I packed into this room during my second year's semester break of university. For all the years before, I slept with my mother upstairs. Our building is a three-story building built with rocks and

When Harrison came back to work two days later he handed me a piece of notebook paper that had been folded into a perfect square. On the outside it read: a reply, as promised…

Before the landline was obsolete, Nathan and I lived for late night 272-DATE commercials, our city’s own hotline of lust. You had to be 18 or older to call and of course we weren’t, yet I knew to make

The diary didn’t have many entries, but it revealed how lonely Sarah had felt.

He didn’t even try to hide it. This subtle grooming disguised as a peace offering. Young and cool and cultured, he was the new priest from the Mediterranean, with an accent and a peculiar way of

For a few years, before Carl’s dad won a scratch-off ticket and no one ever saw him again, I called Carl my best friend.

Hey girl, heard you’re on the job hunt—and the place I work is hiring! It’s a bit weird, but… Do you want to be a matchmaker? 

We lost my dad somewhere under the blacklights of Club Tabu.

My happiest memories all involve an intense desire to be strangled. 

I do not want to talk about how I need to drink more water. The Doctor in Her Eighth Year of Practice has already told me, in so many words, that the life I save might be my own.

This boy has never been in love. He takes his phone to bed, a ghost or a third hand, he can’t say. Can anyone, anymore, the world being what it is? 

He yearns as the hours creep. Desperate to mimic

after fiona apple

i've waited many years— i didn’t know i was waiting— my myself waited til no one was looking, and it ran, and it ran and— 

all my selves run from me. when i look up they’re

Mama says mad freezes your face, so little girls with feelings be careful. Anger shows ugly over time, lines between your brows or pulling down the corners of your mouth. Girls should smile, say

On Sunday morning, at eight central in middle Tennessee, I watch the Grand Prix. This season is the 70th anniversary of the FIA Formula One World Championship, which feels like enough of a reason to

Maybe I’d hang out in the locker room and find someone who would treat me better. Maybe I’d go to Taco Bell and eat in the parking lot.

We’re spinning Vince Guaraldi’s soundtrack for A Charlie Brown Christmas in our den, a small extension the previous owner built by dry-walling in the original porch's 1959 concrete border. We erected

1955

Nothing is earned unless something is lost. You lost your father in a car accident, as mommy explained. You are less than a year old and don’t have language for anything, much less grief. The

When Michael left for the West, I experienced what in Portuguese is known as saudade, an intense nostalgia for a person.

Why are we so very unwanted, but somehow always wanted by the worst of things?

The first time I went rock climbing, I lasted 30 minutes.

We listened to the fathers sitting on the front porch of Hurd’s, smoking cigarettes and talking baseball until sundown. It was our one final glimpse of our world before it was rebuilt.

I smile now, waiting, always waiting, for you to reappear and remember me ...

I once let the person I loved prick my ribcage with a needle a thousand times so I wouldn’t forget. A collection of dots arcing messily into two black brackets.

I am writing you now from a city we scored with nomadic walking fourteen months ago. During that trip I had been ill.