A few weeks ago my wife told that I have some mild hoarding tendencies.

She said she was sick of it. The thousands of marijuana roaches I'll never smoke. All the goddamned books lying

I pass a woman who holds a red polka dot Christmas music box in her lap. I never see her turn the key, but as I scan the aisles for my specific things—the white balsamic vinegar, the slivers of blanched almonds—I hear Jingle Bells faintly, somewhere behind me, no matter where I am.

That ability to dissociate—to look from above. You think it would make us save ourselves, seeing the planet from afar, feeling like with one hand, maybe you could fix it.  

At first sight the line, nearly invisible but sometimes catching a ray of sun through the clinging water droplets, ran parallel to the brown water’s surface, from the tip of the pole held by the fisherman standing in the shallows out to unknown depths.

“My son was murdered last year. His bride murdered him.”

Where the fuck are the collected plays of Ron Allen? The police have won, that’s where.

Cockroaches

This was a sign as far as I was concerned. The high water mark. The North American standard for being a shitbag.

A plague of the poor and dirty.

So when we started to see

LOL. When I send you emails re: feminism I feel like I'm trolling you. It isn’t that you don’t care about equal rights and access. It’s just that it’s not “your bag” to talk about it a whole lot.

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like squeegeeing sewage out the back door of the break room for three hours. Or push-brooming a greenhouse until your black snot could be used as an adhesive. Cupping each writhing Bag-a-Bug to see if they’ve eaten their fill of Japanese beetles. 

 I breathed in deeply, not knowing at the time I was breathing in the lives of all those at the café, those I sat with just moments before, molecules sliding from the rubble of the explosion into my lungs, bones nestling behind bones.

My roommate lives her life differently. This is what she claims. 

You are obsolete. The cashier in your neighborhood’s grocery store is obsolete.  The typesetter—who placed each individual letter for the headlines of the morning paper—is obsolete. Tollbooths barely require someone to stand sentry in the middle of the highway to collect coins anymore and soon enough lasers will replace surgeons in operating rooms as well.

How we pretended to be other people for fun: “Hi, what’s your name?” she asked. “Bill,” I said. “Bill, huh? I can think of a lot of words that rhyme with Bill.”

If one person can take from this that it is not about privilege, it is not fiction versus poet, it is none of the internet fashions of complaint and it is not anonymous (even though I am any-goddamn-pleasing-way anonymous with or without my fucking name) ...

The next three and a half or four minutes will be used to draw conclusions on the relevance and authenticity of Christmas based on self reflexivity by using photographs of Cheryl Ann during the days leading up to Christmas. 

Humans learn occlusion on their way out of infancy—the ability to grasp that the toy still exists when it’s under the blanket...

We took a bus down to Dallas, TX, probably forty or fifty of us, and spent the night praying for our families in a large hotel room.

I 

I wake up one morning and want to read Woolf. Being a woman writer. Is being a woman-who-is-a-writer something to consider, or. Yet it is not the gender really but the closeness to the skin,

A burrito, historically, was a food of convenience, much like the sandwich—a transport vehicle for the meal itself...

Versace "Medusa" V-Neck T-Shirt

This is the first article of designer clothing I ever owned. A month or so after I got out of rehab my grandma gave me a Nordstrom gift card for my birthday and

Imagine if you can, "a dirty house in a gutted world," the poet said, which what the poet said is precisely what I saw when I stopped to look around while listening to reports from the BBC and ironing my favorite lavender blouse. 

In November 2011, Bethesda Game Studios released Skyrim, a gigantic, multi-console fantasy role playing game set in Bethesda's larger Elder Scrolls universe. Also in November 2011, I was just starting my graduate program at the University of Washington. I watched the footage on YouTube and told myself that after grad school, after I was done studying literary nonfiction and contextualizing and living an examined life, I would play the hell out of this game.

rich

in maybe middle school i started telling my teachers, on the first day of class, that i’d prefer to be called rich. my friends started calling me rich too, because i told them to. i think

Frasier Crane never gets what he wants because Frasier Crane is a horrible person.

Amanda is in her first year of a new city, Chicago, binging on television on the internet, and suspects

We parked on Michigan Avenue like we always would, walking hand-in-hand through Corktown, the oldest neighborhood in Detroit. We bought peanuts in brown paper bags from vendors on the street. They