People come to you asking how to behave under certain conditions.

As I wait for you, my eyes draw circles around other men.

​I gave him two months of my fingernails and toenails in a purple mesh sachet that formerly held a bar of scented soap. He had never said anything about toenails, but it seemed like the sort of thing he would appreciate. And he did.

Coming back to people after too many knuckled hours in books…and…it’s amazing to think I had two parents and they are now dead, in the shadow world, and maybe watching me continue to flail: look at bodies on the computer screen and eat too many tortilla chips.

Trying to kill my boyfriend’s dog. Drinking Mike’s Hard Lemonade

Monica invites you to her church while you’re jumping rope. You’ve never been, and she tells you they mostly eat donuts and play, and talk about the bible sometimes, but just a little. Since donuts

The most unforgivable thing I’ve done that didn’t involve sex or lying was today, I was wiping the track before the next train and this man was squelched black in bone tatters in the middle, and I

Why the fuck would a seventeen-year-old girl from Akron, Ohio say something like that? Why would that even be in her repertoire?

Six-thirty in the morning on this, the thirty-fourth birthday to pass, and there’s metal scraping against metal outside the window. A screech heard over fake rain blaring from the noise machine and

This is what we tell ourselves about places like this: that they belong only to a certain New York, a New York of discrete transactions and brass plaques reading “Jeffrey E. Epstein Corporation.”

But even when I felt ashamed for liking her, I also saw her as somehow supernaturally chosen for me. She rejected me from the moment we met. 

I love idiots. Or at least some of them anyway.

What was I supposed to do on Friday nights when there was nothing to celebrate?

That day I let him touch me in his car on the side of the train tracks outside of town.

Her favorite video was one of a girl getting fucked during a Zoom meeting.

No one has dared come to my front door. No one has dared to meet me face to face. 

At that point her father filled the rooms with firearms. Instead of a house tour Lizzie liked to give friends the glock safari.

They always share their worst secrets with me and look to me for female forgiveness.

That date where he asked if we could have a threesome and I said no and so we had sex on his roof instead

The ladybug nymphs were hatching in the hoop house.

Otters float in pools of blood, swans tangle in rivers of entrails. Heads of leopards wear fringed shawls, their fangs piercing shallow trenches.

He told me he knew someone on death row. That dreamcatchers weaken over time. He said Oktoberfest was the Promised Land.

Before the third time I lost my virginity, I recorded myself eating an orange with nothing but my mouth.

The wanting requires an immense amount of theater.

I’ve never told anyone this story before because it is a little embarrassing. Plus legally I’m not really supposed to talk about it but…here we go. 

I had my first sexual experience when I was