We had no idea what Erotica Week would look like when we dreamed it up, over Twitter, months ago. And now that it's finally here, I'd describe it like this: the stories and poems on the site this

It wasn’t my intention when I set out this afternoon to penetrate these woods, but I am here again, tracking a deer, a tanned phantom slipping in and out of the shoots of fern. 

I've respected Rachel B. Glaser's sense of mischief for years. When I heard she'd written a novel, Paulina & Fran (2015), I was excited to see it. What the heck could it be? I thought. Was it

So I retired and wrote a book, / called games for NBC. / But I was far too fond of drink / and prone to anarchy, / my own damn anarchy.

I was six, and we were on our way to get a new car.

The apartment listing, spare and direct, stood apart from the exclamation points that forested her vision.

The cops catch your friend, bullet belt and pants around his ankles. Chain link fence skins your back. Your ankle grinds like burnt clutch on your girlfriend’s Jeep. She keeps a pair of dog tags in her apron. There is a divot in her hipbone.

Obviously the place is unsafe . . . 

I came by to talk. Figured it was time to fix a few things.

“I have a collection of small animals!” I announced one night at a friend’s party.
This might not have been the best headline for my match.com profile.

...darling Jennifer Jason Leigh. An actress who knows pain and ain’t fucking around. I miss her for his art. Margot at the Wedding is devastating. It is pursed-lips mean. You can’t measure its parsimony on heart. 

9. pearls for the gentry
10. marriage material
11. salvaged material
13. some burning islands

Here, in the green glass light of the parlor, Swaingrove cultivates its memories.

I just finished reading Upright Beasts. I adored it. Thank you for writing the stories and putting them together in a collection. First, I'd like to talk about surveillance, a theme that is heavy

he whispered Fuck this shit, and I asked him what he meant.
All he said was I have to go and put me on hold. Now all I am sure of
is Whitney Houston in my ear.

in the movies the alcoholic always swims alone in the dark

I am not saying the clarity is a hoax, just that it is a bit expensive 

how do you know how to make a
difference in my life? I’m so happy.
I’m at a news release from prison in
my head.

Jordan Castro's thoughts re: Young Thug's Slime Season and Drake/Future's What A Time To Be Alive in the first installment of his new column re: rap & rap-related things, "The GwalaCost."

Gary Coleman walks into a bar and says something sassy, but the bartender’s a bear, so instead of replying he stands on a big rubber ball and juggles. There’s a song maybe too, in the foreground perhaps, something an organist might feel inclined to play.

Because my father dips himself / into the vagina of a Swedish woman // and is never found again, / my mother's heart dies.

E says the sky is fuller today and I say it isn’t. Meaning we aren’t significant so why would our surroundings be.

By the time I hang up, the goats turn into Roger Clemens and Pedro Martinez. We smoke my last cigarettes, the three of us. 

When it’s my turn to order coffee I look anywhere but her eyes and whisper “soy latte” like it’s a secret. When she asks my name I tell her. It doesn’t matter how you spell it.

*

The

Jordan Castro writes some jumbled thoughts re: "slang" then writes about some words that he likes...

Roy Scheider is afraid of the water. He has been his whole life. It’s a difficult one to explain, especially considering the life he’s chosen: chief of police for a beach community on a small

If you’re of the age to have returned that difficult game (I’m too trapped nowhere between gen Xers and millennials to pipe up about this or anything, though I favor the X for its aesthetic absurdities pluming in the early-to-mid 90s culture that raised me), or are of the mindset to grouse at the receipt for any difficult entertainment, then your whole life is probably you snitching on yourself under the guise of being genuine, and you should continue to embrace your deciphered and dimensionally rounded community of bullshit Star Wars enthusiasm which predominately infects the arts (or get fucked in your ball cap).