All I have every week is nothing but free time but I won’t tell the twenty-one-year-old that.

People come to you asking how to behave under certain conditions.

In Morocco, a long time ago, I was orphaned.

As I wait for you, my eyes draw circles around other men.

the movement of our bodies had rubbed the edges of my right knee completely raw.

I was naked and felt like Elvis after six banana and butter sandwiches. It was a very dark time.

I first read Wave of Blood in February. Then, I could feel the winter, but not its cold. What I felt instead was warmth: the warmth of knowing. The overwhelm, even, of knowing. The knowledge I had was

I rode four buses from the burbs to the streets of P Town. A kid who is as rebellious as his parents allowed him to be. I am filled with grunge and a hunger for falafel. A youth shaking with an indie

As if he were some seasonal pollen that gets stuck up my nose and reminds me what time it is, every year at the beginning of spring it all flashes back and I’m right there again in that sticky

​I gave him two months of my fingernails and toenails in a purple mesh sachet that formerly held a bar of scented soap. He had never said anything about toenails, but it seemed like the sort of thing he would appreciate. And he did.

Coming back to people after too many knuckled hours in books…and…it’s amazing to think I had two parents and they are now dead, in the shadow world, and maybe watching me continue to flail: look at bodies on the computer screen and eat too many tortilla chips.

Trying to kill my boyfriend’s dog. Drinking Mike’s Hard Lemonade

I want you to see this as romantic

Monica invites you to her church while you’re jumping rope. You’ve never been, and she tells you they mostly eat donuts and play, and talk about the bible sometimes, but just a little. Since donuts

The memories form a bridge, but the boards are loose. If I step in the wrong place, my ankle twists. I fall. And then everything comes crashing down.

Drew once wrote a poem about bridges. He gave

A unneutered preteen breeze / loiters around the trees / this morning. 

- Her: 7 hours, 13 minutes

- Me: 24 minutes

I am no longer interested in the world and know that it is not interested in me.

Dear Jane,

I sometimes wear an old kimono I bought out of a by-the-pound box in a shop basement in Chicago and I listened to a podcast today about how I shouldn’t wear kimonos if I’m not Japanese

The most unforgivable thing I’ve done that didn’t involve sex or lying was today, I was wiping the track before the next train and this man was squelched black in bone tatters in the middle, and I

When discussing Eimear McBride’s new novel The City Changes Its Face, we could start with the Jonathan Franzen/Ben Marcus tete-a-tete that occurred two decades ago, when the “make it accessible,”

Because the trembling lashes are ready / Cuz the door cracks like a whip

We started off as strangers,
you and I.
And I’ll always wonder -
if there had been others
would I have picked you?
Your brothers were already gone
by the time I got there
so I paid for

Why the fuck would a seventeen-year-old girl from Akron, Ohio say something like that? Why would that even be in her repertoire?

Six-thirty in the morning on this, the thirty-fourth birthday to pass, and there’s metal scraping against metal outside the window. A screech heard over fake rain blaring from the noise machine and

One grotesque morning, our friend Dani—frequent companion in cocaine-fueled escapades—stumbled from the spare room, blacked-out, around sunrise.