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. 

In this dappled language, like a woods painted by Neil Welliver, in and out of our attention, animals wander in the camouflage. They are highlighted by our attention: each stands in a yellow bar of

I grew up in the predominantly all-white neighborhood of Warwick, Rhode Island; I was one of only two Black kids in my elementary, junior high, and high schools. I dressed well, presented myself well, got good grades.

My friends and I would see you on the streets and say you looked like a villain. Slicked back black hair, tall and thin, distrusting gaze, but handsome. All sinister swagger.

1985: the year of “high-risk” and Careless Whispers. His appearance was brief —lasting all of ten second— but there he was, following an interview between Debbie Harry and Nick Rhodes on the Palladium. 

You turn to face me, apologize for the mountain, for not drinking enough water, for not letting me turn back to make sure you were safe at a lower elevation. For not realizing what this would do to me.

Reason for rescue? What does that mean? Cause it was dying, I don't know. What do you want me to say?

Last Christmas, you asked for my latest address and sent a postcard all the way from Paris. There was a close-up shot of Hemingway’s face on the front. On the back, you wrote: “You deserve all the good in the world.” I took a picture of it but never sent anything back.

In my Sunday dress, I suckled water from the Baskin Robbin’s water fountain — the one nearest to the men’s restroom. My father sat at a table a few feet away, writing notes in his Bible for his next

I like sex in fiction to be full of ambivalence—undeniable lust mixed with doubt or disgust. I have done things with lovers I don’t want to tell anyone. 

I started high school miserable. By my sophomore year, I was looping Sinead O’Connor on my headphones, the album with “Nothing Compares to You” and “I am Stretched on your Grave,” and trying not to

In contrast to wild animals, pets are timelines left on the floor. These models of accelerated, abridged lives can be found to the right of the Lazy Boy and the magazine rack.

Not knowing was better than being disappointed. If I didn’t know what TGOYI meant, it could mean anything.

I wasn’t attracted to him at all but I was single and alone on New Year’s so I listened to him go on and on about birdwatching.

One guy told me I didn’t look like my online photos while we sat al fresco in a bougie hotel in Venice. He smelled of vinegar. I ordered two crab sandwiches. I ate one and got the other to go.

Lightning struck my grandparents’ house five times in as many years.

I didn’t have my brother Patrick’s phone number until after my parents had been in a car accident.

I move the VHS tape with me to every new apartment, packed away in a cardboard box full of my old things.

Yes, my mother loved Pooh, but as far as I know her love was platonic.

While sitting in the parking lot waiting for masked employee to bring your items out to your trunk you watch customers walk into the store. Count how many are wearing masks versus not. Watch them laughing.

During my first year of grad school, I learn how to kill rats. I work in a lab studying time perception, a cognitive function that’s not fully understood. We have to train new rats for every study.

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And they all lived happily ever after. 

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Finishing work on the Saturday and heading to the pub because that’s what we always did. Tall Paul and small Paul and (ordinary) Paul, Ian, Bel,