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.

Tonight a boy goes to a field where he knows a horse has died.

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.

I make him coffee, I make hot chocolate for his kids, and sometimes I buy his weed.

April

A cycle with seven edges
equals my dream of bicycle spokes
jutting towards the center
of an ice cream bowl. Don’t tell me
the seconds yellow took to elevate
to red isn’t

People are just the mares under their craft.

You were dead: tiny birds of glass littered the road like jeweled confetti for a New Year’s bash.

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.”

Or more specifically its monster, long tail whisper in our swimming pool: in a valley girl’s mind. 

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

The Great God Pan

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." 

If this were paint it’d be asymptotic, red.

A girl on my train is watching Kylie Jenner’s snapchat. I lean in and watch over her shoulder. I can't hear, but it doesn't really matter.

When I turned to face you. I knew I had to face you.

I found out I was pregnant in the bathroom of a wine bar. 

Too many toasties cut in quarters for Subway. Too many indemnity claims at Allstate.

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

If you’re wanting to write a poem that will appeal to the largest possible amount of people, you really can’t go wrong writing a poem about water.

There is an eerie glow to the hollowness of bark that has been stripped of its leaves and fruit

I try to turn everything into a metaphor so I don’t have to face it straight on.

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

please alert The

Paris Review that this wrenching November

is truly the cruelest month of all.

When was the last time she ran? At all? As a real kid in bare feet in grass at her grandparents’ house.