I knew making him leave would be like pulling a turtle from its shell; we grew up thinking they were two different things, when really they were one.

The text said: Hey! I think I just saw you cross the street (I’m in the red Prius). How are you?

Did your grandmother live not on a lake, but near? 
No but my Grandfather lived in Long Island, near the bay. My grandmother lived in Wisconsin. She was far away. She was the good one. 

On Human Origins

You take a half-person’s body, then another half-person’s body, and you connect them together and put them inside the mom’s body. Then they grow and grow and grow. Then you

This is how we played: one of us would lay on top of the other fully clothed, “go dead,” and see if the other could move. He relished it. I would lay on him, every part of me heavy and slack. It was

I bought a compilation of Michael Jackson Number Ones when the Wal-Mart Supercenter finally opened. It feels right to have viewed the future from my bedroom, door closed, music up.

In fact, even if I could reverse my reach through the years spanning us and stop you, I don’t think I would.

We hear them in the kitchen, leaping around with meaty thuds, and in the morning Cheryl has barricaded the kitchen door. She tells me the landlord sent someone to assess the situation.

“Okay,” I

I suppose I was in a conspiratorial mood when I told you that I don’t always feel like a man.

The last dozen years of my life could be mapped out by my Craigslist history, moments when I’ve called out into the abyss and some voice has come whistling out of the darkness with the exact inverse of my need.

It was 2007, and the closest that most Americans came to hitchhiking were two new movies: The Hitcher and The Hitchhiker, a lower-budget version of the same plot. In both movies young naïve roadtrippers pick up good-looking psychopaths in the desert. In The Hitcher Sean Bean chains a teen heartthrob between two semi trucks and pulls him apart at the waist.

There is a loneliness to many things, I am finding: there is a loneliness to sidewalks, to tea bags, to guest bathroom wastebaskets. This hickory wood sits like concrete in my hands; there is also a loneliness to interacting with materials, materials that can’t know what kind of end they’re meeting.

On a bench outside the classroom on our fifteen-minute break, I close my eyes and practice the grounding exercise my therapist taught me earlier that week. Facing the rush hour freeway, I try to

(Iowa City 1995)

What I think I want, is Inez . . . Fuck! Now it’s a blur. Drawing. Rather, a dream in which I’m drawing.

I came from the city, was sort of swept away by the bristles of time and love and bowel-upsetting uncertainty, and I am now in a dust pan called Mora County, New Mexico. Dust pan is not derogatory; it’s a just a place where things end up.

I feel like I should confess. I used to worry that I hadn’t suffered enough. I really hadn’t suffered at all. I mean, someone did kick our door in at three in the morning because of the ‘80s and

the history of countries is the story of roaming. And maps are relatively new inventions in the human narrative 

ON Drugs, Magic, and the Sanctity of Losing Your Shit

Like any self-respecting Gen-Xer, I spent the bulk of my teenage years doing drugs. I tried all kinds: ecstacy, mda, coke, meth… I even tried

Until this year, I didn’t know I get seasick.

I board a boat on the northern coast of what they now call Sri Lanka, outside my ammah’s hometown, and I sit down below. I accept my friend’s offer of

Normal: a word-world I, as cisgender, could claim. That she couldn’t. So many label traps. Normal, gender, virginity. Sarah.

3/31: The day is young. Dress smart today Capricorn, big things on the horizon. When standing in front of new people, don’t forget to smile. People are drawn to you, but you forget to drop your

My mother mentioned Darren to me only once. I was in college by then.

Some days, Luke told me it hurt to sit down. Those days we played in the woods.

We took tarps and string from the shed to make tents between trees. We stole pennies and nickels from the house, put

My writing professor said to me that in order to get better, you had to dismantle the person you were, because that person was killing you. I kept wondering: Why did a killer love me?

A dispatch from 2016 and now.