I had no brothers or sisters, so I received a single white envelope. I took my time opening it. I watched as those around me opened theirs. One of my friends started crying. Breathing deeply, I read mine.

It Worked Out a Way to Survive

The Venus he gave me ate another daddy
longlegs. They were still wiggling when I
watered it this afternoon. It's a cruel world
he texted me last month but it's

They gather in the basement to weep together like the boys they are.

We ate dinner with our heads down masticated silence Mom slathered hot sauce on everything including Dad’s words and the ones he didn’t say lips spraying consonants vowels dribbling down his chin i

I’ve started to clench my teeth before falling asleep. 

FANTASIA FOR FOUR HANDS

Hello. This is my body. 
It makes me terrible. 
Someone opens it regularly.
It is opened regularly. 
I am always the same thing: 
what’s missing.

Make a sentence

He was super into God. He was super into church. And he was super into me

Precarious Poem

I’m craigslisting again and this time, 
I’m in Portland hanging plants

next to windows, snaking 
vines around the glass, framing the outside

green in green. In

after Britney Spears

The camera pans—is this still
Mars? Oops. Gloss-

lip. Oops. Long-lashed eyes
gazing between the scraps.

Guttural purr. Oops I.
Did. It. Again. White girl

There was a Help Wanted sign at the florists. I had a car, so I walked in and applied. This was a time in my life when I’d decided anyone could do anything. In other words, I was an artist.

When I was young, I never kept a journal. Instead, my understanding of the world—and myself within in it—got wound up in 500-plus battered tapes that have followed me through life.

"Honestly, I don't care if language overtakes story." 

The thing I can't wrap my head around, when it comes to the 2003 Detroit Tigers, is what it must have been like to show up to work every day. What must it have taken, as the losses mounted – up to and

I was standing in line for a movie and a movie played in my head.
I was standing in line for a movie and the movie I was waiting to see strode through the lobby and out the front door.
I was

Dear Naomi,

Please find enclosed some clippings from the local fishwrapper.  I’ve underlined the juicy parts in blue pencil.  It’s complete kleptocracy down here.  You were right to leave.  I can’t

Most nights I would take communion with Willis Alan Ramsey, a one trick pony like me, but I hadn’t even run yet.

You need to know
the world used to be softer.
This new color sharpens & blinds.

When it arrived,
people crashed their cars,
stumbled hands over retinas & then
over ledges,

My first boyfriend collected knives. He was the kind of boy who listened to Metallica and Ozzy Osbourne, who liked to draw superheroes and werewolves, and was drawn to darkness and violence with the

Amoral Impurity

Picking at ingrown
pubes on the porch swing
in the sun on the first
summery day of May 
and the dogs reach up to lick
my cooch. This is not 
the first time today I’ve

I vomit discretion, magic tricks, a glass ashtray. I take a break
from vomiting & light a bottle rocket.

“Recorded learned and mixed in two days” sounds like exactly the sorta shenanigans we were all about.

That morning, I rolled over with the intention of apologizing. I'd meant everything I'd said, but none of it was enough for me to end anything. It was the hazards of a relationship; I had to decide if I was losing myself or becoming better.

I crave the lack of my thousand siblings...

For a moment, regardless of our lives, everything the light touches is warm and friendly, and we are all indeed in the same circle: Access Member Humans who love Access Member Dogs and can put up with their people for three hours because we also love baseball.

I am lonely and just learning how to say I'm lonely...

This Essay Isn't About the NBA Finals Because No One Here Cares About the NBA Finals

Jurgen Klopp, the coach of Liverpool’s soccer team, wears a black shirt and pale-framed glasses, just like the