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.

We keep what’s between us a secret. 
I’m supposed to be at your house

and you’re supposed to be at mine,
but, really, we lie in the center of the wheat 

where no one can find us, make

Echo pressed her index finger to the Facebook icon on her phone, opening up a chat with her recent ex, Morgan, who was still typing.

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

Pete wasn’t looking at me. He was half listening, half joking and trading cash with girls walking men in and out of private rooms.

“You thought about being a dancer?”

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.

Hours later, when all these thoughts and feelings had been erased by his pressing occupations, he got a text from her.
“dont b mad”

“There are some things that just cannot be reconciled,” the duck quacked, as it waddled across the path.

The man was disturbed. There seemed to be no end to the rain's falling, but only he was

We spent most of the night watching Billy Madison and eating ice cream and cookies and building a fort.

I took the test. 
Persistent rash? 
A cough? A rumor. 
A fungus 

from that polluted 
Ipanema beach. 
I smiled when I heard, 
took a drag, bent 

my wrist, palm up. Juana 
Delledonne.

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

I confess my DIY rituals in high school, tiny fires fueled by crumpled notes and dried flowers from lost loves and later, gifts from my parents bought during the divorce. In the smoke, my hope conceived visions: sometimes revenge, always return. Nothing I witnessed was more than smoke