Can you teach an eighteen-year-old trauma? 

Joni says, “Time moves so fast these days.”

                  Joni is somewhere between three and four times my age and I am twenty-two.

Imaginary Audience, who is messing with whose head? Can therapy make one worse than one was before going in?

Located at Oak Park Rd. and Forest Preserve Rd. in Chicago,
you must park about a mile away and make the trip to the en-
trance on foot. 

hell you know it’s only a question of dainty morsels
you can eat dog food probably and survive

It is something like a nuisance that you exist. But I have headphones to help ignore

Pretty girls appeared from behind huge wooden poles below the boardwalk.

Y’all’re fine ass. Y’all got dark in the pill-bottle-orange sun

I went to a poetry reading and a guy I’d slept with once read a list of everything he’d done in Los Angeles and I wasn’t on it. 

We ride in pairs to the stars and look up but flourescent rainbow strips make the everlasting dim.

Cockroaches

This was a sign as far as I was concerned. The high water mark. The North American standard for being a shitbag.

A plague of the poor and dirty.

So when we started to see

It’s an uphill battle to transition to a lifestyle of blunt objects.  

I imagine her
walking into my bedroom—Drunk

between her legs, the whole world
the same temperature; 

I ask the sun to call me at night on my walk home. Everyday I become a little more scared. I recognize people and cars and it makes me nervous. My mother told me girls are most likely to be

I thought about taking a picture of the book or, perhaps, a selfie of me holding the book up against my face. I’d upload this photo to facebook or twitter with a caption like, “The journey begins”

Don't high five me for drinking a 40.
Don't ask me for a Newport.

LOL. When I send you emails re: feminism I feel like I'm trolling you. It isn’t that you don’t care about equal rights and access. It’s just that it’s not “your bag” to talk about it a whole lot.

there are days without. Not quite a gap in whatever they call it, the space-time continuum or circadian rhythms or the tidal pull of every single thing, not quite, but noticeable enough to know what’s not here, that others are not here,

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like squeegeeing sewage out the back door of the break room for three hours. Or push-brooming a greenhouse until your black snot could be used as an adhesive. Cupping each writhing Bag-a-Bug to see if they’ve eaten their fill of Japanese beetles. 

 I breathed in deeply, not knowing at the time I was breathing in the lives of all those at the café, those I sat with just moments before, molecules sliding from the rubble of the explosion into my lungs, bones nestling behind bones.

I never knew a woman who wasn’t capable of killing me with a sentence. Until now?

Instead I see embroidery, lace-making or metallurgy, fine filigree of rusting swing set against wood, the vertical birdfeeders foregrounded, but so close my eye misses them at first. I don’t know what to call this world anymore.

We all laugh, hard, and keep reaching for more laughter deep in our heavenly bodies because it distracts us from thinking the same thing: God is slipping.

One night your boyfriend sleepwalks to the kitchen and brings a handful of M&Ms back to bed. You wake to bleary chocolate splotches on the sheets. You’re annoyed because they’re your nicest

Mmm... I want ILB.

After Pete and his daughter Aya finished the course work to become certified masseuses, they entered the hotel meeting room for the final exam, which began with the instructor asking the entire