A river coursing with so much life it broke through the surface. I liked that.
If anything, he believes he’s out there performing a perfect approximation of a regular man doing regular things, a regular body covered in flesh in the midst of that regular act of shoving sustenance into his facehole.
I didn’t believe my sister when she said our grandfather’s spirit had knocked her calendar off her living room wall.
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 stood in the middle of that road in front of that shimmering turquoise El Camino. He dangled the keys over my open palm and then dropped them, like we were in a movie.
that was the year that all the carnivals came to town. sounds like a fake small town thing, but when you live in a small town, all the things that happen are fake small town things, except they’re
The summer I was allergic to tap water was the summer I lost all my friends. School was out but nobody wanted to be around me except for Joel who wasn’t really my friend to begin with but sort of became one afterwards. It was understandable. I couldn’t shower and, well, to be perfectly honest, I smelled bad. Joel didn’t seem to mind, though. He worked the check-out at the general store and taped his ear to his head.
We’ll leave your hair for the birds, she’d say, so they’ll build their nests to keep themselves and their babies protected.
You asked if I wanted to send you the latest version of my story as a Google doc so you could add comments. You offered to send me one of your stories in return.
And V, who had been high all day and drinking since around 4pm, suddenly realized how fucking bored she was of all of it, of once again drinking her way through grad school in a cool city going to goth nights with people she was or wasn’t in love with and so V thought about getting up mid-sentence and leaving and calling her old sponsor and hitting up a late night AA meeting or maybe even just going home and getting some sleep or crying but instead she just listened to herself charmingly talk about nothing until she couldn’t stand it and asked the girl to dance.
i think you can learn a lot about a person
based on their Super Smash Bros main. or starsign.
or by asking. how convenient to be told? to learn
in spite of our own misgivings. part of growing
Eighteen days after our dog died, my husband dreamt of her.
I wake to the shuffle of wind along the sill.
The soft moon hue weighs on my blanket, saying nothing.
From the fragile dark, experiences remembered
become rocks tied to my ankles and feelings churn
Ask me now about Grandma’s house and I’ll recall the ocean-carpet, candy, bossa nova, cousin, shotgun, books. I won’t mention the adult woman in a crib—a person who was someone’s daughter, sister—and I guess, aunt—for a lifetime.
Friday night, I swipe the side mirror off my Nissan Sentra and can no longer see what's behind me. No major loss. I've never been particularly interested in what's going on back there anyway. There's some evidence to suggest there's no such thing as the past or the future, only the present.
As a kid, you don’t really know how swings work. You just move your legs and you get higher and higher. You find out later, regarding the swing, it’s because you are using your momentum through gravity, generating centripetal force to be exact, which creates a back and forth motion. But, for now, on that playground, your sister is swinging next to you and she laughs and yells, Higher! Higher!
The plump pastor looks down at you and smiles. You are dead. You lay in your cream-colored casket, on a bed of scarlet silks and smile back, all satisfied like.
I am trying to teach my brother Micah to write poetry.
What is my obligation in this moment? Is it to my body or to my daughter’s?
Years later, he asked “Do you still use this email?”
and I replied “No.”
I get so bored sometimes that I think about getting sober. It never lasts that long; inevitably Charlie comes back again and I find myself with a cold nose and shaking hands just one more time. I
Sometimes
trauma is a prerequisite for softness.
It depends on where you’re from,
and who you ask, but you should always ask.
A friend who is no longer arguing with her boyfriend later tells you The Magician’s wife called the police that night.
I wish him luck and watch him until he’s halfway around the bowl. There’s something about a chance encounter, especially in baseball, where you don’t want to know too much.
I couldn't fully recall the Simpsons episode in which Marge buys a near-identical pink Chanel dress.
