Still though, that’s fucked up.

I agree, I say. It is fucked up.

Even in death, I would make a showing of my conscientiousness. I would step into a black trash bag, first removing my heels to avoid a snag. I’d put a note on the outside of a second bag before pulling it over my head.  “Please do not open; call the police.”

I stand in front of this body-length mirror. The compression vest is gone, the drains are removed, and all the cushioning gauze has been peeled away; I’ve watched video after video of other

Field Report From Concurrent Timelines

(Or: Basketball)

What I’m saying is:

There are countless alternate realities in which Kawhi Leonard’s game seven buzzer beater against the

I’ve never run for political office and have no desire to run—which is not to say that I’ve never thought about it—but I do know what it is to move, to travel, to traverse, to go around for the sake of one’s ambitions.

Stillness

The sky is a mottled mess of silver. Even
in California, I am expecting the snow to heave its way
from the northeast, to imagine
its arduous, low voice through the dark. In the dark, I

This sense judders through you when you collide with the snowplow truck.

The last time I dream of him, my dead ex-boyfriend asks me to stop bringing him back.

Usually, when I dreamt him alive, he didn’t speak. I’d sit next to him while he sorted mail. I’d watch him turn

The water witch said that if I cut my hair and killed the prince and his new bride she would turn my legs back into fins and I could go home. I didn’t have to think about it very hard.

When I mention this flash of sexual fluidity to people, it bothers them.

Morning, Winter

In quivering snow pools
the cold sky blinks
up at me
while I wander
down the boulevard
in my tired red raincoat,
waiting
for tomorrow’s clovers
to prick the silent

Felt, for a minute, like some façade had slipped, like a glitch in the matrix. Is this in fact the car we came in? Are we who we think we are?

When I was dead, I returned to my father’s house, an old farmstead in Northwestern Ohio, and I stood alone in the gravel drive, satisfied to see that the house was just as I remembered it—small and gray, rising on a plot of land west of a moonlit apple orchard.

I checked the rest of the house, but everyone was asleep. I had a brief moment of nothingness, of emptiness, and then terror bloomed.

in davis at the ceramics conference

on the Easter Bunny’s lap
a polaroid of my heavy bangs

smiles and my mother swears
I loved that bunny so much

I wouldn’t leave the store
to visit

On our third date, we went shopping for funeral outfits.

The following text was stripped, edited, and reassembled from the thousands of comments on a potentially illegal YouTube upload of ‘Song on the Beach’ from the movie Her in an attempt to render the

Wisconsin

Can we please
go back to
your uncle’s house
in Wisconsin
that was used in
the movie
Amityville Horror
the house is
definitely haunted
but beautiful
even with the
piles of dead

The curtains opened, the ballerinas emerged, toes became violins, hands, trumpets, backs, cellos.

Ann and Andy have a small, quiet apartment. They live tucked into a nook in a towering building, which is filled with other people who also live small, quiet lives.

Ann and Andy are made

I have decided to hate you for 100 days
As soon as I figure out the first day

When you run out of tiles, start counting the specks on the ceiling; form constellations out of them because you’d rather be looking at the night sky anyway.

You make me cry

when you talk about her, and only now do I realize
that you never knew your mother at all,
there simply was no space for her in your crowded pocket
carrying poverty like a

I                vomit till I’m              hollow.

To Buy

Saccharine body baby,
snot on the inside of my t-shirt like
I’m made of it, I would show up
to their house wrung out by sadness
the earth speeding up through my feet
up through the

I tell my mother I don’t know why his death cracked me open. She says the small parts of your life seem bigger when they’re gone.

I recently had the good fortune to zoom with Derrick Austin in celebration of his second book, Tenderness. His first had set the new standard for aesthetically beautiful queer debuts, and I devoured

analgesic for apostates

nosediving from the ketamine and
distracting myself from the open
wound on my back, crimson-soaked

mesh shorts and criminally cotton
mouth, the nurse flashes flawless

Freddie had a bomber jacket for almost every day of the week. William wore one too. Kenyatta had one, but he only wore his when it was cold. I don’t remember Xavier having one; in fact, I’m pretty sure he wore the same gray sweatpants all year.

He wasn't a thief, but the world kept narrowing down his choices.