We rely upon these narratives, asking them to explain away uncertainties about why we are the way we are, about how we have come to be in the world just like this. We ask them to prove to us that we have been here at all.

I worried I had magically bloated between 9 a.m. and lunch time, even though I’d only eaten the prescribed six saltine crackers.

A river coursing with so much life it broke through the surface. I liked that.

S and I were together nearly a year before the band really got back on the road. Their six-week tour started in Minneapolis.

We’ll leave your hair for the birds, she’d say, so they’ll build their nests to keep themselves and their babies protected.

What is my obligation in this moment? Is it to my body or to my daughter’s?

I couldn't fully recall the Simpsons episode in which Marge buys a near-identical pink Chanel dress.

I was a glamour upon a glamour upon a glamour, a mouth devouring a mouth devouring a mouth.

Imagine being so famous and blonde that people love you so much they hate you again.

I will feel like a bad country cover of a Kate Bush song.

> One of my favorite reading experiences was a book called "The Silent
> Woman" by the journalist Janet Malcolm; it was about the biographical
> treatments of Sylvia Plath and the impossibility of biography in general.

The stench of my high school ID lanyard hung around my neck like a noose for the rest of the school year, reminding me of my capacity for self-destruction.

Who could trust those colors? Smears of scarlet molting into pert lavender.

Not long after the bugs started crawling out of my sink, the diamond on my engagement ring fell off.

If a middle-aged man sobs in a dark room and nobody is around to hear it, does anyone say, “It’s just a cat. Get over it?”

Ten years ago, I made a temporary move from New York to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a research fellowship for my novel. Within a month, I met Gino, a tall lawyer with a pronounced Roman nose,

My grandmother screamed when she saw me.

As a baby dyke, I’d waded into sex and romance like a kid at a water park, slowly and then all at once. Now I was on the sidelines.

Half Brits, half Americans. Special Relationship Rule No. 1: Love thy neighbo(u)r.

Two months in, we began to confide our secrets to each other. Her early brush with benzos. My peer-pressure-prone passivity.

To our right, I feel the cool breath of a gaping canyon. It beckons, invisible behind the wall of fog, its voice the skid of tires on gravel.

I get too drunk on a Tuesday night and tell him I want to marry him. We’ve known each other for six years.

I’ve become a puddle on the floor everyone dances around, stares at, hoping to see something.

I pledged to him two things: one, that I would hex the ones that hurt him, and two, that I would write him poetry.

When They Let Them Bleed: Ten Years After

It took me a long time to write “When They Let Them Bleed” – both in the practical sense, in that I recall writing it in very short bursts because it was