When a bikini-clad granny cracks aces / At Virtual Poker  / The Avatar Dealer, / A flickering PAWG, / Winces or winks  

Our social circles had overlapped for more than a decade. To everyone here, I was first an old acquaintance, a fixed figure of their long past. Not the person I was today.

I showed up at a bar that served free meatballs in a red slip I bought at my local Chinese dollar store, hoping to get high on a charmed stranger. 

I'll say the metformin must be working. You'll tell me to message my doctor, ask about upping the dose.

I feel a change coming on. I want to travel more. I want to visit Vietnam, and Transylvania; I want to watch the sun go down along the Nile.

Murray would be my only American-born super.  He was big and fat and had a very productive-sounding cough and he always dressed in the same dirty white T-shirt and the same baggy corduroy pants whenever I saw him—summer, winter, spring and fall. 

Meaghan Garvey knows well the hypnotic power the road holds for introspection as well as the inherent humanity one can find among the regulars at those solitary dive bars.

ration the rest of the smoke, / spend hours tracing maps / to find the pub marquee 

You are new ink that will not dry.

There is a rooster tail of snow and ice behind it, and the roar of the engine enters my chest before he reaches me.

But there, hand gripping faucet / It spoke in a language held only in the body

Why am I being so transactional?
Why am I being so weak?     
Why am I talking to strange men online?

I keep my teeth sharp / cus plush is still abundant // it’s a good reason to keep going, / biting the seam off jackets // biting the states off one by one

Käärijä doesn’t win Eurovision. We both know this and don’t. Instead, the album brings us to a body broken and weary. Käärijä is willing to do anything, joints displacing themselves to the beat.

I am motion-sick with / a divination-death glimpse / of a carnival Earth

"My wife and I are looking for a third partner. I was thinking, maybe…" — here he gave a small cough, his speech turning slurred and hard to follow.

This was only a few months after I lost my husband, and much of that time is a blur. I still felt as if there was something between me and the world. In some lights it was a window, in others a mirror.

Fearless, sweet boy, / your courage is not lost. / I am uncontainable / ​​​​by nature too. 

He looked like the kind of person who fed the pigeons in the park, and he charged $44.99 per hour to come to my home and hurt me. I scheduled him for the following Thursday.

There wasn’t anything to say, or to do, but there was this terrible feeling as though one of these things was the thing desperately in need of pursuing.

good afternoon, passengers. this is your captain speaking. first of all, i would like to welcome everyone to my midlife crisis.

Every time I write it comes out far too dramatic. Everything feels so insidious right now. Everything feels so precarious right now. Everything has fallen into place. 

The knife turns, but blood in your teeth isn't poetic, even when I almost enjoy it

Then, my ex decided that they had to move to New York to build community around doing shrooms, eating olives, and working for NYC Health

He’s dreaming. I can touch him softly when he sleeps. I can watch his body heave and rest. We need this. 

Vicodin is why I was smiling