It felt like belonging, like being needed.

I was beginning to understand that when Nana said family protects family at any cost, she meant any cost.

I want you to see me ignoring you.

My last few nights at Will’s house were strained but also pleasant. I consciously wanted to love him. And I did, in a way, but I was drifting.

The terrains alien, the people / Extra terrestrial / Make sense do not.

Punishments:

—deprivation of recreation

—bread and water diet

—48-hour dungeon stays; no bed, no food, no lights

My wife and I run around the tables in our moisture-wicking workout clothes for the entire 177-minute runtime of the masterful, twenty-nine-track album.

This was my chance! I moved to the seat in front of her and we lay across our seats and laughed together like a yin-yang necklace coming back together.

or because I’d seen him unwrap the extra large condom and suddenly longed, anxiously and fatuously like a girl wanting her stuffed animal, for my first boyfriend who weighed less than me

writing like someone might care

I smoke on the drive to the corporate bookstore, where I slip Eve Babitz’s Sex and Rage into my fur coat.

a Clown Slam: the slutty Christmas clown concerned with rent prices

according to some, no unicorns were on noah’s ark 

The position in which you are structurally dependent on surrendering the entirety of your scheme, and all the various information edges embodied in it, each time you want to add someone to your team is a bad position to be in.

Alex burrowed into my cold, bright grave, nestled in tight.

That night she found me on Facebook.

The written word, music, visual arts. These, if done well, are the unconscious sneaking past the curtain. Using language to self-implode Logic. Some real Matrix shit.

He liked to change it up enough so that I couldn’t have his pastry ready with his coffee and then he’d have more time to try and converse with me, an extra joke or two. 

In the black screen, I watched M undress me slowly.

I wanted to cry.

We're given breath, also the mystery of life.

If I tell you what’s in the bag, will you let me continue to play dumb?

“Pull over,” I said, “I’m finna yerk.”

Midway through our relationship, he had told me that whenever we had sex, he needed to think of other girls in order to stay hard. He told me everyone did it

One night Evan and I got so drunk on grape liquor that we started making out in the shower

I consider asking Richard if he’ll piss on my book but I’m still too shy.

A Small Gift

…is awareness, at first,

and then it may take over,

for a while, and also recede

if it must, and at times, it must.

That sometimes gentle ebb and flow,

and sometimes