Lorena told Sofia to put a drop of her own pee
in her man’s beer
if she wanted him to love her
so she did 
and by God it worked.

The cop and strip club security guard had climbed onto the roof from outside the building and were trying to get in through the locked laundry room window. Claire let them in.

To a degree rarely rivaled, Sean Kilpatrick lives for words. Tantrums is a testament to the last twenty years of his life, and includes absolutely batshit scripts, joyfully brutal fiction, and

“Have you tried hookers?
Church? God? Your dead
mother? Pills? Coke? Crack?”

Bitter Water Opera is one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read.

His dreams fill with bell towers, stabbing deaths, his lifeless body dragged by split fingernails into consciousness.

“Because of nothing we are together.”
—KA

Now, there were two biographers and a documentary filmmaker circling her fame like the moons of Planet Kathy, goddess of love and lust rising in

It was not yet this day and age. A writer sent a proposal to his literary agent. The proposal concerned a major trauma. The agent submitted the proposal to a select few editors who made it the

She began imagining what it might have been like to be Agatha, crying and disheveled with both pale breasts exposed.

Let’s get more filthy!

In time, the questions become increasingly diffuse, numbers jumble and disappear, the symbolic order smears.

If I could be in The Fifth Element, I'd want to be in the scene where they pulled things out of the blue opera singer's belly. But I would want to keep pulling out new, surprising things.

She was always looking in the mirror.

“How do you say, I am the wolf.”

“Je suis le loup. Tu es mon loup. You are my wolf.”

“Je suis le loup,” I say.

Marissa:
I try very hard to be polite and normal, like manners are weirdly important to me given I'm a huge fuckup generally but my inner world is probably a less palatable version of Helen’s 💀💀

Anna:
You’re out here trying to be a good happy girl 

Guys, you’ve got Earl fucking Palmer out here in LA. The guy played on “Tutti Frutti” for chrissakes. You don’t think he could be part of the next hot thing?

I could hear the cheering of the crowd, their silent plastic mouths were happy; I could taste the dirt kicked up by the elephants, smell the liquid butter sediment of cheap popcorn.

            i think the other end of seinfeldian is like
            tiny things really sharply observed

Few are lucky enough to realize when their destiny is laid before them. I am one of the lucky few. Mine came when my parents suggested a cruise to the Mexican Riviera from Christmas to New Year’s Eve.

I begin to write a eulogy for
a guy who doesn't exist.

But she is always here, always too strong to evaporate into some kind of hereto after.

I have no interest in living another 360 years. The folks I get along with have about died off and the world will be on fire by then. I’m blowing my brains out.

there is breathing
which is automatic
and there is loving you
and one is easier

Can't spoil what's ahead but suffice to say I may attempt to falsely accuse a fellow indie writer of war crimes in a psychotic bid for even more attention

Crush ten pills into a fine powder, then stir thoroughly in a glass of warm water. Put the glass in the freezer and let sit for twenty minutes. At this point, the mixture will have separated.

SHELDON LEE COMPTON: The aliens actually showed up. They only communicate through images and demand you show them one overall image that explains our civilization. You have five minutes to Google Image search. What do you type into the search bar?

LEAH HAMPTON: “Image of Donald Trump shitting on an endangered butterfly”

Eventually, the coke got to his head. He started becoming extremely paranoid. I was on a trip.

I was ten when my mother first took me to a psychiatrist. He put me on Zoloft at her request. My relationship with pharmaceuticals is my longest running one to date. My normal.

Chris snaps the seal of a Jack Daniels shooter and pops the brown sugar down his throat. Tommy pops Vicodin: Coronado eats a stick of dynamite and blasts his brain with meth, no judgement.

She sits in the grass in her special place and she does her meditation. It is the place she has carved out for herself in the world. 

Chronic illness already made dating hard. And then the pandemic arrived.

“I almost forgot—” my childhood friend interjected as we were wrapping up a phone call on a blustery September day. “I

What I mean is I write auto-biographical fiction and as such I’m a habitual and unrepentant liar-liar-pants-on-fire sheep in wolf’s clothing.

Once, I thought I would forgive. Now, a year later, I’m still waiting for the feeling to appear

Full facial tattoo or painlessly losing your lips. One has to happen. What is it going to be? What’s that facial tattoo going to be? How’re you going to face the world without those lips?

I have known / a hunger I would undo / my own good birth to sate
 

Rebecca K. Reilly’s debut novel Greta & Valdin was a bestseller in her home country of New Zealand in 2021, and today it’s being released in the US and the UK. Pitched as Schitt’s Creek meets

There is an attitude in the liberated fetal detachment

My mother always says it was my father’s fault I couldn’t get along with anyone.

Jilly says the 21-year-old is weirdly similar to me, specifically because she’s in her early 20s and has a dead dad.

MSN Messenger was the absolute dive of the internet in 2002

I also have a white t-shirt I like a lot that says JOHN PRINE IS PRETTY GOOD, but I don't actually wear it because it comes down to my knees.

It wasn’t nice to call her eyes empty, Sondy supposed. Guileless, most people would say. Furtive, is probably what they’d call Sondy’s eyes.

Your Uber arrives and now you remember you’re not wearing any underwear.

I go into parties wearing a long-sleeve t-shirt that says Bonjour on the front and Au
Revoir on the back, eating candy cigarettes.

That comment got 55 upvotes. I downvoted it. I don’t have friends anymore

I get in bed, move my mouth over her nipple.

“Do you mind if I moan?” she says.

I tell her this is all I’m getting, because this is all I deserve.

Getting chemical poisoning together seemed romantic, the closest you could come to being entombed, Pompeii-style, in each other’s arms.

I wanted you to count on me—if not as a lover, then at least as an object for your using.

Normalcy has no moment to collapse because it is absent from the start.

Sometimes he’ll cum on my face, and I’ll have to hear about it in one of his poems.

This place looks haunted as shit.

You touch everything you see. You want everything you touch.

Uncle Dale says, “We’re lucky that none of us can fly.”

your uncle has a whiteboard on his wall and on it it says TO DO: TELL TERRY YOU LOVE HER. he wrote that you don’t know how many years ago. terry was his girlfriend but she’s dead now

I felt like a fool in the rain as I sat under the shower head.

Molly, in its three hundred and twelve pages, transcends time and space, life and death.

Say thank you
for what they’ve done: the late night call
to AAA, the five spot for a hot dog, the cups
of coffee & scones

The fantasies I’ve been having
Are so awful

My mother’s screams woke me up.

I have come to teach you love / and the solitude that comes / with ultimate strength.

In late July, in the mid-nineties, I begged Mom and her fiancé Paul to buy me a big ball at Roses department store.

Showboat said he'd like to take me out sometime. I asked why.

“Because I think you’re attractive, and so we can hang out somewhere other than the coffee trailer,” he said.

It was October, ten

I want to perform for you, pretend to be good enough for you.

Do we keep our husbands’ secrets,
or distribute them like sweets 
amongst ourselves?

Australian author Lexi Freiman’s second novel, The Book of Ayn, is the funniest book of the year. In it, a writer named Anna struggles to find meaning after being canceled for her “classist” book. To

Booze, Bullshit & Buttfucking is one of those books you can only describe with negative adjectives, despite your enjoyment of it. It’s quick and easy and invigorating in the way stimulants often

I think I’ve lost the practiced falseness of what it means
to be impossibly young. The fingernail moon
hangs over the welt on my goosepimpled thigh. Where
does the world go when not inside me?

I am supposed to call myself a survivor, but honestly I don’t think surviving is what I’ve been doing.

Under a contrived knit brow, his eyes aimlessly drifted among a thicket of words, until they happened to stop on depling, noun, German to Middle English, a child born to older parents, and thus he found a new label for himself, more succinct than his mother’s change-of-life baby and less piercing than faggot, which Joey Novakis and his friends would blurt as they passed him in the school hallways.

There are times when you just want to go up to no one in particular, and say, “Fuck you and the nutsack that held nightmare-you for x amount of time,” even if, and perhaps especially when, the eventual target is your own face.

1. A well to do woman hosts an orgy that gets gate crashed by a vanilla couple (I just want to be included).
2. A boy is seduced by his ex-girlfriend’s hot mom on the Fourth of July (I’m facing my fear of MILFs).

waking up with
the desire to lay here
to look around the room
and notice things

What does a lifetime of loneliness look like, feel like in the body? Athena Dixon examines this question in her second book, The Loneliness Files, published by Tin House, and edited by one of my

The first man is the only one that kills you.

—COLETTE, La Naissance du Jour

Who is Angel? Who am I.

Have you ever loved a mirror?

Laughed, on suicide watch, until Kool-Aid spilled

Is my dick the one getting off in a peanut can?

What most people don’t know is that most of your town butchers are on some kind of pill, powder, or liquid, to get them through the day. 

I have a dream, after selling this book, someone asks me what it’s about. I explain and they say,  So, the narrator is still pining after Finn? They put emphasis on the word ‘still.’

Ethan had saved $100,000 for his trip. I had $8,000.

Internet celebrity Melissa Broder’s third novel is what one Goodreads user accurately deemed an “existential horny cactus western.”

Men are tyrants with their time; but women are tyrants with the eternal.

Everyone worries about mind control.

I’ve always wanted someone to tell me what I want, to sell me on a life I want to live.

Literature is happening all of the time, all around us, all at once.

That was my youth: I developed a sickness, a ruinous crush on the man at the filling station

I was driving down the freeway listening to Third Eye Blind way too loud

My friend asks if I believe in / gay marriage

I was stationed in Osh, a forty minute flight south of the capital. I had

a decent sized apartment

Part I of the book is titled Forest. 

Bobby was going down, not on a woman or a man but fast and with extreme force into the frost covered asphalt of a Holiday Inn parking lot, five minutes from the Detroit airport.

My father is talking fast, telling me how the redhead is waiting for him.

Gone, like T9 texting, is the once exciting novelty of being important, popular, scandalous

This act of attention lifts you momentarily out of your debilitating amiss-malaise. 

when congress bans our faves we will smuggle them through customs and call it praxis

I knew the talk about a baby was another red flag, but the more uncontrollable Amelie became, the deeper I got hooked. I couldn’t go back to what my life was before. I think it had been drowned the

The thing about Grandma is that she seems to show up unannounced and she doesn’t care about the substance of the prayers, just that they end in Amen.

 I know Max is probably hard by the time we get to the overlook at the dam. He puts the car in park and tells me he mixed a cd, just for me, because I’m so special.

- I can’t believe this is

The sleet has stopped but the cold is something unthinkable. It lends a deathly permanence to the still, heavy darkness. I stand shivering on the sidewalk and look up at the Hollywood sign. I try to

I just thirst for barbed wire
 

He’s still rambling about my womanhood, my untapped, ethereal potential, when I reach for a tissue and blow his hot load out of my nostril.

But her coup de grace was when she started bringing a white boyfriend to our parties. He was a real champion. His name was John.

Motioning the stone girl over, she
deadpans, “It’s grenadine, not blood.”

When the angel came I was young.

“I like the way how you wriggle when
Your mind doesn’t agree with your heart”

KS

Our translation of home.

He had lost his virginity to nothing less than the beast of the swamp.

What’s your name? Like an oak
I want to carve a heart
into our washing machine.

We started as open, NOT poly. This was a very important distinction to us, despite not having a working definition of either types of relationships. It was, we both agreed, substantially less cringe

Definitely one poet holdover is just being a magpie for weird

I do this because I need a hobby. Because hobbies are things you do when nobody loves you. I watch movies too.

Mysterious beauty spot the farra on cheek.

You’ve heard of flightless fish that get flung out of
the water for wanting something special

By March of 2016, my cousin Josh and I were practically flat broke. We’d been having an incestuous and adulterous affair, one that elevated his title to “cuzband” (he hated that term). Four years

The great neon calamity of his own life exhausts him.

One night I was so drunk, I couldn’t feel my face.

Everything would be fine, sort of, if she could close this deal.

Ruth Madievsky’s debut novel All-Night Pharmacy has everything I want from a book: a toxic sister relationship, countless nights at a seedy LA nightclub, and an unexpected sapphic romance. After her

There is a strength of purpose, I suppose, a fortitude and integrity, in simply admitting yourself to be a malevolent presence skulking the dingy alleyways of your own life.

Right away we shared amphetamines. He fed them to me to keep me awake.

You have to keep in mind this is a true story, and the events I’m about to describe took place before 2006 in a desert land which I’ve never been able to find again on any map. And years later, when I

Loud noises bother me. Crunching on chips. What did they do five hundred years ago when they didn’t have chips? They ate grapes. Quietly.

Dexedrine,
obedient beauty,

a low-calorie
alternative

for excess.

I tell her I want some kissing, one
minute of mat kissing before lesson plans,
emails, dishes.

and by the way, I wear jeans too, and I’ll fuck that white girl, absolutely, from the commercial, the camera trails her on the beach, she’s smiling, now she’s hiding behind her hands . . . 

They put her flyer on their mailboxes and look at me like she’s dead.

My boy on the boulevard bubbling.
Triple wick rip tide in my mind.

Seeing a picture of my tits online didn’t bother me as much as it should have. 

With snot running down my chin, weeping, I allowed myself to entertain the possibility that this key situation would go on forever.

I have to believe that what I am writing — what I am living through — means something.

There is no hotel breakfast. No air conditioning. No Tour Guide singing in the next room.

Bliss can flip into alienation and back into elation, adding to the teasing uncertainty of identity.

When you peed in the cup, Herman was behind you, watching.

‘Did you talk about capes,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ Mary said.

But I don’t even know what a collective is. And I can’t remember if he had tattoos.

One weird Halloween everybody dressed up as Elliott Smith.

like HFCA is kind of artless manipulation 
it’s not subtle
 

People keep saying that they can’t say anything but everyone is saying everything all the time. 

Finally, Mr. Mackey, the chair of the school’s English Department, delivered a rambling panegyric about the school’s depth of talented writers. I left my seat in the bleachers to fetch a Dr. Pepper from the vending machine.

Like many who quit drinking, my mother became a proselytizer for sobriety.

The other half was the memories of the end. The time Teddy had threatened to burn the only copy of my novel.

He struggles to come up with actions that give him a sense of joy or purpose when she is not around.

He says he feels like all his problems would be solved if he stopped going to that bar.

Things that make sense: plants, deer, video games, sushi, beer.

When she looks back at me, there’s a saturnine hopelessness in her eyes I understand too well.

He stole my Tupperware, the largest one in a glass Pyrex set.

I was telling stories. I was enjoying music. I was proselytizing. I was observing.

His white face is red. Mom taught me that people turn red like tomatoes when they’re drunk. I look around and see pink and red faces all around me.

I am torn with longing for many unnameable things.

At night, we lay on unmoored mattresses, pressing hands over our eyes to block out spears of light from the street. We cursed our naked windows.

What the Mother wanted to show us might be different from what we wanted to see.

“My grandma drinks that,” the kid ahead of me at Duane Reade snarks at my six-pack of Ensure bottles.

It’s me and Helena. Helena and me.

She feels bad for being taken aback before; she really is a very nice doctor.

The attic room in the student town of Ordrecht went for 365, 52 euros monthly, not including the safety-deposit, called borg in Dutch.

“Lucky boy, just too late. Because we have crisis in Holland,

In the mornings, the woman sees her husband off to work in her night dress, sometimes with curlers in her hair. After he leaves, she always lights a cigarette and stands with the glass-paned storm door cracked open. I can tell the inside of their house smells like knock-off Estée Lauder and menthol smoke.

I fucked his heart, ruined the fitted sheets,
flamingos left erect in a pool of afternoons

other byproducts are produced
sticky sweat, the stink of loneliness

We drank the acid. I immediately felt fucked.

I imagined finding him hanged beneath the creak of a taut rope as often as I didnt.

Do you ever get mad
and want to 
hit something?

don’t say the truth                  

it’s presumptuous                               and tastes like an airhead           

This marriage project
What a blast

A few minutes later I was presented with a tall, condensation-covered glass, containing an opaque, dark-green liquid that looked like it had been skimmed off the surface of a stagnant pond. I took a tentative sip.

How they stabbed me and got away with it!

I guess my approach is not to take myself too seriously, which sounds kind of dumb and obvious, and just to write the sort of book I most like to read, which is usually something heavy but also light on its feet, fast-paced and horny, and generally not too full of itself.

Sometimes they say, You can’t really teach someone to write a poem, in which case you might answer, Well,
not you.

Our lovemaking is a demilitarized zone.

i don’t think there will be booze
for sale, the style writer says, 
because it’s a synagogue

in the midst of a historic crisis, i ride my bike to the river

He turns up late to almost all of his final exams, answers whatever questions he feels like and defaces the rest of the paper.

I vomited
up a prophecy in a dive bar,
inhaling hot dogs.

I can tell she’s not convinced. But I’ve been Googling symptoms: confusion, nausea, loss of appetite, changes in sleep patterns, visual hallucinations, erratic behavior.

waylon in the kitchen
pancakes
the pain of a tattoo gun on ribs 

Drainage stains. Snow turns to shivering rain. The rear facing concrete walls.

“you’re bad at finishing beverages that aren’t alcoholic,” you told me

writing fiction in which people google things,
suffering in a very abstract way
trying very hard to shut the fuck up & failing

You must stop dating
physicists, that sere barnacling across
the cold, leeward faces of rocks.

At the head of the conference table sat a man scrolling on his phone, whom Michael intuited was the leader of this secret society. 

I wake up glad to not be strung out.

I wonder how my drug dealers are doing.

I finger a ring of keys and wonder what doors they might unlock.

It’s a sin,
to desire different architecture, I’m told

in a cellar not far from here, wine waits years to peak
before a bottle is cracked open only to empty
a bruise.

Coolness is an anchor, a fortress, a cold and remote puritanism.

Burying me # alive 
in training pants and # rags is my son’s 
# gift of sorts

The other day she showed up at André’s apartment in the middle of the night with a red rose and, in the bottom of her purse, a steak knife...

Waxing Phase

Sparrow day
draining to red

red wall of night
night a voice

caught within the throat
the throat a tunnel

a blackened river
a wing bending

a moonrise

Night

He sits alone on the beach with his feet in the sand, cigarette in mouth, eyes on the water, though there’s no one out here who knows him, and it’s not clear what he wants, unless what he wants is to be alone, in which case he picked the wrong part of the strand.

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

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.

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

hemos vuelto heridos de una guerra que todavía no empieza
yo perdí una de mis extremidades
y él las perdió todas

HOW DO I GET MORE WEIRD RUSSIAN ART GALS TO FOLLOW ME ON INSTAGRAM I ASK BECAUSE THEY HAVE THE MOST INTERESTING PROFILES AND SEEM LIKE THEY COULD SUCK YOUR DICK SO GOOD THEY COULD ROB YOU OF

The aliens were everywhere that summer.

You can never return to the track. A hard truth, heaven knows, but heed me— delay the wreck
and coma. Take a longer backwards way and savor that last downhill run, the final door to close.

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

Hobart and HAD contributor Rebecca van Laer's debut novella How to Adjust to the Dark (Long Day Press, April 12) weaves together poetry, fiction, and criticism to follow the narrator Charlotte as she

The parrot's flamboyant red and blue plume cocks, shivers. The family approaches.

You might be reluctant to try liver mush. You might think it’s not for me. But you are at a party, and you’ve been cornered by a stranger, and there’s nobody else there you really want to talk to, and

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?”

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.

On Penguins in Brooklyn

the protagonist feels like
she’s never leaving,
stuck on a moving walkway
in the middle of cincinnati
international airport
in kentucky,
headphones dangling,
she

September Dream

An eternity, for the Asphodel, is a brief few
months. It’s been a decade, as the crow flies,

ten days on Venus, ten Venus days,
each, longer than a year.

When I’m without

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’ll Always Make Love to the Mississippi.

We bruised
my knees on the bluff.

I’ve disappeared into the current
of loving nothing
but tainted water lapping against rotten fish
against a rocky

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

i felt you were floating now with them, in a bubble in space, the bubble has a name, ecstasy, keta, speed, coke, that’s the name of the bubble.

For the better part of every year I try like heck to be a better person. Nicer. More caring. This year I’ve taken up breathing. I breathe in and I breathe out each day. Last year I learned to put less

I was about to witness Kershaw’s first career no-hitter on TV when pieces of meat started to pour from the skies and slap the ground. Our house rattled as we rushed to the windows and watched the

A Hopeful Young Man on a Job Interview

I’m broke and eating chocolate ice cream out of a novelty helmet
I’m sweating because I’m wearing a sweater in the heat
to cover up the insane poison ivy on

1. There is a protective radius of ten feet on all sides of me.
2. I only know the name of one person in this room.
3. My body hair was groomed solely for this moment.

In Praise of Hands

I miss hands. I miss their flimsy, awkward quality –

the way one looks when offered while still searching

for a reason. I miss being young, lining up after the

You are standing on an indifferent platform in Preston Station and a little black spaniel is making unbreaking eye-contact with you as he pisses on your leg.

Maybe you didn’t recognize me, me with longer hair, growing tits, a new name.

She was going up to Poughkeepsie to see a girl she had met on the internet who, promisingly, shared her passion for Gary Larson comics.

Two men smoking cigarettes on Bleecker could mean anything
to each other.

Fifteen years before my autism diagnosis - the year I chopped off all my hair with jagged scissors - I hid a not inconsequential baggie of hash in my dorm room closet. I was, as always, trying to

Do you remember the names of everyone you swallow

Here’s the plan: we’ll become high-class prostitutes. “Courtesans,” I say, “like ancient Greece.”

Jay arrived once a week, every week, for sex. He was a dental student, worked  Wednesdays at a clinic near my house so it was easy for him to call to see if I was free. I made sure that I was. He

tree tree tree tree calvin calv hobbes

I know that I should be sad, or at least look sad, or somber, as I go through the things in Johnny’s room.

A man was arrested for creating a labyrinth in an IKEA.

doesn’t know how to give a PROPER blowjob
The spittle
of the sea
                        otherwise known as Jamaica Pond
dries hard on her eros:erring:elbow still deeper
resonating
in her

I don’t respond and two hours later he sends a photo of the dog.

Alice sighs in the way only British people can sigh. Maybe it’s all the rain they have inhaled.

We went back and forth, hyping each other up, talking about the best summer of our lives and how we would never be this young again and if we pet an alpaca everyone would be jealous.

Wind, always strongest by water, whistles and whooshes, knocks a girl off her feet.

I am searching for the type of room that would change my life if I lived there, you know the one.

“Bandeau,” I type into the Tumblr search bar. The results load like a quilt of skin.

I'm waiting for influenza in Virginia. Or the taste of something metal.

She could eat. She could get a little plump, not so plump that he wouldn’t like it, but plumper than before she knew him, when she had to stay thin and dainty so she could get married and become plump, though no more than he liked.

After last night, I’m no longer allowed at The Mint Bar. You could say it’s because I choked the owner’s daughter up against the wall next to the jukebox that only plays Cash songs—pushed her hard enough that a quarter fell from the coin slot—or you could say she deserved it.

I’m in accounting. Sally in the lab. Among her other duties, Sally is an odor judge. Her nose is rather ordinary to look at, what my grandma might have called a button nose. But Sally’s nose is legend.

The Chetrams were from Trinidad and listened to Bollywood music on the weekends. They were good, hardworking people. Their kids were polite. They were not Muslims as far as their neighbors could tell, since Chetram liked Miller Lite and the daughter wore high-waisted shorts in the summer. It was not polite to inquire.

"Ryan" and "LMGTFY"

It takes falling in love, staying there...

Fruitfly [64], [76], and [77]

But to write We thought is a fiction.
We always felt that…the moment you write this phrase, you have lied.

I looked up at Rudy, his back hitting the air like a ruler. The mind is an act of balance, he said, looking at me. It is a lever for the body.

Our hypothetical date tomorrow is at a show for the band Tennis. I have never heard of them, but I trust him. I say I will work my magic to get us in.

I love you best
like this: sun in your hair, a heavy daze
of pollen on your eyelids.

When we talk about a writer’s work, we are talking about the things she makes: poems, essays, books. It’s a mercantile word to apply to the artistic process, and yet it’s an inescapable one. Short

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

Under the pretense of repairing things, I go to prove I am not broken.

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 mention this flash of sexual fluidity to people, it bothers them.

Felt, for a minute, like some façade had slipped, like a glitch in the matrix. Is this in fact the car we came in? Are we who we think we are?

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.

in davis at the ceramics conference

on the Easter Bunny’s lap
a polaroid of my heavy bangs

smiles and my mother swears
I loved that bunny so much

I wouldn’t leave the store
to visit

The curtains opened, the ballerinas emerged, toes became violins, hands, trumpets, backs, cellos.

I have decided to hate you for 100 days
As soon as I figure out the first day

The old man kicked us out after the fight.

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 Class of 1953 Tachikawa Air Base Bride School girls were fertile, well-fed and rested.

i wanna drift like they do...

“And then after I came out to my wife, she stumbled across People Can Change,” said the man from Fresno.

Don’t they let you? Don’t they ever let you lay down your head?

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

Previously on...
Part 6  ||  Part 5  ||  Part 4  ||  Part 3  ||  Part 2  ||  Part 1  ||  Prologue

I Googled things that bond people. Google said trauma.

We’ve sat in pot smoke-filled basements, watching boys play video games, and I’ve sipped wine with my parents on special occasions, but neither of us have been to an actual party before.

Ken pounded out three novelty songs on his busted up acoustic guitar, looking like a knock-off Daniel Johnston.

To try to allay his doubt, or figure out of it’s real, [Li] mentally consults his in-progress novel, as if it were a friend. He intuits, in an intuition described by the line you quoted, that his doubt is wrong, is habitual and self-sabotalogical.

If a ghost is the impression you leave after you, then the divot you leave in your old bed is a ghost. 

Gratitude is not the response she expected. She smiled through thin lips, missing the hoped-for fight.

Gunderson could hear the vehicle’s noisy carping from eight blocks away, like a herd of wild trashcans rolling down the street.

Oh, absolutely a mistake to have given the wealthy Protein Bar Daddy my number.

Playin’_The_Keys

i love to dance, sing, write, chill, read
and play the keys, but sometimes, life
doesn’t allow me to hang out
and do my thing, which means
i have to divide my time into many

My son is fifteen when he asks the first question I am unable to answer.

When the Santa Anas whipped into town, everyone became a little crazier. They invited the wildfires as if to burn the witches amongst us. 

My last suicide attempt was in a park called Jesus Green. I said ‘last’ because I gave up, not because it worked. Writing plays tricks with life and death so you need to make things clear.

I’m Writing from the Other Side of the Universe to Ask You How the Weather Is

This is a soft rain, my father says, his forehead a creased encyclopedia page. It is mao mao yu in Chinese, syllables

Seventeen days since you spoke your last words to me. They repeat themselves in my mind, I never want to forget them.

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.

Song for 2 Phones

     What is that?
The line outside
the Maria Bamford standup
we went to last year.
          Send it to me.
     What is that?
A sugar maple on the hill
shedding Gatorade

Traffic

It’s 60 degrees in January so the birds have decided to just stick it out because who can afford the time-share anyway and the flowers bloom completely off-key like the conductor is drunk

Consideration of Deferred Action for Chilhood Arrivals

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

...I'm part of this thing where fish learned to walk...

"lucky" and "trophy"

Tom Selleck, in his best reverse mortgage voice, volunteers to call your parents and break the news that their daughter almost died. Your mom is happy to hear from him since she always liked Magnum P.I.

Big Bob sat beside me and watched women he classified as MILFs walk their kids to the pool with large, clear tubes.

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

After we finish doing the dinner dishes together, Mario heads into the living room and picks up the remote control.

“Guess what?” he says, turning on the TV. “New Zealand is playing England in

There was a time I had a flower in my mouth...

Previously on...
Part 5  ||  Part 4  ||  Part 3  ||  Part 2  ||  Part 1  ||  Prologue

The house on Olean street stands as it once did, a formerly bright white house, the sidings been torn off, revealing dark greenish-black shingles. This house, the black sheep of the neighborhood.

"High School Kids and Gonorrhea" and "Bearclaw Asshole"

Previously on...

Chapter 1a: Converging
Chapter 1b: Crisis 
Chapter 1c: Fighting the Fog

Chapter 2a: Two People
Chapter 2b: Divergence

Our return to campus one evening to discover spray-painted in black on the university’s entrance wall, “ICI ZOO ETRANGER” (HERE IS THE FOREIGN ZOO).

Against the grinding fever of suppressed 
song, against a muzzle’s searing, sound 
is a muscle.                 The body’s rebuttal, 

a kind of clamoring                             
held

Previously on...

Chapter 1a: Converging
Chapter 1b: Crisis 
Chapter 1c: Fighting the Fog

Chapter 2a: Two People

It is December 21, 2020, the night of the Great Conjunction. For the first time since the 1600s, Jupiter and Saturn will be the closest to each other they’ve ever been. NASA says you’ll be able to

To the left of the counter stands a dead rat on its hind legs, taxidermied, with one front paw extended and one middle finger raised. An insult that looks like benediction. A pair of antlers sit atop

I’ve been trying to find this quote by Chris Kraus from Aliens & Anorexia I think, but the quote is nowhere in my notebooks, even though I remember writing it down obsessively.

Previously on...

Chapter 1a: Converging
Chapter 1b: Crisis 
Chapter 1c: Fighting the Fog

For the first time ever, they were being honest about their sex lives.

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.

Throughout our first year in that house you woke feeling this ghost’s breath on your face, and at night, sometimes, you’d jump up frantic, swearing you’d felt its grave-clasp on your ankle or arm.

The night before Easter he ties his belt around my neck and gives it to me to hold.

My brother and I were standing outside of the 30th street station in Philadelphia.

I forget how old we were but we were old enough that our mom let us take the train alone from Lancaster to

Mike and Nick and Tom are already playing stickball in the back lot when Dad drops you off at P.S. 236. On one brick wall they’ve chalked a strike zone, on the floor is a powder-blue pitcher’s mound

Previously on...
Part 4  ||  Part 3  ||  Part 2  ||  Part 1 

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

From the couch corner where 
his ass has crafted a killer dent
for the better part of a week,
my father begins shouting insane cuss words
at no one in particular – 
titty fucker bang bang, cunty

TOOLS OF IGNORANCE

“[the term] tools of ignorance...was meant to be ironic, contrasting the intelligence needed by a catcher to handle the duties of the position with the foolishness needed to play

An absorbed sound

There was the night where the snow was quieter than usual
& your car wouldn’t start, so we stood under concrete

steeples to wait for the tow truck until your last hand

Times the Dog Looks for God

Sun is too hot
Sun is too cold
Fire alarm

Balsamic Moon

Lightning in remembered spaces
going dormant
Shade avoidance and dashboard doubles

Feeling

By late August, Mary-Beth was sweating on her front porch swing, a bottle of Budweiser resting on the table her daughter Madison gave her for Mother’s Day a decade earlier. Mary-Beth had been watching

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

Do you know how to leave this Earth? Because I really need to leave this Earth tonight. Jettison my skin. Supernova in a brilliant burst.

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

The moon came out, riding on a motorbike, his head hatted, silver-blue, attached.

We compiled our snacks and made for the playhouse basement.

"Peak Inertia" and "You don't know if you should laugh at my poems"

Fuck you.

On my first job I worked for a woman named Jeanie who owned a soda fountain, thrift store, and tavern. I worked at the soda fountain fixing milk shakes and simple sandwiches for the few customers that

He wondered, "What if I never get out of the shower?" and just like that he never did.

"Tight coils come / up floating in / my husband's peppermint..."

We can't feel how fast we're falling...

I was nineteen, still felt like a kid, and Tom seemed to like me. 

She is thinking that when you make love, your brain opens, and everyone knows what you are thinking, and you know what everyone else is thinking, so your husband knows what you are thinking and can control you.

I told him about Nebraska and how it was a dried up ancient ocean bed, how farmers harvested corn and clicks, how there might be kings buried under the freshly tilled soil or angels who dusted the August crops.

When the ground thaws and the air grows thin, the boys come crawling out of the valley to your doorstep at the foot of Mount Rose.

             after Ruby/Hilary 

For just 
fifteen seconds

out of my twenty-
six years living

I imagine 
myself 

a white woman

bones breaking
in a new way

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

I saw her in front of us then, and she struck me: white parka down to mid-calf meeting white Ugg boots, white hood drawn over head.

For a few years, before Carl’s dad won a scratch-off ticket and no one ever saw him again, I called Carl my best friend.

Charlie would never cannibalize me; he’d have nothing to eat. 

I posted a picture of my rarely used kayak on Facebook late at night.

On Sunday morning, at eight central in middle Tennessee, I watch the Grand Prix. This season is the 70th anniversary of the FIA Formula One World Championship, which feels like enough of a reason to

This is the Santa crushing it on Etsy.

This is the Santa denied unemployment.

This is the Santa whose Zoom background brought his therapist to tears.

This Santa doesn’t give a shit—he’s a

She lives with her mom

two states away

and I wish this was all

I've failed to teach her. 

I’m now constructing a mental pool for how long these two can keep up the corporate veneer before they go insane or at least pop Gene in the teeth or at least say Okay you’re done no more pineapple and then whisk away the tray of pineapple Mom and I have not stopped noshing and ogling and noshing...

The first time I went rock climbing, I lasted 30 minutes.

On Shaving my Legs for the First Time

the offending hairs that sprout from dark skin
like unwelcome ants that toil through the night

hairs that signal virility on my father’s chin
draw taunts

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 WRITE PANIC

into the locked kitchen
cabinet, china chipped
& sticky. i write
myself into a bottle
of vodka, sloshing
in waves of bitter
padded tongue.
i write the morning
green &

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

I am writing you now from a city we scored with nomadic walking fourteen months ago. During that trip I had been ill. 

Dan disowned my sister and me via email a year ago

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

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

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

"Why This Pregnant Woman Walked Out of a Subway Restaurant in Tears" and "The Return of Sad Beck, Thank God"

Why did Train A leave while Train B was still getting ready?

"A Diaristic Quality but Everything Is Still Gone" and "Jonas Mekas at the Tate Modern"

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. 

Previously on...

Chapter 1a: Converging
Chapter 1b: Crisis 

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.

I’m standing on top of Drew Barrymore’s star and the song’s issuing from a hot-purple Sony boom box someone set up a few feet away.

If you cut my leg and peel away the muscle, there’s a family living inside

“Hey, are you up?”

love does not begin and end the way we think it does. love is a battle; love is a war; love is a growing up
      -James Baldwin

when i say
I love my family
what i mean
is i worship
the

to survive
tenacious teeth held their nerve

It’s funny: I don’t recall ever hearing music around you, not in the condo and certainly not in the trailer.

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

1. And what does it mean to witness yourself, on television, dying?

            a. I no longer watch the news.
            b. I’ve exhausted every mirror in my home searching for my

Gender in the Long 19th Century ends at 4 p.m., which leaves enough time to raid the liquor store on Cowley Road. A and K and I go early, J and S join later.

The driver laughed when you couldn’t pronounce the name of your destination. It’s a cobblestoned European town the same as every other cobblestoned European town you’ve seen so far.

I remember when my parents first told me.

A man sits in a bar in a no-name town in a flyover state. It’s late. He’s alone. A double whiskey sits before him, sweating on a cheap cardboard coaster. The bartender knows his order by sight.

Letrozole (2.5mg)

Pharmacists are torn over which tone to take with me, Letrozole being used primarily to treat breast cancer in post-menopausal women after surgery. In Google summary, a

If thinking your own thoughts has never brought you love, is it so bad to let another think for you?

I saw Jim Jarmusch yesterday.

Previously on...

Chapter 1a: Converging

I was God’s favorite, once—enough
schoolgirl in me to make Mary
sweat. not a fall-from-grace, but something sweeter.
an unlit cigarette wedged between two
adolescent fingers; & the skin like

Jilly and I fought a lot when we were kids. When other folks tell me they never fought with their siblings, I think about all the circumstances in their childhood that would have made that a remotely

Tennis balls were always disgusting. That creep-crawly not-green not-quite-yellow felt that made my teeth grind and my spine twitch, always wet with dog slobber. And it never lost that toxic new car

This diner has been here since 1949 but I am sure that no one has ever looked as beautiful as you do sitting on these red vinyl seats. 

I painted my lips and fingers red the first time I was unfaithful. It was in college, with a girl with sharp orange hair who had a smile that said come. I never really liked her--she was arrogant and

She focuses on efficient point accumulation: jam, 12 points.

Skincare for Trees

Take care of your skin she says, over the dinner table,
tracing lines on the table with thin long fingernails,                                                                 

It was a Sunday morning in Delta, Mississippi when the body of the missing Negro giant washed up on the bank of the river. First news of the creature’s arrival was brought to the town by a local fisherman...

not the man

you should have fucked
the forest, not the man

the ravine holds secrets
not him

not him
secrets hold the ravine

not the man, the forest
you should have fucked

easy come,

About two weeks into the Coronavirus Quarantine, I began noticing some odd behaviors.

Lunar Flesh

Your daughter wraps her arms around your waist and asks, Does everyone have a skeleton inside? 

Already dinner is on the table. Brown rice, sticky rice, ginger duck, little saucers

Late June on the North Side of Town

We are in a paleteria eating lime & chamoy ice cream—
or is it sorbet? On our walk over here we talked
about ginkgo leaves & how they offer the

The boy’s hair was like the sand. He looked good. They all did, bruiseless in the sun. Striped towels in primary colors lay beneath them, shovels and tilting turrets walled them in. Sonia cupped a

the only person who texts me is my mom

mostly about how her back hurts
i send her a
proverb that says: you are as old as your spine
she replies: then i must be dead
my mom is always

Moonlight hiccups through the dirty windows, jumps around on our faces as the truck hits potholes. We’re already gone, smoking cigarettes.

And oh god it’s wonderful sitting here, drinking too much coffee, eating too many pastries, and loving everything about this moment. 

"On Trepidation" and "When I'm Lonely, I Shop Online for Things I Don't Need"

"32 questions for a photograph" and "Blue Door"

It doesn’t sit right anymore, so neither does he. But in the Brooklyn neighborhood where my mom grew up, he’d walk on his hands for an audience of Irish-Catholic children. Older now than he was then, they’re still in awe. 

One evening you come home to discover Boris Yeltsin standing in your kitchen.

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

I return to the kitchen and walk in on Jodeci pulling a syringe out of her neck. She takes the rope from my hands and uses it as a tourniquet for my arm.

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

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.

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.

On the tip of my tongue, the shadow of your incomplete rebellion 
a riverine blister ; a city-street broken into brick-brats, 

glued together again to fashion a ceramic gnome, its 
rickety

We keep what’s between us a secret. 
I’m supposed to be at your house

and you’re supposed to be at mine,
but, really, we lie in the center of the wheat 

where no one can find us, make

The guy looks over and sees me eating my pepper steak. He is a hard blur of hair and grease. For one brief minute, I think he’s going to lasso me or ask me to come over and polish off a bag of pork rinds.

Echo pressed her index finger to the Facebook icon on her phone, opening up a chat with her recent ex, Morgan, who was still typing.

My husband is a proficient fighter. He catalogs the inconsistencies between the things I say and things I do. Against this tactic, I have no defense. For he is right, but what he fails to understand is the internal consistency in my inconsistency.

“There are some things that just cannot be reconciled,” the duck quacked, as it waddled across the path.

The man was disturbed. There seemed to be no end to the rain's falling, but only he was

We spent most of the night watching Billy Madison and eating ice cream and cookies and building a fort.

Later that night, past midnight, I quietly hear her leave the apartment. I don’t stir. I don’t ask her what, where or why. I stay perfectly still and pretend to be asleep.

Before Sasquatch’s girlfriend got into rats, she had dogs. I don’t remember how many exactly, but a lot. One dog was called Pee Dog. Whenever I fell asleep on the La-Z-Boy, he soaked my leg

TIP TOP VACATION PERFORMANCE

Two women velcroed a husky, mesh tank top
in order to separate the men from the boys.
Then, 20 aisles apart, mimed the crucifixion.
Words I’m akin to grasp start in

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.

Oort Poetica

The way ice can become a verdant spring. Horace, you know the way we stare through lenses; how we bathe the sky in radio waves. Do you understand what it means to listen to a body

Everything that could have possibly budged already had, anything neglectable was long ago done so.

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?

Mama was a truck. A Ford Bronco, to be exact.

The First January Sun I Want to Share with You

At least a handful of sunshine,
the best ataractic; I
steady myself in the russet
downpour, attempting to trace
down this new feeling,
like a

Your gym is perhaps your favorite thing about Hattiesburg. Your student budget is tight, but you’ll manage to eek out thirty a month somehow—you have for the last three years.

The day before isolation, I celebrate my birthday, unwed, the first of its kind in my adult life, my divorce from a great man with whom I shared an OK eleven years, finalized by way of a $250 internet

I’d spend the night there on Saturday nights, get up Sunday morning and drive to my church and preach. I didn’t find God because I wasn’t looking for him. I was looking for me but I didn’t find him either.

Nirvana

I don’t think it was nirvana playing
I don’t know what it was
in the ocean sometimes
warm water is pulsing under the cold surface
I don’t know if I really mean it. I mean,
maybe it’s a

Maybe you can do this. It’s not your idea. But maybe.

Previously on...
Part 3  ||  Part 2  ||  Part 1  ||  Prologue

Your boyfriend was the first...

when i’m

on coke i feel like i’m

in cruel intentions but

i have the personality

of winona ryder in

girl, interrupted

I followed him up the stairs up to his apartment and once inside he made parachutes, wrapping loose MDMA in tissue paper.

If I forget to night shift my mac it’s tragic...

We can stand here / on the corner, arguing... 

Xenia and I had been cheating on each other with the same woman for about three months

After that, I gave up / on finding a good doctor...

People I Don’t _______ to anymore. This is a prompt inspired by Chelsea Hodson’s essay, People I Don’t Talk To Anymore.

I remember the next morning, puking, shaking violently, asking for God’s mercy. There was too much light coming through the blinds. I was a living, breathing version of “Hurt.” 

I didn’t have headphones for my CD player, so when my parents were home I kept the volume low. At night when they went to bed I played it at a barely audible level and hugged the machine against my ear.

We played in our cousin’s backyard. It was always pitcher’s hand out, right field out. If you did dish it right over the barbed wire into burdock, Queen Anne's lace, thistle, milkweed, you had to

Three boys took their positions on the makeshift field. The flagstone wall edging the upper lawn was the outfield fence. One foul line was the street, the other the edge of the woods. Joey pitched.

He visited the library later that night still in his baseball gear, his eye black dancing with tears.  I'm sorry, I said, but three strikes is three strikes. His batting glove let me know he understood.

The veteran second baseman
is fiddling with his glasses in the twilight: The calculated
third baseman is scanning over the crowd for his family...

It felt like a belly flop
crammed into a calcified bounce house

The helmet is slightly too big, and the interior foam padding is the texture of damp dough, thanks to Paula’s fat, sweaty head.

Eighty-five percent of the Earth’s surface is tarp

​I knew a man, older, who was afraid to cry.

Even if it is addressed to you, this is a letter for me. If it were truly a letter for you, it would be written in sound, in the words that lilt on your tongue, rise a tempest in your rage,

The "UTOPIA STUDY" series is a form of experimental architectural photography that focuses on modern architecture in a number of American cities. Buildings and details within them are transformed into

I could have no path, no idea of what I should be or how I should live. I could skate through neighborhoods, where I wouldn’t find a Mormon church or anyone who knew I had strayed from the path I was raised to follow

Since You Left I Have Spent My Days Staring Blankly at the Beer Sign in the Bar From the Time it Opens Until Closing Time

Neon

Neoff

Boredom

I walked through the senior hallway, heart beating fast. The boys’ stares burned into my skin as they whispered things to each other.

There is a crawl space in my lover’s house that his wife and children don’t know about. He likes to sing into it when he’s drunk and he’s only drunk when he’s with me.

Were this place to close, or burn, or fall, in an earthquake, down.
Were it to flood or be bulldozed to make way for the gray &
unmusical slab of an apartment building. Were it to be

Q-tips were her guilty pleasure. She loved the feel of them caressing her inner ear, reaching the itch she could otherwise not scratch. Even when there wasn’t a swish of water lodged within, she loved

She had us trade cardigans. She said it was an exercise in empathy. 

I used to write in circles. Starting in the center.

Part 1 of 4
Part 2 of 4
Part 3 of 4

Apart from all these violent events, Raziel, De Kuff, and the other cult members have been moving between Jerusalem, Safed (site of the ancient

He was in love with his friend Faye, had known her since elementary school.

If you get this far, that means that things are all, more or less, going according to plan.

I was only doing what she asked:  Not listening. 

Despite your better judgement, you click on his profile and then on the most recent post: a picture of him smiling on a white slope with his arm wrapped around a remarkably average, yet still somehow traditionally hot (not pretty, just hot) snow bunny.

The story of religious mania and the story of political violence look very likely to converge on each other.  Having consciously elected the first, Lucas keeps being drawn, sometimes unwillingly, sometimes unwittingly, toward the other. Both feature his new inamorata, Sonia Barnes.

swang

at night i sleep next to you, your skin balmy course. like grinded down sweetgum made smooth in the sweat of the mississippi delta summer. you tear and bend at my will. your spine disjoints

If Lucas is the most obvious Bob Stone avatar in Damascus Gate, Adam De Kuff might also be a contender, sharing with his author an improperly managed mental illness (it’s made very plain that De Kuff has stopped taking his prescribed bipolar meds a long while back)

Brian was psyched too. Not about her requests—Tom Waits was more his groove—but about where things seemed to be headed.

To be naked on the beach after a storm is something special—the salt and the petrichor and the hum of being unsettled that maybe the torrential rains caused damage, that maybe there were nearby ships that will never make it to harbor.

My Magic cards were the coolest thing about me.

Stone had two modes of handwriting: one a gnarly cursive he used to talk to himself and the other block capitals, more easily legible. On a scrap of torn paper in a crate of Damascus Gate research material is a draft of a self-mocking doggerel poem...

I could not imagine the dark well of her grief. I wanted to pretend it had nothing to do with me. But I felt compelled to bear witness somehow.

You would have believed on the screen was where my attention stayed.

"Letter to Brandon" and "Poem for Julián"

After I jack off to hardcore gay porn...

There was a yearning in me for her soft whiteness, which went powdery pink in her most private of places.

Previously on...
Part 2  ||  Part 1  ||  Prologue

By the time he’d arrived at the Atwell Park Summer Solstice Festival, Bill Hannan was so high he mistook one of the paper lanterns hanging from the red-lit oak tree at the center of the park for the moon. 

"with sky as ceiling, / ground as home, / we can call the stranger / lover / and the earth / ours / at least for a little while." 

salat to define the terms of ritual

               [adhan]

A calling, a culling, a billowing
minaret banner, a cigarette starter thrown
out a moving car window to prove a point.

I dreamed we were in a department store trying to buy you shoes.

My Brother’s Two Screams 

I heard two screams from my bedroom. Outside,
my brother had killed his best friend. That day 
the clouds stayed put. The trees swayed under 
gentle winds, but not

He tells me I have a lot of fear. He tells me I have a lot of hurt. He says someone really did a number on me, that I’m a really hurt person. 

You preheat your oven to 425°F before measuring out two and one third cups of self-rising flour into a glass Pyrex bowl. White Lily is the best though it can be hard to find outside of the south and is worth tracking down. It’s milled from a soft winter wheat, and with it your biscuits puff up into soft, light pillows that literally melt in your mouth.

Every twenty-something in Los Angeles has a comedian friend. In late winter, mine invited me to his show in Culver City with a foolproof pitch: no cover, no drink minimum, nearby parking.

I had anted up already: pics in the too-small bikini top he liked, back arched in his favorite Brazilian-cut bottoms. Did you just take these for me? he asked. By your mid-30s, romance is infinite regress. Or infinite repeat. Or just infinite, like Groundhog Day, or samsara. I don’t reuse sexts! I replied. This is romantic. We understand this is romantic. It is, in fact, romantic to take pictures just for him.

She crushes up some blow with a MAC compact and does a line, her anger switching off instantly. She resurfaces on a genial plateau of euphoric haze.

I REALLY NEED TO STOP FUCKING MY FRIENDS

but o, what of the familiarity?
of known hands learning anew?
of a bad outfit thrown off like silk?
of the easy joke of it? our names
re-translated? my

Macy’s Closeout Sale                                                                                                             

I am curious what newcomers think of my city,
but it is not really

I forget how many jobs I got let go from and how many houses picked me up, sheets and everything, and dumped me around the corner until some other work, some other roof overhead, seemed to gather me up and dropped me hence. 

CYCLE

i sit
drip blood
think i am
such a giver
(whether
i want to be
or not)
where’s your effort
your trail of crumbs
leading to
better understanding
safer sex
i love you
you

It was revolution by music. The world would never be the same.

Upward Mobility

First, we push the children into their games and giggles, to insulate them from obscenities circulating in the kitchen  / Then we lose our temper, & act like masters of a new

I don’t smoke, I called out, but no one heard me, and I sounded uncertain. 

I just remember the room dense with familiar sound, the melancholy howl of the perfectly in-tune saxophones, the electric brilliance of trumpets, a drummer with eight arms; my mother looking over at me, expectantly, as if to say, “This is what you wanted, right? This is making you happy?”

A deep hole.

I believe with perfect faith in the perfect expectation that no matter where I am my iPhone will have access to the internet via Wi-Fi or at least 3G.

July yawns. Flashes its grills...

At last our molars burst forth from the gum and we emerged from the rose-colored womb of our first grade classroom.

"Faith" and "Arcade-Scented Candle"

It is late, mid-July...

soju smooch...

THE SEATTLE MARINERS' history is one long tale of woe studded with infrequently dazzling displays of capability, with all of it adding up to exactly zero championships. I say this as someone who has

Only 498 words remain. So, let's turn to death.

Our waitress bustles around smiling a strangely huge smile for this boring work night. My boyfriend Nick and I don’t follow football and weren’t invited to any parties, and since most Texans are either holding or attending parties the place is pretty deserted. After the waitress brings our waters she follows her normal script and asks if we want to try a signature TGI Fridays drink, but her eyes keep dancing to the bar behind us.

My wife and kids and I are driving around in New Orleans, not too far from where I spent the first years of my life and then the occasional week during the summer when I stayed with my grandmother

I was seventeen, so he was a man — had I been older, maybe not.

Bible | Vers

Top to Bottom | scan my profile | For Christ’s Sake | Sing Jesus’ Name | I gospel & apostle | Book of Vers | My rural bottom’s up | My crop /top | down along the road | a hym(n) in

There’s a song in my figurative head 
that I can’t shake loose. 
When I was a body, 
I did so many things with my hands, 
I can’t count. 
Around here it smells like lightning, 
like plasma.

By the time the keys were in my eager teenaged hand, this car had been through some shit. Even ignoring the holes burned into the driver’s-side door, the missing half of the left side mirror, and the warped, discolored metal down the rest of the vehicle, the car was 13 years old already, and it looked it.

The cherry and strawberry seasons have passed; the apples are reddening. Only a few games remain. A Pit Spitter lays down a bunt, and the runner on third crashes in: a perfect suicide squeeze.

                                                           
                                                           {All I Wanted Was Everything}

You say you know the reason why Archimedes

I always knew I would wash up on an island.

I’ve started to clench my teeth before falling asleep. 

He was super into God. He was super into church. And he was super into me

There was a Help Wanted sign at the florists. I had a car, so I walked in and applied. This was a time in my life when I’d decided anyone could do anything. In other words, I was an artist.

The thing I can't wrap my head around, when it comes to the 2003 Detroit Tigers, is what it must have been like to show up to work every day. What must it have taken, as the losses mounted – up to and

My first boyfriend collected knives. He was the kind of boy who listened to Metallica and Ozzy Osbourne, who liked to draw superheroes and werewolves, and was drawn to darkness and violence with the

Amoral Impurity

Picking at ingrown
pubes on the porch swing
in the sun on the first
summery day of May 
and the dogs reach up to lick
my cooch. This is not 
the first time today I’ve

That morning, I rolled over with the intention of apologizing. I'd meant everything I'd said, but none of it was enough for me to end anything. It was the hazards of a relationship; I had to decide if I was losing myself or becoming better.

Of course, Jesus only had hyssop—a bitter wine on a wet sponge—during the passion, but that was not an option at the concession stand.

"My Favorite Hat," "Blue Hawaii Hat," and "Rust is a Color, the Tech Sergeant Told Me"

When so much energy is spent on surveying the territory, adapting to the wonders and confusions of a new place, there isn’t always room to develop as a person.

In the dark room, the computer screen...

Previously on...
Part 1  ||  Prologue

I should tell you I used to be in an imaginary band...

Horace Guy Womack was in the employ of four different Major League teams across five seasons, a serviceable bullpen righty who lost as many games as he won, but managed to keep his lifetime ERA a

I will take an infestation, but only if it won’t spread.

I wandered around Sam Goody, more likely keeping track of my ABCs than taking inventory of the musical selections I passed row after row. It was December 1996, the beginning of another bleak winter in

to Mrs. Burrell

When Ms. Griffin was fired, my mother said 
it was because she was too gay, too flamboyant 
for our small charter school. I mourned her 
ombre dreadlocks and her laugh that swept

She didn’t look mad, but she was something. She was moving slow-fast like a cat, something I’d never witnessed, like I could feel how fast she wanted to go but wasn’t going.

Now, you book an appointment on a whim. But it’s not a whim. You’ve been thinking about this for a while.

Previously on...
Prologue

A tendril of smoke dissipated above us. She made an opening in her hands, revealing a little frog. Its throat pumped rapidly.

For Caite’s Sweet 16 we get a couple rooms at the Motel 6 on Cerrillos, not the one downtown with the outdoor pool, the one on the southside between the strip club and the mall, and everyone can pay

Hank sucked what was left of his cigarette back in one pull and flicked it into the alley.  The hot light of the ember cartwheeled through the air before disappearing into the snow.

I write this from a subterranean lair packed tight with things: books, CDs, LPs, cassettes, an old laptop or two, and a pile of baseball memorabilia. This is where I do my writing, on a desk among all

When my mother built me
again, she did not wait for sobs

to pass. She left clasps undone
then wept in her bedroom.

I tried to reach for the gown
but my fingers mumbled back hair

into metal

I don't notice anything when the television is on.  A bomb could go off in my kitchen and I wouldn't notice the wreckage until the next commercial break.

the man who touches you also touches
the other women of the city, this special
man who you chose to be your first man
even after you’ve met so many men who
wanted to know you as a woman

When I wasn’t on the road, I ate lunch at the diner just to watch Cathy polish the cutlery. 

When our baby arrives I am feeling a funny mix of elation and terror – what have we done?

I will shake your hand now. Later maybe we will have drinks. 

Sometimes we’d see a slip of moon hung in velvety sky, and we’d find ourselves crying for no good reason, or maybe every reason that we could think of. 

We know who has her period and who is still waiting. If a girl takes her backpack to the bathroom or sits pool-side in swim class, she has her period. So do the girls who—when they ask Can I go to the bathroom? and the teacher says, No—say But I really need to go.

Smart girls don’t tempt the devil. I was a bullseye, a bloody Rorschach blot, walking into the prison flaunting my muleta.

MINIMUS OPUS

1997
I was hiding behind a chair
Cutting off all my hair
My father asked me
If I was a retard
I replied honestly
I didn’t know
Childhood is
A population of no’s
In a field of

Neck Tattoo

Your neck tattoo spoke to me but I needed a
translator. Needed a nail gun, a barn wall to
respond to  your forward  advances.  After a
night together,  I woke to find  that your

I turn 30 next month but I’m no longer afraid because I read somewhere that time is an illusion. I am purchasing an anti-aging moisturizer, just in case. It’s expensive, but money is no object. I’m worth four figures.

More than most players, examining Guerrero's life feels like voyeurism, or like wandering hospital corridors with your head on a swivel. When he was good, he was, as James suggested, astonishingly good... But his bad times were difficult to watch, and lacked the privacy that we'd all hope would greet our worst moments.

I watched Jim Johnson try to close out the 9thin front of a half-capacity Camden Yards. My father was supposed to come, but he was six blocks up at Mercy Hospital relearning to use the left side of

And yet, when it came to hitting a baseball, I always liked my odds.

The solidity of contact is registered first in the hands. The knowledge radiates outward from there. 

Old Seals Stadium is a shopping center now. It is a parking lot, a grocery store, a 24 Hour Fitness, a Ross Dress for Less, a Japanese dollar store. I get all my errands done at old Seals Stadium—all

It's their first practice in good spring weather,
not only not raining, not cold, but full of light.

He said that Thompson could be the fastest to hit five hundred, a first ballot Hall of Famer, but I just nodded and sipped my coffee.

Wrigley had put out a study claiming that gum chewing increased performance on assessments and my elementary school took it as gospel, sending letters home asking for us to bring it on test days. Marshall brought Big League Chew. 

Gaylord Perry toiled for twenty-two seasons in the majors, and the look on his face suggests it was hard toil indeed.

The solitude. In the summer, I dine. On hot dogs. And fast balls. Go Dodgers!

Take your pick. Me, they said I hung my off-speed stuff, lost track of the count, lacked mental toughness. I waved off too many signs.

And everyone in section ten is standing

After tonight, I’ll be demoted to my parents’ couch and a job at my uncle’s lumberyard.

Then maybe head over to the State Park near Orange City to rent a canoe and paddle gator-infested waters, strafed by black vultures and large, fictional-looking birds, for the chance to see some manatees, large and stationary in the gentle current of a warm, clear river. 

I’m on a date with this dude, the guy’s gorgeous, and ripped, skin all sunburnt like a surfer with big white teeth and confident eyes.  It’s all too sexy.  But I’m on guard.  I want to deny him but

We are intrepid travellers hunting – or rather haunting – the square. We are exhausting the place of its details.

You elaborate: Christmas just makes people emotional. "No," she says, raking at her hair with French-tipped nails. "I don't think so."

They bang their silverware and take turns slamming the toilet seat. They drag their garbage bins too late to the curb and leave them abused by stark weathers all week. Shaker knows there is an awkward progenitor situation.

Being Jack’s a guy, he’s also tasked with the act of pulling my ass apart when needed so the Radiation Oncologist, Dr. Katz, a short petite woman of prissy demeanor who does her ass work in civilian clothes, even while wearing heels and a tiny purse strapped across her midsection, can insert her finger.

I want to deny him but he’s playin’ it natural and attentive.  He’s good but I ain’t sure if he knows he’s good or if he’s just as polite as he’s coming off.

A furniture delivery arrives, as my mother warned me upon leaving for the store that it might, and two nieces who have hidden themselves in a cabinet come out at the sound of the doorbell to ogle the brightly-colored truck in the driveway.

Sitting still can be tough on a body, just as the shifting earth, and plunging and thawing temperatures can be hard on a pipe.

I didn’t realize, when we were falling in love, that her father was a pathological extrovert.

You are dancing naked and you think you’re alone, but someone is watching. It’s Red, your daughter.

it's dead at the bar so I say
"sure but I'm not in college
and I'm not wearing underwear

Pan and the Nanny Goat

                         After ancient Pompeii marble sculpture
 

The God of the Wild yanks his lover's chin hair, 
clasps her knee, his godhood fully aroused.

She hands me a carved pineapple. Big and heavy.

OUR CHEESE FRIES WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE!

It was 2006, and I had just arrived in Florida for a marine biology excursion sponsored by a certain theme park that dabbles in ocean rehabilitation. To spare myself from any lawsuits, let’s just call it Ocean Planet.