here were girls who sank/ a thousand leagues beneath his hips/ and never bobbed back for air. I came ashore/ in a body of my own, crooked gate/ and piano fingers

Two weeks after the scientist’s freak exposure, a man in black arrived at his front step. It was the weekend, and the man in black brought with him a gift: a jumble of neon material he removed from

The goal of short fiction is up for debate, but it seems to me that, if a story has a single job, it is to subvert the expectations of the reader.

I’m shoving fat candles into dirt,
blowtorching the wicks and tooting
horns.

I couldn’t render enough tallow
to properly honor over 4 billion years,
sorry,

you have so many hills.

The cousin had called my thesis advisor and said something like, “Hey, film professor cousin, can you do this film for us?” and my thesis advisor was like, “Hey, no. But I know a guy who is still unemployed four months after graduation and is about to get evicted.”

We spent that summer on Dad's couch trying not to move, because if we didn’t move we wouldn’t spend

Dibs

In Chicago, we use dibs to take
ownership of what we will never own.
Traffic cones, rusted patio chairs, strollers,
a pair of orange Home Depot buckets.
Flanking the concrete.  We

He started as a single Clay Aiken, the one we all knew with the smiling face and aw-shucks demeanor

Her first reaction was to laugh: "That's so like you, Camilla, to lose an entire car." 

It’s clear that most of these students hate Sal, Dean, and Kerouac.

believing in nothing
listening to jazz
cooking purple sprouting
rituals evoking
somelike
the aspirations
of the expectations
of a certain

the drugs didn’t wear off,
the guy she wants to get in bed
                                doesn’t really care.

when she was 6 she’d never touch cigarettes,
                                but drugs made her slip

washing the wound
in beer and poetry

Look, you smile too much or too little, both at the wrong times, and people don’t like you.  

Yellow 1 & 2

I will no longer keep you; I will remember you yellow

you have a beautiful yellow
ache, a scarf made of heavy eyelashes.
I keep you tucked in my backpack among
other

We turned off the game and drove to the mountains, a dead dog in the backseat

And she doesn’t know a word of German, except “bier.”

One day I came across an inverted map of the Western Hemisphere. Cape Horn was in Alaska's usual position. I felt very disturbed, like air was flooding into the space above North America and

love becoming, like an apple,
this requires time, starred
blossom, then summer, the attention
of bees, grown men
bow their heads, concentrating
on the national anthem
in stadiums

After watching the TEDx Talk, I initially thought, “I wonder if everyone who watches that video will try to write a memoir.”