I thought, this message probably killed its messenger, strung out on finding its way home.

Nick your shin shaving, stare idly at the blood coursing down your foot and down the drain, and maybe this is how you do it, empty out all your insides until your shapeless skin is all that’s left.

I wanted to be “that girl,” but my new high-waisted pants from the Marais were already unbuttoned once.

A girl named after a country wore a metallic jumpsuit and gave tarot readings.

Brian was psyched too. Not about her requests—Tom Waits was more his groove—but about where things seemed to be headed.

I didn’t know why I never wanted to have sex. Or I did know, but what I knew was a lie, or maybe the Biggest Truth of All and I would rather die than admit it to myself.

I have my tee already halfway over my head, blocking my eyes, when I feel a hand on my forearm, yanking me toward the other end of the field. “You can’t do that. Put it back on.”

To be naked on the beach after a storm is something special—the salt and the petrichor and the hum of being unsettled that maybe the torrential rains caused damage, that maybe there were nearby ships that will never make it to harbor.

Violet and I sit in her bed a while and talk. She shows me how to unhook and snake a bra through a sleeve.

“When Zac started writing the poems, I didn’t think it would get to this.”

I can see him weakening, even if he can’t.

“Foresee this, I did not,” Yoda commiserated. But he knew what he had to do. He just didn’t know if he could do it. 

I’m not trying to justify myself. I’m trying to tell you something.

By now I have learned that sometimes, as Tricia pummels away at the backs of my thighs, I can tolerate a memory or two of George.

Mississippi Man and I been dating for a few months now and we ain’t said it yet.

Under what circumstances do we find ourselves here?

“Yvonne?” she called out. 

when encountering the duckrabbit ... 

By the time he’d arrived at the Atwell Park Summer Solstice Festival, Bill Hannan was so high he mistook one of the paper lanterns hanging from the red-lit oak tree at the center of the park for the moon. 

This was months ago. April, maybe May. The weather was foggy. So was my brain. I saw you again in the Cubism section. I was standing in front of “The Actor” by Picasso. The second I saw you, I smiled

"You won’t let me love you, so I am loving this plant,” he says.

We do Christmas Eve at our mom’s.

I want to say, Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker, and mean it.

People used to tell my father they looked alike, he and Bruce, and I suppose it was true.

Betty's son Jonah is convulsing in the kitchen and there are fifty ways he could die.