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.

DID NOT SEE

NOT THAT ONE!

SEE? 

COMING! 

DIDN'T ONE? 

Greg listened to hold music while rereading the suicide note.

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

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.

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.

Had I broken a vase, it wouldn’t be as bad. Events like that are outside of reasonable control. Anybody can slip and trip over a vase.

             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

When Harrison came back to work two days later he handed me a piece of notebook paper that had been folded into a perfect square. On the outside it read: a reply, as promised…

Coco with hairs between her eyes she had me pluck sometimes at sleepovers, and eyes that opened me up like I needed fixing.

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.

it’s hard to explain how tired I feel       each day
my autoimmune disease attacking my bones
at the hip joint and spine       I limp down the hall

to the water fountain where I joke but am

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.

She looks away but can’t get the photo out of her mind, like gazing at the sun, an electric blotch.

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.