The pain reminds me: I am here. I am real. I matter.​​​​​​​

I put away my matchsticks / and hammer. You remain, standing / the same as you were.

when I laugh, you perk up
like a misted lily

there’s always something new to say

It is only for an hour or two that I get to panic about pregnancy before the blood starts.

At Bryn Mawr I was taught never to use CAPS / I dawn my lips / and paint my toes / red as a manifestos

behold a God's eye in storm where tapping rings / finish me.

Michelle understood my frustration. She diagnosed Peter with “terminal vagueness” and agreed it wasn’t my job to financially support him.

Hoarding is bad and it’s equally bad when all that indie music doesn’t hit the spot anymore

I like crazy. I like the monomaniacal Captain Ahab, the deranged Humbert Humbert, the murderous Raskolnikov, the obsessed Heathcliff, the serial killers Patrick Bateman and Tom Ripley, the psychopath

Lies are told beneath silvery moons
And far beyond sad boys and girls falling in love.

I wake up the next morning with the sensation that my lips weigh ten pounds and are about to drop off my face. I’m too scared to look in the mirror,

Did I want to fuck her? Or did I want to be her?

It’s the question everyone asks but I’ve never felt it until now.

Before the internet had all the answers,
before Siri, before Alexa,
before TikTok teens with ring lights
explained the universe in under thirty seconds—
I had my dad.

Dad was my Wikipedia.
Dad

In those days, it was popular to ask, What would Jesus do? I crucified myself for days.

They said it was a record-breaking storm. I wasn’t paying attention. I was trying to find a clean bowl and wondering if the radiator was supposed to make that noise. I didn’t think anyone would be out

Look longingly
out the window. Wait for myself to come home.

County Holding

In county holding, girls recite the future from memory.

Sleep is an escape. Blankets for those with perfect zeros.

In county holding, the girls, they’re always using the

We shouldn’t have become friends. Everything about our separate lives suggested we wouldn’t meet—me in the comfort of my sunny Los Angeles home, framed by blue skies, and Frank confined by barbed wire

The hamster was actually a mouse. We were calling a lot of things by the wrong names back then.

Silly’s hands were tangled in his hair. His gaze snapped back to mine. “You didn’t hurt me, Elle. Not at all.”

One time years ago, a friend threw herself a birthday party and bought her own birthday cake, which I found surprising. She said, of course I bought my own cake. Who else was going to do it? I think it’s the same with book promotion. You have to buy your own cake, and make an event of it.

I mean,
it’s only love.

My dad described heaven as a sports bar.

Somebody is going to roofie them, I said. Dave laughed uncertainly. 

It was the summer of 2018, and I had just returned home to California from Italy, where my relationship exploded after we had lived together for only four months.