I fear being buried alive, but I insist on being buried when I'm dead.

We agreed to meet in a bar known as the ‘anus of the city.’ It had terrible lighting which obscured its ugly regulars. The regulars had heads like onions with names like Fred, Harry, Deborah, Henrietta. Years of drinking had withered their necks to the size of cocktail sticks and I didn’t pity them because I liked hating them.

Self-guided tour: Exhibit #9 from the National Museum of Broken Marriages

A medium says to channel the late wife through beloved objects. I press my ear to a mug, a journal, my husband’s chest.

Most of the time, I am skeptical of the notion that a writer can find his or her voice.  I warn my first-year students against believing the maxim because, to me, it presupposes that every writer

I've been socialized to be alive / the quiet death of women eating salad

We talked about a lot of things when we were high. We talked about a lot of things when we were sober, too. 

Dad’s side are all boring fucks. Mom’s side, god—all my mom’s brothers thought they were the outlaw rebel cowboys of New Jersey. Wild ones. Alcoholics. They were fun, while they lasted. All those men

We lie here together, gold in charred hands, / pulling the ash from each other’s hair.

As always, feel I’ve mentioned this elsewhere—But here’s how deep I’d get into something without being able to have it make sense. 

This is the most difficult sermon, / The one where the disciples / Burn the hamburger buns and / Christ nearly misses his train.

I grow our loneliness in my mouth, feed you— / sweet and bleak— under a halo of buzzing stars.

An interview with Anna Noyes

I am all the way turned on; turned up. Nerve-hiss-skin. There is a story here, and I am running interference.

First, he ARRIVED – like the swans at Capistrano, or aliens in the desert, or, more likely, a flaming dessert.

“Who is that?” my friend Noelle said, poking me in the ribs; her inflection, a

Dress Code

I’ve got this friend who’s passionate about dress codes. Her name is Sharon. Most of the jobs I’ve had, when it’s come time for a boss to enforce the dress code, they do so

Radio Tower, 4yrs old

The radio tower had big cones on top. We were in the car and I said to mom, “What are those?” She didn't know so she said, “Oh, that's where Mickey Mouse lives.” I was

Cave In
Album: Jupiter
Released: August 8, 2000
Hydra Head
Length: 44:10

My friend Beth was blamed for everything I ever did wrong. In my grandmother's eyes, it was all her fault.

texas was underwater, florida had been evacuated, and the eagle creek blaze—started by fireworks in September of the hottest Summer on record—filled the skies for hundreds of miles with the forest’s ashes.

A sister in place of a father wasn’t an exchange. I’d had twelve years with a father and none with a sister, and I’d preferred it that way.

The Gemini

It would be a lie to say I always went to bed with one brother
and woke up with another—that at night he placed pomegranate
 
seeds on my belly, making constellations on my