It’s customary in Italy to have food during happy hour. I ordered white wine but was nervous to ask for a plate. When I don’t understand what someone is saying I will just say no.

Latvia’s Baltic coastline is almost completely undeveloped except for a few fishing villages and some dilapidated concrete resorts for Communist Party officials.  A forest of black pines begins right at the edge of sixty-foot dunes.

Let’s touch hands across the rubble.

A person in a pool of water
drinks it all up.

Because Math! 

she had dreamt she had fed herself to tigers

felt their maw drag her by the neck

wondered nothing more of her life

other than how many calories she would be.

In  a dream you were chewing your fingers down to the knuckle. My fingers, missing nothing, seem a kind of bloom, fluid as they slide through my mouth and the mouths of others. Sometimes I

Snakes and Sharks and Bats

Here we are like we used to be,
my thinking of you, your eyes
slipping, never quite on me.

The program started with Take Your Kid to Work Day. We were pioneers in the field of crime scene investigation. Everything went smoothly as long as the kids didn’t touch anything. They’ve got eyes

a text msg that was sent:

ur hands my hands
both needed if i hit
u first would u hit me back

Seen two hours after I fell in love with you

the text msg that needed 2 be

1. She told him to shut the window-slats. Every shred of light should be brushed away. She wanted to feel invisible.

From Osama Bin Laden to the WNBA, Jordan Castro and friends explore who/what has sauce, and who/what doesn't.

The house

is new, but these woods are

strange, endless, and ancient.

around you because
I want you to keep thinking of me
as a small body, to wonder what keeps me
so pale, what sustains my Spanish mouth.

Don't ask me what I need,
for

Wasn’t this, after all, why she’d come out here in the first place? To find something special? 

This is not beautiful because this is not beautiful.

I meet a girl on OK Cupid and the first date goes well enough.

And now, as summer ends
and the days spread thin,
I feel my life like a meal,
not a bad meal, but one
I have eaten too many times.

[Previously on... Part 2 ::  Part 1]

There is a room in the cathedral called
"The Quiet Room."

Imagine.

Its entrance, this body too shaky
for comfort.

Janus, god of doorways and beginnings,
when I desire

Catie sent me her new book
said I was in it a fair amount
that’s a good way to get me to read something

Late one night I found him, my long-lost uncle, Duane.

pictures are as real as forever is
hello kitty in the weeds
I live endlessly as actual nostalgia
dying alive with the light
a new bedpan under the moon
all love is a lack of

I've known Tom Williams for a handful of years. I think I originally met him through Barrelhouse, and I've mostly tried to not hold that against him. He is, in the parlance of whoever it is that

I mean, werewolves, they have appetites, don't they?

"free the nipples"

I beat a guy

who had a crush on me 

at beer pong

we got stoned

in the Walmart parking lot

when my car wouldn't start

6 months later

he

In her third memoir, Belief is its own kind of truth, Maybe, Lori Jakiela uses a collage-style structure to write about the collage-like process of assembling an identity, and the particular

Eventually she won't think of me unless she hears mention of my name, or sees my friends, or a boxy japanese sedan from the 80s, or, perhaps, a Paul Simon poster

When I die
I'll die
In the woods
I will be found
After 14 months
By a 9 year old
You're picturing a boy 
But it's a girl
She is lost
And climbs over a log
To see
If she