I bought a compilation of Michael Jackson Number Ones when the Wal-Mart Supercenter finally opened. It feels right to have viewed the future from my bedroom, door closed, music up.
In fact, even if I could reverse my reach through the years spanning us and stop you, I don’t think I would.
I return to the kitchen and walk in on Jodeci pulling a syringe out of her neck. She takes the rope from my hands and uses it as a tourniquet for my arm.
“But beauty wasn’t enough.”
– Gretchen Marquette
Nurturing as a kestrel checking your sheets for mice I am a woman designed. Because I was designed
it follows that I was
We hear them in the kitchen, leaping around with meaty thuds, and in the morning Cheryl has barricaded the kitchen door. She tells me the landlord sent someone to assess the situation.
“Okay,” I
I suppose I was in a conspiratorial mood when I told you that I don’t always feel like a man.
The last dozen years of my life could be mapped out by my Craigslist history, moments when I’ve called out into the abyss and some voice has come whistling out of the darkness with the exact inverse of my need.
Psycho Trev scared the shit out of me. He did the dishes at a Tony’s diner in town. He lived in a singlewide out in the woods and did a lot of shrooms. He had huge parties at his place too.
young girls walk alone
at night and
laugh from their bellies, sing
in jungle gym voices
to cradled stars
It was 2007, and the closest that most Americans came to hitchhiking were two new movies: The Hitcher and The Hitchhiker, a lower-budget version of the same plot. In both movies young naïve roadtrippers pick up good-looking psychopaths in the desert. In The Hitcher Sean Bean chains a teen heartthrob between two semi trucks and pulls him apart at the waist.
There is a loneliness to many things, I am finding: there is a loneliness to sidewalks, to tea bags, to guest bathroom wastebaskets. This hickory wood sits like concrete in my hands; there is also a loneliness to interacting with materials, materials that can’t know what kind of end they’re meeting.
On a bench outside the classroom on our fifteen-minute break, I close my eyes and practice the grounding exercise my therapist taught me earlier that week. Facing the rush hour freeway, I try to
(Iowa City 1995)
What I think I want, is Inez . . . Fuck! Now it’s a blur. Drawing. Rather, a dream in which I’m drawing.
Canada Goose — the age-old adage of
whether or not a ton of bricks or a ton
of feathers is heavier & the fact that it’s
always the feathers because you have to live
with the guilt on
On the tip of my tongue, the shadow of your incomplete rebellion
a riverine blister ; a city-street broken into brick-brats,
glued together again to fashion a ceramic gnome, its
rickety
I came from the city, was sort of swept away by the bristles of time and love and bowel-upsetting uncertainty, and I am now in a dust pan called Mora County, New Mexico. Dust pan is not derogatory; it’s a just a place where things end up.
“Hey buddy, are you alright?”
The husband looked at me with a smile disguising mild alarm.
“I’m going to be.”
The guy looks over and sees me eating my pepper steak. He is a hard blur of hair and grease. For one brief minute, I think he’s going to lasso me or ask me to come over and polish off a bag of pork rinds.
the history of countries is the story of roaming. And maps are relatively new inventions in the human narrative
i came to America too young
to be foreign, so all my dreams
are American and contemporary,
present and blinding as morning-hunger:
a fat gull scavenges for loose plastic bags
and their
My husband is a proficient fighter. He catalogs the inconsistencies between the things I say and things I do. Against this tactic, I have no defense. For he is right, but what he fails to understand is the internal consistency in my inconsistency.
ON Drugs, Magic, and the Sanctity of Losing Your Shit
Like any self-respecting Gen-Xer, I spent the bulk of my teenage years doing drugs. I tried all kinds: ecstacy, mda, coke, meth… I even tried
is the egg yolk, broken when it was meant to be fried,
the sobbing of a child who’s just found
that their favorite character does not survive,
the scraped knee, the store out of cigarettes
But I didn't feel sick anymore, was the thing. The sweating, capsizing sensation, the kaleidoscope of Muppets I saw square dancing behind my eyelids on that third night when it was legitimately bad, all that had been weeks ago and still everyone brought my mother food.
