Destiny's Child third album track # 1 she plays as if I don't already know what’s up. She just wants me to remind her she's a queen so I play Coming to America, and we're okay for a few more years.

Later at night she looked by the fires of Ohio at the burn on her palm 

He wore these fuck-you neckties (one looked like a whole trout hanging down his chest) and bad jeans dyed mint green, lemon yellow, cake frosting blue.

Fourteen tourists had signed up for “Six Days in Glorious Vienna: Open Plan,” and since Kotoko and I were the only singles in the group, it was inevitable that we ended up rooming together at the hotel.

A boy in your science class starts sitting behind you on the school bus. He whispers into your hair that he’s known about atoms for as long as he can remember.

I look down Rue Acorn. Along the red brick factory I live in. And at first all I see are parked cars. Shadows. And the slow moving Sunday traffic farther up the block. Along  Rue Saint-Rémi.

You were right, I tell myself with confidence, there are no fucking fallen dogs out here. Just a sack of rice or side of beef. Plain and simple.

I’ve been told, he said, you can make a house out of magazines. Roll them up and seal them in something and stack them up in a grid formation. There are supports, of course. Has to be a framework.

Every night since she stays in, thumbing the wheel. She burns napkins and cotton swabs. She burns whatever she can find.

Sometimes my brother would randomly run through the house saying the outsiders sat perched in the trees, they had guns aimed at every window in the house, and we’d run to the basement and whisper our last words to each other in the hiding cabinets 

When I met Magic on 188th and Valentine, he pulled a quarter from behind my ear.  Most guys didn’t try that hard. 

A few minutes before tip-off, Gorilla stretches in the locker room—he’s no longer allowed to stretch on the court, not since an activist group called it a prolonged obscene gesture—and he is beset by

Sometimes she fears her new husband is her old husband. In her mind the two take up the same space and linger in the same places. 

Kneeling on cement, the lifelike nutz dangling in her face, Daniela tried to work the screwpin out of the anchor shackle, but she was unable to unjam it from the lughole, her press-ons flexing dangerously against the hitch. 

I walk every day until I stop talking to myself. 

The card reads Leo Schwezeger, MD. The only other print is a phone number and the phrase If you have to ask...

Worst thing I ever did I did when I was doing Hank’s cousin, Theresa. It was a crime of sloth, a crime of not-saying.

Golden Boy lived in a little house on our mantlepiece.

Oliver sat in the locker room, a towel tucked neatly around his waist, next to a Smithfield rep who was slicing open packages of hot dogs and wrapping them individually in foil. Oliver did not have

I am a woman of discipline, which is to say: I don’t act at random. But I once slept with a mindreader on a whim.

I’m to blame for every fake suicide this week. If anyone knocks at the door I shout the addresses of shut-ins until I hear footsteps. If the knocking continues I take my gun and start shooting through the walls.

Most nights he wakes to use the bathroom and in so doing wakes the dog, which in turn figures it might as well do the same.

I had runoff all over. I hadn’t escaped the heartland.

I’d pony up the midnight sun for a pulled pork sandwich.

My friends told me they’d introduce me to May, but only if I understood that she’d been through a lot and didn’t need any more bad things to happen to her.

His family was there. My family was there. My bouquet was made of flies.