They brought us plates of toxic urchin, slipped us suspicious vegan sandwiches, and poured out shots of that green liquid preferred by celebrities.

It was cloudy most days.

When it is morning morning I dress myself in nice human clothes. I am ready to leave the garden, but I do not leave the garden.

It is not comfortable to be on the show anymore, but Snooki never finished veterinary school and she needs the money.

Glenn cleaned public bathrooms at beaches across Harwich, Massachusetts.

Do us in quick, I begged, do me easy.

Perhaps we are simply trying to figure out how to stay inside a relationship – our relationship – and figure out how to physically exit the space we currently inhabit and enter another. 

I was seventeen, so he was a man — had I been older, maybe not.

Show her face to the camera. Put your finger in her mouth.

Here is your neighbor, blood forking from her nose, catching on her lip. 

When the men came and dug us up to make way for the next crop, it took a sharp tug or two to free our limbs from where they were entangled with the earth

He’s soaked in sweat already and all he’s done is drive. He must know what they are here to find.

Doris said she would pray for me because I was a kind person and her murdered great-nephew had also been named Kyle.

I always knew I would wash up on an island.

Say, “we should start a band.” Get shut down because everyone wants to sing but no one knows how to play guitar. 

Fuck couples therapy!

When I was thirty I found my birth mom. I’d written her letters but never sent them.

This is a frontier town. Means it’s small. 

Now, if the frontier was moving forward, like they do sometimes, our town might get bigger, but that ain’t happened for nigh on eighty years and I don’t

They gather in the basement to weep together like the boys they are.

It’s after midnight and Jason is awake, trying to ignore the suspicion his twin sister is masturbating on the floor of his bedroom, four feet from his bed.

“A temporary sleeping arrangement,” their

Nobody knows Ralph has a flask tucked in his front shirt pocket. His blue Hi-Mart vest hides the bulge it makes beneath the fabric.

We amass, aquatic, shoal of the legless. The one grown webby with appendages pads onto the raspy sand, and we surface to see: gleeful and aroused with pity. Eyes so dry: the air all around but

There was a Help Wanted sign at the florists. I had a car, so I walked in and applied. This was a time in my life when I’d decided anyone could do anything. In other words, I was an artist.

He had one of those cool lighters – brushed metal case, tiny chimney with a pattern of holes, bright heat when flint strikes. He’d spark and snap it, a habit that at first I didn’t want him to break.

We’re practicing doing timed tests for the AP Language and Comp exam, and the prompt Ms. Anniker gives us is “What Are You Proud Of?” I think immediately, “my chin”