My novel is my father, I am saying, and it too is the best art I could make but not the best art I will make. For I am 33 and my feminist Jungian therapist says often: the beginning of adulthood is forgiving your parents for their sundry errors.

The next day I send the above photo to a friend in Michigan. She asks if I'm fine. And what the doctor recommended. My response is typed laughter. I tell her I've been taking it easy. Staying medicated. But the chance of seeing a doctor is slim. The hospitals are over run. She's a little surprised. It's contrary to what she's been told.

I am reading a poem called “George Washington” in a book of poems called George Washington in a bar called The Library in the Lower East Side of Manhattan where I am spending my last twelve dollars on four beers and my last four dollars on tipping the bartender because happy hour still hasn't started.

But if it's anything like years passed it'll boil down to something real simple. Start drinking as soon as the coffee is done. Bottles of beer and wine. We'll wrap ourselves up in blankets to stave off the cold. Too cheap to turn on the portable radiators we use to heat our place. Her parents will call. We'll feign sobriety. A hard thing to do at 10:00 a.m. with wine-stained lips.

I understand this. This is what made me psychic. This is what makes images arrive on the doorstep with a bindle over the shoulder made of red bandana. Each man is the last man.

Christopher Boucher’s new novel, Golden Delicious (Melville House), is a kind of referendum on all we presently hold dear in fiction. Its emotional hold on the reader is very strong, but its avant-garde methods critique those special effects by explaining what they’re doing to your feelings while they do it, which somehow only makes the book more sad.

I have a thing for droopy-eyed men.

I won’t apologize for trying to forget the days I spent with you, riding pillion on your Honda, inhaling Bombay’s foggy polluted streets, sitting on rickety wooden benches of hole-in-the-wall Indo-Chinese joints, slurping Szechwan noodles and sipping Tom Yum soup, strolling on Juhu’s wet sandy beaches, letting the ocean wash our feet.

A girl on my train is watching Kylie Jenner’s snapchat. I lean in and watch over her shoulder. I can't hear, but it doesn't really matter.

I found out I was pregnant in the bathroom of a wine bar. 

I try to turn everything into a metaphor so I don’t have to face it straight on.

Things to remember:

Ghost Deer, Ohio

Ray St. Ray

The walls, statues, and shrines of the New Orleans Historic Voodoo Museum are covered in offerings to the spirits—or loa—represented within. Plaques have pennies and dimes resting on their frames; there is a wishing stump filled with dollar bills. And there is lip-gloss everywhere.

There’s an episode of The Outer Limits where Alyssa Milano plays a college student that eats men whole with her vagina.

A fleet of pickup trucks and a white panel van have taken all the shady spots outside my parents’ house.

His first sensory seizures were like a passing light-headedness.

They stopped my mother’s heart four times.

I definitely gained traction in my twenty-ninth year. At twenty-nine, my skin cleared up, I sold a book. But the biggest accomplishment for me was that I stopped working retail and made my money solely from writing and teaching writing.

For ten years, General Motors knew about faulty ignition switches in its cars but concealed this information.

When I lived in Michigan, I ruined baseball. I recorded every Detroit Tigers game only to fast-forward between pitches, so I could get back to stacks of paper grading, so I could be as productive

I was wearing my home-made Giants uniform, as I did every day that week, laboriously sewed by mom who was not enamored of sewing. 

It is 5:30 in the morning. I am standing in the lobby of a midtown Manhattan hotel, judging the distance between me and a planter because I am pretty sure I am going to throw up.  My stomach is in

I have been to many games at Shea Stadium and I know that this facility’s bar for unacceptable behavior is extremely low.

Let’s start this account of fuckfaces on October 18, 2006. I was 30 years old, recently engaged, in my third year of residency training at Chapel Hill, and depressed about the New York Mets. 

Dear Dicky,
You probably figured it out by now, but I’m sorry I stole the softball.

I was twelve going on thirteen when I first saw Stand By Me. I guess that would have made it 1990. As the narrator, Gordie Lachance, says about the first time he saw a dead human being, as voiceover at the beginning of the movie: “a long time ago… but only if you measure terms in years...