It took so long
   to realize we never learned to speak of joy, instead send
clips to make each other smile.

‘Le Trou Normand,’ I said to the Garçon, winking knowingly at him.

We long to see the world from her point of view, the worker. But do not ever long to be the worker.

My mother had been on a rampage to find me a husband since I started college.

Really I think all art should be freely available

“And no one knows in what guise the end of the familiar will arrive.”- Joy Williams, “Cats and Dogs” 
 

Dale-Anne has heard a noise in her backyard, loud enough to pull her up from sleep.

I’m good at getting fucked up. I’m good at having fun. Go go go. I’m best at forgetting.

The boy
is just a boy until he is a street name.

To try to allay his doubt, or figure out of it’s real, [Li] mentally consults his in-progress novel, as if it were a friend. He intuits, in an intuition described by the line you quoted, that his doubt is wrong, is habitual and self-sabotalogical.

If a ghost is the impression you leave after you, then the divot you leave in your old bed is a ghost. 

Within 1-3 weeks, the body will begin to actively decay. This is when the organs, muscles, and skin will liquify. The hair, bones, and cartilage will remain.

Someone there used the blackest-known shade of black to make a circle.

Gratitude is not the response she expected. She smiled through thin lips, missing the hoped-for fight.

The whole first week after moving into his Brooklyn apartment – our apartment he keeps correcting me – I’m horribly constipated.

Gunderson could hear the vehicle’s noisy carping from eight blocks away, like a herd of wild trashcans rolling down the street.

If we debate giving up,

then lose our voices

like a screw dropped in grass.

Oh, Anya!

I’ll dig a pit where it can roam, feed off the aporia of my lust, wash its hooves in semen, soak in pools of piss.

The show literally fuckin has to go on.

Oh, absolutely a mistake to have given the wealthy Protein Bar Daddy my number.

I walked up to the window for immigration services at the Embassy. A Mastiff sat behind the pixel glass, writing furiously. He didn’t look up when I said hi, so I knocked on the glass, twice, with my fingertips.

Steady State Phenomenon in Muharraq Before

This is the invention of a spectacle. The verge of fungible wealth, dirigibles
of electricity. A thunder of dust and rickshaw sermons in Muharraq

Nobody liked accidents. Her bumper had merged with her backseat. Her windshield had shattered. The glass absorbed as much sunlight as it reflected, a pile like salt left after a backwards glance.

Playin’_The_Keys

i love to dance, sing, write, chill, read
and play the keys, but sometimes, life
doesn’t allow me to hang out
and do my thing, which means
i have to divide my time into many

I wished you knew how it felt to sit at the dining table with all your cousins to crack the shells wide open.

Your fingers began peeling the fruit, tossing orange scraps among the dirty straw. In the right light, they could have passed for blood.