according to my mother, men
are just thieves rifling through another’s calm...

oh raised-hand Matt. you
centrist bastard, your mouth kool-aid-stained
with stubble, it gushed and fucking gushed.

You can never return to the track. A hard truth, heaven knows, but heed me— delay the wreck
and coma. Take a longer backwards way and savor that last downhill run, the final door to close.

...she told me she had lived in Singapore
too long to call it home anymore. She hated her name so together we made
her a new one, & like this she finally belonged to herself.

Even at his weight, he could still get himself down to a 40 degree angle with the ice at a speed that pushed him to vapor, when you feel dilated into thin air. That is what they called it in the New England League: pushing vapor.

Remember when Lena Dunham said

She wished she’d had an abortion?

I will feel like a bad country cover of a Kate Bush song.

On the other side of the apocalypse, you will become something unimagined,
you will dissolve and finally become the wind—then, you will be enough

Chloe N. Clark is a writer, teacher, editor, and frequent Twitter chef. (See here.) I’ve taken a ton of her poetry and prose workshops, and been lucky enough to have published two stories in the

That summer was like a movie or waiting for a movie to start, stuffing yourself all through the previews and when the movie came it was always a rag...
 

i ask if i could be june
my birth month he says all days any days
for a smile like mine

“To the sweet life!” Phil says.  

> One of my favorite reading experiences was a book called "The Silent
> Woman" by the journalist Janet Malcolm; it was about the biographical
> treatments of Sylvia Plath and the impossibility of biography in general.

She combs her hair: I love her. She throws up on a Thursday after drinking at a new club spot on a Wednesday night: I love and love and love her. She spills her coffee onto the floorspace between our desks and laughs, Black Cup Down: What can I do?

Hobart and HAD contributor Rebecca van Laer's debut novella How to Adjust to the Dark (Long Day Press, April 12) weaves together poetry, fiction, and criticism to follow the narrator Charlotte as she

I started working on an essay about Fernando A. Flores’s Valleyesque in early May. Time got away from me—as time often does—and while I was working on the piece, the Uvalde school shooting

“He just picked up a Nerf gun one day and shot his bottle right off the table from twenty yards out,” Dad would tell reporters, with a practiced shrug/grin combo that played well on television. “We knew he was something special then.”

The stench of my high school ID lanyard hung around my neck like a noose for the rest of the school year, reminding me of my capacity for self-destruction.

The parrot's flamboyant red and blue plume cocks, shivers. The family approaches.

Who could trust those colors? Smears of scarlet molting into pert lavender.

Fuck an infographic — where’s the paper?
Operation: Get Paper to hand out paper,
‘cause all my people needed was their papers.

You might be reluctant to try liver mush. You might think it’s not for me. But you are at a party, and you’ve been cornered by a stranger, and there’s nobody else there you really want to talk to, and

The Day I Drove to Dubuque (an Hour and Fifteen Minutes One-Way) to Find Out I Had $1.09 Left on a Books-A-Million Gift Card

poetry in real life is January in Iowa,
watching from my

Not long after the bugs started crawling out of my sink, the diamond on my engagement ring fell off.

When I opened my eyes, I noticed something large there lying on the ground beneath a half-fallen tree.

If a middle-aged man sobs in a dark room and nobody is around to hear it, does anyone say, “It’s just a cat. Get over it?”

Ten years ago, I made a temporary move from New York to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a research fellowship for my novel. Within a month, I met Gino, a tall lawyer with a pronounced Roman nose,

My grandmother screamed when she saw me.

Regarding my best self, she’s referring to yours truly, the one who keeps Michelangelo and Caravaggio from canceling each other.