I was nineteen, still felt like a kid, and Tom seemed to like me. 

There were no ways around. There was reverse, but that was its own failure.

She is thinking that when you make love, your brain opens, and everyone knows what you are thinking, and you know what everyone else is thinking, so your husband knows what you are thinking and can control you.

They had taken up four of the ten seats in the sushi restaurant, and the smallness of the room made them serious and giddy, as if they were being admitted to a secret.

Greg listened to hold music while rereading the suicide note.

DID NOT SEE

NOT THAT ONE!

SEE? 

COMING! 

DIDN'T ONE? 

I told him about Nebraska and how it was a dried up ancient ocean bed, how farmers harvested corn and clicks, how there might be kings buried under the freshly tilled soil or angels who dusted the August crops.

HOW DID YOU GET STARTED IN THIS WORK?

In this story I am meant to tell you of the men I met in parking lots. It is night and it is will be raining, though I do not know the science behind the

When the ground thaws and the air grows thin, the boys come crawling out of the valley to your doorstep at the foot of Mount Rose.

             after Ruby/Hilary 

For just 
fifteen seconds

out of my twenty-
six years living

I imagine 
myself 

a white woman

bones breaking
in a new way

my

 It was weird seeing him without a hair wrap, without roller blades, his uniform in college, weird seeing him instead in a pastel button-up.

We’d read in a tour book that the Moscow clubs had shoe and face policies, which meant your shoes had to be killer and your face had to be hot...

if it were untrue, I might have been
less mad; I am the best of drivers

tiger mother, paper tiger, full
of slant, piss and vinegar

that occasion of our first big fight,
he connoted with a

I packed into this room during my second year's semester break of university. For all the years before, I slept with my mother upstairs. Our building is a three-story building built with rocks and

two seasons of sabrina,
the teenage witch
under my belt
i’m feeling powerful

i sign on AIM after 9pm
dial up noises are wands
just a secret crush

it’s always nice,
talking to you,

Shaving his neck to impress...

Cliché

I’m your favourite cliché.
Go ahead – 
  paint a red dot on my forehead,
    push it like a button,
      wrap me in a sari,
        round and round I go.
Make sure it’s
  – bright

She imagined walking barefoot across the grass in the backyard, sitting in the hammock and reading that book her teacher from graduate school had published.

The landscape was a flat dimension, no mountains or hills. Farmland and ramshackle homes that looked like collages, you could see the years in them.

Before the landline was obsolete, Nathan and I lived for late night 272-DATE commercials, our city’s own hotline of lust. You had to be 18 or older to call and of course we weren’t, yet I knew to make

The diary didn’t have many entries, but it revealed how lonely Sarah had felt.

I saw her in front of us then, and she struck me: white parka down to mid-calf meeting white Ugg boots, white hood drawn over head.

Usually I’d just as soon look away from cruelty, but Lemuel flung that chicken square at my face and my first instinct was to swat her, fretting her clipped wings and shrieking like a raspy old woman, down on the heads of the others. Simple reflex.

For a few years, before Carl’s dad won a scratch-off ticket and no one ever saw him again, I called Carl my best friend.

Hey girl, heard you’re on the job hunt—and the place I work is hiring! It’s a bit weird, but… Do you want to be a matchmaker? 

We laughed when he called it a “Shake-n-Bake,” but then looked nervously around the room; the crew veterans weren’t laughing.

Charlie would never cannibalize me; he’d have nothing to eat.