That summer held the moment, in real time and in my memory for several years, of something he said that I didn’t hear.

The mushrooms I bought yesterday are moldy; the lines around my mouth have deepened. Tomorrow I am a mother for the first time.

In his hospital room, he handed over his phone and I called his family.

We’ve sat in pot smoke-filled basements, watching boys play video games, and I’ve sipped wine with my parents on special occasions, but neither of us have been to an actual party before.

We long to see the world from her point of view, the worker. But do not ever long to be the worker.

My mother had been on a rampage to find me a husband since I started college.

I’m good at getting fucked up. I’m good at having fun. Go go go. I’m best at forgetting.

If a ghost is the impression you leave after you, then the divot you leave in your old bed is a ghost. 

Gratitude is not the response she expected. She smiled through thin lips, missing the hoped-for fight.

The whole first week after moving into his Brooklyn apartment – our apartment he keeps correcting me – I’m horribly constipated.

I’ll dig a pit where it can roam, feed off the aporia of my lust, wash its hooves in semen, soak in pools of piss.

Oh, absolutely a mistake to have given the wealthy Protein Bar Daddy my number.

I wished you knew how it felt to sit at the dining table with all your cousins to crack the shells wide open.

Here’s the thing about choosing songs to give as gifts to people: it starts off being about them but really, it’s about you.

I am buried in the backyard, beside the garage, under the rack where the family canoe rests when not in the water.

When the Santa Anas whipped into town, everyone became a little crazier. They invited the wildfires as if to burn the witches amongst us. 

In early June of the never-ending 2020, I attended an anti-curfew, anti-police terror demonstration in my hometown of Oakland, California.

It was a warm evening as myself and a couple friends

Junior year of college, he touched the scab on the crease of my mouth where concealer failed me. I get these in the winter too, he said, and then, I have a cream.

It’s all about the timing

It’s as simple and invasive as a chime on my phone. A banner news alert, which, for most people, involves elections and wars and natural disasters and celebrity

I still want to spin someone like a record, baby, round round round round.

Seventeen days since you spoke your last words to me. They repeat themselves in my mind, I never want to forget them.

I am not a pinch, a spoonful, a half a cup of light rivering down into the stomach where, I should know, the heart truly resides.

George Simmons used to sling crack on 42nd St.—why his uptown boys always called him The Midtown Turn. Now he’s 54—and everybody calls him Pop. He’s been running the streets for decades. “The streets

I didn’t turn around because I wasn’t entirely sure my name was being called and even so there was no one I wanted to talk to on the street in the middle of this particular Tuesday.

And yet, and yet, from the rear pew of my mind came a rude slurping as my straw probed the ice of a Pepsi.