looking up at me with eyes like dogs
who’ve humped too many pillows
and now it’s time to pay the price

She feels her and this bartender, this boy, are doing sex theater. Romance theater. Everything theater.

Affection follows episodes of abuse

The secret is getting almost too in the weeds. The secret is Bujalski-maxxing.

            But by then I was dry heaving on some dark back road.

Another reading.

When a lover doesn't know your name

I could swim inside a seafoam green field. 
I could have cigarette breath again. 

Our teacher is running late, the distractingly beautiful former beauty editor emailed our group. This confirmed my suspicion that she and my teacher had a separate text thread going. She was, after

He lies there, crumpled and ragged—
a pile of unwashed laundry.

A Review of Alexandra Naughton’s Sick of Being Inside Myself

"How deep do you want to go?" the facilitator asked as I knelt before a candlelit altar. It was reckless to choose a depth in an ocean I’d never seen, but I aimed for the bottom. "Very deep," I said—a

[It began when I learned]

It began when I learned to sit                                       I began when I burned and sat
in my boredom, our poverty with                                in my

Charley and I met freshman year of college. She was the blonde one, whereas I was not. I was never the blonde one. We went to college on a big hill, warm in the summer, warm in the winter. We both