half-empty gel pens used to spawn spiked poems

Literature is happening all of the time, all around us, all at once.

i am built for harsh weather and dazzling violence

That was my youth: I developed a sickness, a ruinous crush on the man at the filling station

Life bleeds thick, porous and holy

When a cherub grows up, he hates angels.

We chased the tail laid before us. Scratching and sniffing our way to pain. We took turns leaving consciousness for a few seconds.

I was driving down the freeway listening to Third Eye Blind way too loud

My friend asks if I believe in / gay marriage

I was stationed in Osh, a forty minute flight south of the capital. I had

a decent sized apartment

1. A bottle of orange wine – half a packet of cigarettes.

2. You caught at the bar the space so crowded that people were practically caught under your armpits – grinning nervously, two pina coladas in hand.

3. A kitchen dance – or two.

4. Luther Vandross.

Part I of the book is titled Forest. 

Bobby was going down, not on a woman or a man but fast and with extreme force into the frost covered asphalt of a Holiday Inn parking lot, five minutes from the Detroit airport.

If I have to die, I want to die for love

My father is talking fast, telling me how the redhead is waiting for him.

Once her parents were reliably asleep she helped herself to a long hot shower, a respite which was what she imagined drugs must be like.

Gone, like T9 texting, is the once exciting novelty of being important, popular, scandalous

This act of attention lifts you momentarily out of your debilitating amiss-malaise. 

One night—which was, as it turned out, my last night camming

“Must have been rich kids,” says Al. “A lot harder to make money staying anonymous.”

Mai Knicker