Mathias LaFleur: the first Eagles Got Talent contestant ever clapped off stage.

The narrator of Ben Lerner’s 10:04 goes to see The Clock at Lincoln Center in New York. The Clock was at Lincoln Center from July 13, 2012 to August 1, 2012, but in the book’s acknowledgements, Lerner explains that time in the novel does not always correspond to time in the world. This creates a sort of magical New York where Occupy Wall Street, The Clock, and Hurricane Irene can all be happening practically at the same time.

Whose hometown are we in in the dream? :: Do you hold my hand or do you disembowel me? Whose side are you on, anyway? :: My confession on this Sunday morning is: we are all human.

His first sensory seizures were like a passing light-headedness.

They stopped my mother’s heart four times.

I’m pretty sure very few people fantasize about being burned at the stake, but I do think there’s something fantasy-like in a witch burning – putting a ‘dangerous’ woman in a submissive pose, publicly humiliating her, watching her scream and writhe as her clothes and then flesh burn away.

You have been saved in vain.

Sigh, my beloved. May I be her Pepe Le Pew?

Hello, I'm the wise giraffe. Tell me how and why you came here.

I definitely gained traction in my twenty-ninth year. At twenty-nine, my skin cleared up, I sold a book. But the biggest accomplishment for me was that I stopped working retail and made my money solely from writing and teaching writing.

The rock is slow to change. The wave can be exploded by a breeze.

I’ve seen men punch holes in walls. They lead nowhere – I’ve looked, I tried to escape. I’ve seen what happens afterward too.

You interviewing me for Hobart is pretty much the peak of my hustle. Maybe this is me selling out. Maybe this is growing up. 

another kind of crime scene
walking to the post office with A

One time, a pair of blue Tattersalls, two Sigma Chis home from Clemson. Two, again: faded blackwatch shorts and a stretchy lavender thong, smelled like Obsession. Just that one time.

For ten years, General Motors knew about faulty ignition switches in its cars but concealed this information.

Corbin was listening to Pete Rock and CL Smooth’s T.R.O.Y. and thinking of Trina McIver when shot inside the bodega on Fourth Street.

I first came to know Miles Klee when I published him in my anthology, Watchlist: 32 Stories by Persons of Interest (a beautiful brand new edition of which is out this May from Catapult with

On stage my son forgets his line and my husband Sam whispers “The winters were hard for the settlers”

Let’s go back to the twin indigo suns/ in our eyes. To shooting holes/ through the walls of our skin, one/ metal kiss at a time...

In my country, says the bulkier, pastier, frowning president, journalism students are admitted to university according to their eloquence in abbreviating my biography.

When I lived in Michigan, I ruined baseball. I recorded every Detroit Tigers game only to fast-forward between pitches, so I could get back to stacks of paper grading, so I could be as productive

I wanted this essay to be about love. I wanted it to also be about my grandfather and Arkansas and my copy of Ain’t Doing Too B-A-D, Bad, a live jazz record by The Bobby Bryant Sextet. 

When a strawberry’s
sore, it leaks

I’m just gonna say it. Invisalign is bullshit.

New ballparks keep sprouting up,
like summer sweet corn. 

Midway through the school year one of the kids in one of the other sixth grade classes hung himself, so we couldn’t call the game we played in the mornings ‘suicide’ after that.