After last night, I’m no longer allowed at The Mint Bar. You could say it’s because I choked the owner’s daughter up against the wall next to the jukebox that only plays Cash songs—pushed her hard enough that a quarter fell from the coin slot—or you could say she deserved it.
Is it weird to call Dave Housley the “Uncle” of lit mags? He’s that guy, the writer/editor/generally amazing human that everyone in the literary world seems to know. Dave is one of the original
I’m in accounting. Sally in the lab. Among her other duties, Sally is an odor judge. Her nose is rather ordinary to look at, what my grandma might have called a button nose. But Sally’s nose is legend.
The man wearing a Ray Lewis jersey doesn’t know who Ray Lewis is.
Dream Vision of Frank O’Hara
it is 4:40 and I’m drenched in moonstone, sequins, fishnets, and general getting-out
of-bedness at the corner of 11th Avenue and 30th hoping for something
We beat Brock Shamos every day. We beat him with jump ropes we stole from Mr. Randall’s P.E. class
KISS ME THRU THE PHONE
trembling string between two cans
across town fry-gravel longing compressed voice-tightrope
transposed, delivered to you I don't know how it happens-
We are always looking for something to cure us of the pain of being made of fallible meat.
The Chetrams were from Trinidad and listened to Bollywood music on the weekends. They were good, hardworking people. Their kids were polite. They were not Muslims as far as their neighbors could tell, since Chetram liked Miller Lite and the daughter wore high-waisted shorts in the summer. It was not polite to inquire.
The first time I went to Paris, I was seventeen and stayed with a man who was thirty-three, Sylvain.
So Mom didn’t come with us to the grocery
store, but she insisted when a box of Grape Nuts
or Popsicles tasted off it was because we hadn’t
selected the box behind the first, that hiding
in the
It sat in my wallet while I made out with a guy during the “Josie and the Pussycats” movie
I never mixed meth with hooking. Not once. I didn’t want to ruin it! (Meth, I mean.)
When the first billionaire exploded I was at the drive-thru with my dad.
...not enough steroids, / the wrong steroids...
It’s August in Manhattan when we both decide to leave. You accept a job in LA and my boyfriend packs my life in a U-Haul and drives it to our new apartment together in Pittsburgh.
When I toss
...How to say / hello without breaking / stride...
The funeral home gave me a special calendar to keep track of the Yahrzeit until 2034, but after that I will be on my own.
It is a miraculous thing, this audible sun.
o lion mane and petalled armore, / you sweet corona of twist & curl...
Something about a synaptic neurotransmitter. You won’t really understand.
His voice, crisp like apple vodka, poured into the September air.
