In jest you call for your horse, but there is no horse. It’s a bright lettuce-green morning, birds piping overhead. You are on foot, and follow the derelict tracks out of town past the Shell Station.  You step off the road and onto a furry plain of high golden weeds and yellow dross. This is strange. 

Two queens walk out of a bar and light a cigarette, me and Lucy Littlefist. Lucy says this. She says, “In a relationship,” she traces quotation marks in the air around the word, “one of you always loves the other more.” And she’s right. She secures her wig with another bobby pin, pulls at her sequined dress. 

“Everything I touch,” he said, twirling his fork in a plate of linguini, “turns to mold.” 

There was once a time when my aunt and uncle had room enough to take us the odd weekends our parents were on vacation. Their house was smaller than ours and I felt haughty in it. The walls were dark and the air smelled musty. In the afternoons dust poured in the air like cigarette smoke in an old black and white movie. Going out into the sun was blinding. 

Cops come and take Hannah s Dad away this morning, throw him in the back of a car and yelling and screaming at him the whole time like he done left the ice cream out all day.

I want to spank Diane Sawyer
In fact, I'd pay upwards of
fifty dollars for it, at least
if she was wearing white cotton
panties

In my fantasy
I wonder
I stop and ask,
"Is

I like to believe it started with her grandfather’s blessing and a bottle of spray paint—even though it might not have. 

Because I can tell it's going to be a crappy day at work I dress up as Virgin Mary with my blue silk dress and white head scarf and lemon drop halo that got coffee spilled on it so it's a little warped, but it will do for one day of selling shoes.

Z’s phone rang. He picked it up and said hello. The person on the other end asked if he was Dr. Schlesinger. After a pause, Z said, “Yes, this is he.” 

That statement, of course, being a lie. 

Gabriel Blackwell’s been busy. In the past two years he’s released three books, two from Civil Coping Mechanisms, and one from Noemi Press: a book of essays and stories called Critique of Pure

Many young novelists have been gravitating toward a movement known as the “Real Newism.” Adherents of the Real Newism assert that effective fiction requires “experiencing events.” And today, you

Buckhorn Golf Course

36 FM 473, Comfort, TX 78013

4 out of 5 stars

This place is a real gem. Just imagine the scene: The Buckhorn Golf Course opens up before you, revealing layer

.I

Be a 22 year old American boy—get really drunk and embarrass yourself in front of the beautiful, freckled, 29 year old Italian Volcanologist that invited you to drinks with her 31 year

I Was A White Girl In A Crowd Of White Girls In The Park

The NSA did nothing after I left a document open on my laptop. In it, I changed your name to new and interesting terrorist

Writers in M.F.A. programs assume, and are often told, that teaching means time away from writing—that after responding to their students’ work, professors rarely have energy left for their own

The boy has horrible teeth and a bicycle. They’re yellow, his teeth, and after school the children take a tree branch to his mouth.

–

His bicycle painted in bird shit: he rides for hours

Hobart: We’ve seen each other at the last couple Mission Creek festivals in Iowa City, and it was there that we got to talking this last year a little about your new book, surfing,

It’s pity sex for both of us, me and Karen and her glass eye, in a motel room off the interstate.  

burrow

you traced along the freckles on my back
with black ink,
like a crumpled constellation

i looked at the picture and smiled,
like a lonesome girl reading her diary aloud to an