m going to be.”
The guy looks over and sees me eating my pepper steak. He is a hard blur of hair and grease. For one brief minute, I think he’s going to lasso me or ask me to come over and polish off a bag of pork rinds.
the history of countries is the story of roaming. And maps are relatively new inventions in the human narrative
i came to America too young
to be foreign, so all my dreams
are American and contemporary,
present and blinding as morning-hunger:
a fat gull scavenges for loose plastic bags
and their
My husband is a proficient fighter. He catalogs the inconsistencies between the things I say and things I do. Against this tactic, I have no defense. For he is right, but what he fails to understand is the internal consistency in my inconsistency.
ON Drugs, Magic, and the Sanctity of Losing Your Shit
Like any self-respecting Gen-Xer, I spent the bulk of my teenage years doing drugs. I tried all kinds: ecstacy, mda, coke, meth… I even tried
But I didn't feel sick anymore, was the thing. The sweating, capsizing sensation, the kaleidoscope of Muppets I saw square dancing behind my eyelids on that third night when it was legitimately bad, all that had been weeks ago and still everyone brought my mother food.
is the egg yolk, broken when it was meant to be fried,
the sobbing of a child who’s just found
that their favorite character does not survive,
the scraped knee, the store out of cigarettes
–After José Olivarez
When Carly’s body
isn’t a body but ash
they wish to be poured
into Lake Washington
below a sun becoming half
a sun,
Fine Line
Harry Styles
Released: December 13, 2019
Label: Columbia and Erskine
Length: 46 minutes, 12 songs
My review is best summed up by alternative titles for each track because this is
Until this year, I didn’t know I get seasick.
I board a boat on the northern coast of what they now call Sri Lanka, outside my ammah’s hometown, and I sit down below. I accept my friend’s offer of
“Louis has stopped taking his dose.”
Sarah lowered herself to her knees in front of the fridge, continuing to uselessly rearrange the sanguinium.
“We think maybe you can spend some extra time with him, maybe get him to start taking it again,” Tim said. “You do great with Dotty.”
Normal: a word-world I, as cisgender, could claim. That she couldn’t. So many label traps. Normal, gender, virginity. Sarah.
We spent most of the night watching Billy Madison and eating ice cream and cookies and building a fort.
Later that night, past midnight, I quietly hear her leave the apartment. I don’t stir. I don’t ask her what, where or why. I stay perfectly still and pretend to be asleep.
Before Sasquatch’s girlfriend got into rats, she had dogs. I don’t remember how many exactly, but a lot. One dog was called Pee Dog. Whenever I fell asleep on the La-Z-Boy, he soaked my leg
TIP TOP VACATION PERFORMANCE
Two women velcroed a husky, mesh tank top
in order to separate the men from the boys.
Then, 20 aisles apart, mimed the crucifixion.
Words I’m akin to grasp start in
