I started working on an essay about Fernando A. Flores’s Valleyesque in early May. Time got away from me—as time often does—and while I was working on the piece, the Uvalde school shooting

“He just picked up a Nerf gun one day and shot his bottle right off the table from twenty yards out,” Dad would tell reporters, with a practiced shrug/grin combo that played well on television. “We knew he was something special then.”

The stench of my high school ID lanyard hung around my neck like a noose for the rest of the school year, reminding me of my capacity for self-destruction.

The parrot's flamboyant red and blue plume cocks, shivers. The family approaches.

Fuck an infographic — where’s the paper?
Operation: Get Paper to hand out paper,
‘cause all my people needed was their papers.

Who could trust those colors? Smears of scarlet molting into pert lavender.

You might be reluctant to try liver mush. You might think it’s not for me. But you are at a party, and you’ve been cornered by a stranger, and there’s nobody else there you really want to talk to, and

Not long after the bugs started crawling out of my sink, the diamond on my engagement ring fell off.

The Day I Drove to Dubuque (an Hour and Fifteen Minutes One-Way) to Find Out I Had $1.09 Left on a Books-A-Million Gift Card

poetry in real life is January in Iowa,
watching from my

When I opened my eyes, I noticed something large there lying on the ground beneath a half-fallen tree.

If a middle-aged man sobs in a dark room and nobody is around to hear it, does anyone say, “It’s just a cat. Get over it?”

Ten years ago, I made a temporary move from New York to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a research fellowship for my novel. Within a month, I met Gino, a tall lawyer with a pronounced Roman nose,

Regarding my best self, she’s referring to yours truly, the one who keeps Michelangelo and Caravaggio from canceling each other. 

My grandmother screamed when she saw me.

We will have an easy drunken conversation I won’t remember.

After My Husband’s Hernia Surgery

His belly is rounded like
he’s just beginning to show

as if the healing
is its own being inside him.

I tie his shoes, kneel down
to find the

And at its core, it’s a book about candor and creation and intimacy and talking about things that often go unsaid.

She said she made boys fall in love with her. I said I was above her manipulations but I cried when she left. When she posted pictures with other guys I felt awful. I tried not to talk to her. Her messages came less and less until finally the feeling calloused.

i impart resonance on the amber zen
in a manifestation of waterford
and drink down the vacuity      to expedite
enlightenment:
a numb tongue and thawing cheek     and the ringing     reaching

As a baby dyke, I’d waded into sex and romance like a kid at a water park, slowly and then all at once. Now I was on the sidelines.

He’s from Modesto, which is clear without him telling everyone in his row and ours that he’s from Modesto. “Takes me only an hour to get here…because let’s just say…I don’t always drive the speed limit,” he says...

Twitter Prophecies

are sour wine.
You say don’t stop pap
smears after age 65.
Cervical cancer can
still happen at ninety.
I say paper boats
still sail the river Styx
home. The sky
is a

Let’s say you go to the beach.  And let’s say it’s on your own for the first time.  And let’s say you’re 13 and look 15.  Maybe 16.  And let’s say your mom doesn’t know you’re going alone, because Olivia was coming, but the little chickenshit went and told her mom, that stuck-up bitch from Scarsdale, who said why the hell does your father even bother paying for flute lessons? 

Half Brits, half Americans. Special Relationship Rule No. 1: Love thy neighbo(u)r.

On Penguins in Brooklyn

the protagonist feels like
she’s never leaving,
stuck on a moving walkway
in the middle of cincinnati
international airport
in kentucky,
headphones dangling,
she