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
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.
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
–After José Olivarez
When Carly’s body
isn’t a body but ash
they wish to be poured
into Lake Washington
below a sun becoming half
a sun,
Fine Line
Harry Styles
Released: December 13, 2019
Label: Columbia and Erskine
Length: 46 minutes, 12 songs
My review is best summed up by alternative titles for each track because this is
Until this year, I didn’t know I get seasick.
I board a boat on the northern coast of what they now call Sri Lanka, outside my ammah’s hometown, and I sit down below. I accept my friend’s offer of
“Louis has stopped taking his dose.”
Sarah lowered herself to her knees in front of the fridge, continuing to uselessly rearrange the sanguinium.
“We think maybe you can spend some extra time with him, maybe get him to start taking it again,” Tim said. “You do great with Dotty.”
Normal: a word-world I, as cisgender, could claim. That she couldn’t. So many label traps. Normal, gender, virginity. Sarah.
We spent most of the night watching Billy Madison and eating ice cream and cookies and building a fort.
Later that night, past midnight, I quietly hear her leave the apartment. I don’t stir. I don’t ask her what, where or why. I stay perfectly still and pretend to be asleep.
Before Sasquatch’s girlfriend got into rats, she had dogs. I don’t remember how many exactly, but a lot. One dog was called Pee Dog. Whenever I fell asleep on the La-Z-Boy, he soaked my leg
TIP TOP VACATION PERFORMANCE
Two women velcroed a husky, mesh tank top
in order to separate the men from the boys.
Then, 20 aisles apart, mimed the crucifixion.
Words I’m akin to grasp start in
I confess my DIY rituals in high school, tiny fires fueled by crumpled notes and dried flowers from lost loves and later, gifts from my parents bought during the divorce. In the smoke, my hope conceived visions: sometimes revenge, always return. Nothing I witnessed was more than smoke
3/31: The day is young. Dress smart today Capricorn, big things on the horizon. When standing in front of new people, don’t forget to smile. People are drawn to you, but you forget to drop your
My mother mentioned Darren to me only once. I was in college by then.
"Today I Promise," "Rubric for Asparagus," and "My Life"
Why bother with the pretense of health or ambition, when the world was ending and there were still snacks, drinks, trysts with another unwashed neighbor?
Some days, Luke told me it hurt to sit down. Those days we played in the woods.
We took tarps and string from the shed to make tents between trees. We stole pennies and nickels from the house, put
Like so many gays around the world, I remember exactly where I was when Lorde dropped “Green Light”, the first song from her 2017 instant classic Melodrama. I was in my car, on my way to work. But that’s not really all of it.
Everything that could have possibly budged already had, anything neglectable was long ago done so.
The guy on the podcast had cancer, he was dying –every day he was dying a little bit more – and he was reflecting on being a literary agent.
My writing professor said to me that in order to get better, you had to dismantle the person you were, because that person was killing you. I kept wondering: Why did a killer love me?
Mama was a truck. A Ford Bronco, to be exact.
