Like Richie’s “Hello,” Adele’s “Hello” is also an ode to longing.

I will never read this essay out loud, so let me take some risks:

Almond, salmon, Episcopal, peony, Adidas, melancholy, mischievous.

In my head: Owl-mund, sal-MON, epic-SKO-poll.

I add force

I’ve never run for political office and have no desire to run—which is not to say that I’ve never thought about it—but I do know what it is to move, to travel, to traverse, to go around for the sake of one’s ambitions.

When I was dead, I returned to my father’s house, an old farmstead in Northwestern Ohio, and I stood alone in the gravel drive, satisfied to see that the house was just as I remembered it—small and gray, rising on a plot of land west of a moonlit apple orchard.

I don’t write “I have the libido of a sloth” in my online dating profile. I don’t use my real surname now either.

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

I Googled things that bond people. Google said trauma.

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.

Consideration of Deferred Action for Chilhood Arrivals

This is when your humanity ends, when a pen hits this paper.

She arrived at my apartment at 3 a.m. with a soft suitcase on her head, a handle positioned over one eye. I could see the netting in her matted blonde wig. Her broken eyeliner and stained lips

Turns out, we decided later, it was silly to try and sell flowers at all. The user experience of flowers had to be re-tooled.

My husband Paul and I are drinking beers and eating hot dogs at the baseball stadium in San Francisco. It’s even a little boring, and I have my back to the field for a while so can I face my friends

All blue awnings

man stands for myriad of anonymous nouns
something like far off voice
presumably an empty mountain becoming his own
invention, able to stand by itself (i.e. come where I am)
is

sadness dies badly like a waiting room plant

every body is mostly water
and will still only sink or float

it’s so maddening
it takes me two hours to finish
an apple

sometimes the human in

CRYSTAL THINKING

Dream logic gets my sober companion drunk
Vomiting silver in the private beehive of our wagon
I went to the cemetery and played you a too-fast solo
Mud seeped in the ass of my

I packed into this room during my second year's semester break of university. For all the years before, I slept with my mother upstairs. Our building is a three-story building built with rocks and

She lives with her mom

two states away

and I wish this was all

I've failed to teach her. 

Describing Feminine Energy

I am electric-orange.
I am strong legs running
through a poppy field, two arms
thrown open, both feet meeting
soil, moon-face turned up to
the sun, with lips like

Many days I realize my dreams are fiction half way through.

in this one you’re a six foot / two hundred pound prize