One morning on McSweeney’s there was an announcement about a new literary festival in Philadelphia organized by Neal Pollack. It was going to be called the 215 Festival (named after the city’s area code) and would feature readings by Dave and Zadie and Matthew Klam and Neal, as well as other young, McSweeney’s type writers.

The first time I met Nate he asked if I masturbate.

I want to perform for you, pretend to be good enough for you.

Do we keep our husbands’ secrets,
or distribute them like sweets 
amongst ourselves?

I stand just a couple inches from the mirror in my grandma’s guest bathroom at her house in New Mexico, my breath fogging up the glass. As I brush my teeth, I give myself the once over and tug at the

I borrowed my mother’s car and went to the mall a lot and stole things, which I then threw into the dumpster outside. One time I drank an entire bottle of Nyquil and almost died, but nobody noticed.

Australian author Lexi Freiman’s second novel, The Book of Ayn, is the funniest book of the year. In it, a writer named Anna struggles to find meaning after being canceled for her “classist” book. To

but at no point 

does God say 

to a golden calf

“eat lead bitch”

For, indeed, posole shows you he can cook. He fancies an air of the quixotic.

He must be a feminist.

“He couldn’t decide if he wanted to draw David, fuck him, beat him up or fall in love with him.”

            -Dennis Cooper, Closer

When I first began earnestly wanting to be a writer,

For two years I worked in the office of a famous Christian singer as he approached the end of his life.

Listen: I promise you soft vowels forever
Hold fast to this butterfly mouth.

I didn’t like him at first. Seemed like a motherfucker. Girls-dripping-off-him-type, but rough. Scared me & pissed me off, how he looked me up & down. That force, that asshole face, eyes like daggers daring me to see what would happen if I didn’t.

I carried Roman water
like a trickster god, for miles
underground

Then I read Journey’s first page.

This isn’t the first time someone I considered a friend has confessed their love for me.

Booze, Bullshit & Buttfucking is one of those books you can only describe with negative adjectives, despite your enjoyment of it. It’s quick and easy and invigorating in the way stimulants often

I think I’ve lost the practiced falseness of what it means
to be impossibly young. The fingernail moon
hangs over the welt on my goosepimpled thigh. Where
does the world go when not inside me?

At Cici’s, I was a God.

“Personally, not a huge fan of the direction your magazine has gone in.”
 

your sister tried
to drown me

I am supposed to call myself a survivor, but honestly I don’t think surviving is what I’ve been doing.

Storm clouds dangle from the sky, the colour and consistency of wet cotton. Way back in the nineties, when long plastic sausages of cotton discs were a luxury that only the cornucopian West could

I LOVE FUNYUNS!

I’m bewildered. 

Those onion-flavored, 
puffed up rings always
the last offering of the 
vending machine.
They are waiting on
my gentle tearing.

PepsiCo is more

I would talk to the doll, then it would talk back to me, reflecting me to myself. And then I’d adjust my behavior accordingly. And, eventually, become a better, less annoying person. It’s kind of genius in a way?

we forgive nothing
we forget nothing
we just ignore it
wasn’t that always
the problem?