Fifteen years before my autism diagnosis - the year I chopped off all my hair with jagged scissors - I hid a not inconsequential baggie of hash in my dorm room closet. I was, as always, trying to

When you died in March, five months before I bought my first plant, I learned what sobbing is.

All the time I don’t know what I’ve lost. 

She opens her mouth to speak, then shuts it, starts to laugh. ‘I guess we're both freaks.’

I.

In third grade, we spend every lunch writing comic books together. We invent a cinematic universe of imagined worlds to rival Marvel's. I've known her since I was six, and I've known my sister

Is this how a woman
Disappears, water-tap and soil

There is one boat out every day.
We are never packed in time to take it.

My six-year-old son stretches his arms to their limit as he describes his latest nightmare.

She flips a stool on the bar like a lamb
 

Charming shyness paired with a love of dancing the Charleston in heels in the street past midnight. I kissed her bloodied knees.

There’s so much advice
in the world, such as: if you’re feeling
very low, put on a suit

I made a call
and I lived. 
It was the longest
life of my life.

2 is the grade I was in when I thought I loved Lucy. 2 is the number of times Lucy was arrested for meth in a single day. 2 is the number of Xanies she must have taken the night she showed up to my welcome home party, because she was fucking sloppy.

I think Westerners, and Americans especially, struggle with “autofiction” since their conceptions of self are so fixed.

Do you remember the names of everyone you swallow

One of your axolotls has eaten the other
and every week you clean its twenty-litre tank
of cannibal excrement.

Here’s the plan: we’ll become high-class prostitutes. “Courtesans,” I say, “like ancient Greece.”

i look like eurotrash
in your red sweatshirt
and blue sweat shorts but

Jay arrived once a week, every week, for sex. He was a dental student, worked  Wednesdays at a clinic near my house so it was easy for him to call to see if I was free. I made sure that I was. He

tree tree tree tree calvin calv hobbes

with an introduction from Matt Bell

I know that I should be sad, or at least look sad, or somber, as I go through the things in Johnny’s room.

A man was arrested for creating a labyrinth in an IKEA.

DeMisty Bellinger is the rarest of writers: the poet-novelist. She edits poetry at Malarkey Books and Porcupine Literary, but she’s also known for her incredible prose. (Despite what you read later in

doesn’t know how to give a PROPER blowjob
The spittle
of the sea
                        otherwise known as Jamaica Pond
dries hard on her eros:erring:elbow still deeper
resonating
in her

At three months shy of 36—one year past my baby deadline—I was nowhere near finding someone lasting