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.
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.
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.
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
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
Your fingers began peeling the fruit, tossing orange scraps among the dirty straw. In the right light, they could have passed for blood.
Here’s the thing about choosing songs to give as gifts to people: it starts off being about them but really, it’s about you.
The Census Taker Asks Me to Tell Her About Myself
Well Terri, I’m afraid
of catfish—not their tunneling mouths,
but the paradoxical combination
of predator and prey in cat/fish—
I’m afraid of
My son is fifteen when he asks the first question I am unable to answer.
When the Santa Anas whipped into town, everyone became a little crazier. They invited the wildfires as if to burn the witches amongst us.
Upon receiving the Pritzker Prize at 42, Welk gained a modest international celebrity and spent his 40s and early 50s galivanting around Europe, Southeast Asia and various island nations overseeing a dizzying array of projects that he believed, in some small way, changed the world for the better.
In early June of the never-ending 2020, I attended an anti-curfew, anti-police terror demonstration in my hometown of Oakland, California.
It was a warm evening as myself and a couple friends
Junior year of college, he touched the scab on the crease of my mouth where concealer failed me. I get these in the winter too, he said, and then, I have a cream.
It’s all about the timing
It’s as simple and invasive as a chime on my phone. A banner news alert, which, for most people, involves elections and wars and natural disasters and celebrity
At the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, I browse the gift shop. It’s scented lavender from a leg-shaped diffuser in the corner.
I’m Writing from the Other Side of the Universe to Ask You How the Weather Is
This is a soft rain, my father says, his forehead a creased encyclopedia page. It is mao mao yu in Chinese, syllables
My last suicide attempt was in a park called Jesus Green. I said ‘last’ because I gave up, not because it worked. Writing plays tricks with life and death so you need to make things clear.
Seventeen days since you spoke your last words to me. They repeat themselves in my mind, I never want to forget them.
I am not a pinch, a spoonful, a half a cup of light rivering down into the stomach where, I should know, the heart truly resides.
