A boy in your science class starts sitting behind you on the school bus. He whispers into your hair that he’s known about atoms for as long as he can remember.

In nearly every used book—bought, borrowed, or salvaged—I’ve found them. 

You all don't seem too keen on fiddling here with bloody Henry.

I look down Rue Acorn. Along the red brick factory I live in. And at first all I see are parked cars. Shadows. And the slow moving Sunday traffic farther up the block. Along  Rue Saint-Rémi.

You were right, I tell myself with confidence, there are no fucking fallen dogs out here. Just a sack of rice or side of beef. Plain and simple.

I keep coming back to the church.  

I’ve been told, he said, you can make a house out of magazines. Roll them up and seal them in something and stack them up in a grid formation. There are supports, of course. Has to be a framework.

I was drunk and coked up and thought it’d be a good idea to cut through some strange wooded area. Then I was completely underwater. 

I tell you I wish my dad would come out as trans like Caitlyn Jenner &/or late-in-life gay like my ex-boyfriend’s father.

Every night since she stays in, thumbing the wheel. She burns napkins and cotton swabs. She burns whatever she can find.

On your way home from work,
you stop at a liquor store for smokes.

Our friend Stacy Kranitz, who is a (super talented) photographer, invited Scott and me to go to Skatopia’s 20th Anniversary Bowl Bash in June. Of course, we said yes. Here is

Sometimes my brother would randomly run through the house saying the outsiders sat perched in the trees, they had guns aimed at every window in the house, and we’d run to the basement and whisper our last words to each other in the hiding cabinets 

Being human is about: what’s unobtainable today? 

When I met Magic on 188th and Valentine, he pulled a quarter from behind my ear.  Most guys didn’t try that hard. 

We were sitting on the shores of the Atlantic, waiting for the wind to change and the black flies to get blown back out to sea when the plane went down.

legs apart, wrists willing: I am teaching myself to love sasha grey

A few minutes before tip-off, Gorilla stretches in the locker room—he’s no longer allowed to stretch on the court, not since an activist group called it a prolonged obscene gesture—and he is beset by

Kilpatrick on the artist’s political responsibilities (these are apparently multiple): Hate has more borders than I can muster into the capability of a vision. That’s why I scream in short bursts. 

for Rachel Corso

Have you tried all our salsa flavors before?
This is mild (not medium), this is spicy, this is verde
(That means green), this is volcanic, this is you

Not listening.

“Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.” – Kurt Vonnegut

I met

Sometimes she fears her new husband is her old husband. In her mind the two take up the same space and linger in the same places. 

My new friend interrupted me to say, “You seem like you live like a real artist.”
My new friend had already been twice published by The New Yorker.
I thought maybe she had confused me with herself.

For all the hours we’ve spent with strangers, all the conversations and shared stories, we ask no one’s name—until now.