Masturbation is a type of isometric exercise
Lacey Verhalen
Two months in, we began to confide our secrets to each other. Her early brush with benzos. My peer-pressure-prone passivity.
Two months in, we began to confide our secrets to each other. Her early brush with benzos. My peer-pressure-prone passivity.
To our right, I feel the cool breath of a gaping canyon. It beckons, invisible behind the wall of fog, its voice the skid of tires on gravel.
A tiny Angus resides in the right speaker of our sound system, a miniature Malcolm in the left.
I get too drunk on a Tuesday night and tell him I want to marry him. We’ve known each other for six years.
I’ve become a puddle on the floor everyone dances around, stares at, hoping to see something.
I pledged to him two things: one, that I would hex the ones that hurt him, and two, that I would write him poetry.
When They Let Them Bleed: Ten Years After
It took me a long time to write “When They Let Them Bleed” – both in the practical sense, in that I recall writing it in very short bursts because it was
They whispered wow wow wow wow in wind that might've just toppled them over; they whooped; they swapped interlocked arms for tightly-squeezed hands and back again.
The tapering light in that dingy parlour. The cracking leather on the chair. My splintered face in the mirror.
i felt you were floating now with them, in a bubble in space, the bubble has a name, ecstasy, keta, speed, coke, that’s the name of the bubble.
I’ll never forget it. There was a long line of trees to the right of the mound whose trunks had been snapped in half like pencils. The ground was littered with broken glass and bits of paper. And at
Autumn was the season of fire. Boys and houses burned pure white holes into the night, and I self-immolated in every room but the little one I shared with you.
I’ve fought and lied about anxiety and OCD for years, terrified that someone would try to medicate away my “super power.” All that practice made it relatively easy to hide some physical symptoms and
In 1964, I was a college freshman. Someone, I don’t pretend to know who, researched offensive statistics for all Little Leaguers in the New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut area. The unknown
One of us liked the giant head races so much she got giddy when they’d appear in the left field.
One of us would buy knockoff hats on the walkway overpass, a special fondness for beanies with
Know that on my Tinder profile, my pictures are all either full-body yoga pictures or heavily airbrushed selfies.
I was young when the Bash Brothers ruled the East Bay. So young that in our classroom, we treated the 6.9 earthquake that struck minutes before Game 3 of the 1989 World Series like another part of
Almost every day, the sitcom actor goes on Instagram to tell his five million followers what he knows about race, class, and - more often than not, women.
1. There is a protective radius of ten feet on all sides of me.
2. I only know the name of one person in this room.
3. My body hair was groomed solely for this moment.
You are standing on an indifferent platform in Preston Station and a little black spaniel is making unbreaking eye-contact with you as he pisses on your leg.
On the first day of my streaming career, I asked Gabe to come over to adjust the lighting design of my “set.”
In the summer of 2017, my wife and I drove from Philadelphia to New York City for a weekend family reunion. She was seven months’ pregnant with our first child—in the third trimester but still far
Maybe you didn’t recognize me, me with longer hair, growing tits, a new name.
Fifteen years before my autism diagnosis - the year I chopped off all my hair with jagged scissors - I hid a not inconsequential baggie of hash in my dorm room closet. I was, as always, trying to
I often sign handwritten letters with the infinity sign and the words “Stay Positive” like lead singer Craig Finn does. I’ve used “Constructive Summer” as a mantra for years. My husband and I often
"I loved reading Exit, Carefully. It’s unusual, and in my opinion exciting, to publish a play without previously receiving a major production."
-Walker Caplan, Lithub
“Lutz’s work is a marvel of the possibilities of language. Each of her sentences is an intricately crafted thing, deeply complex yet crystalline in its clarity . . . her command of each and every word remains supreme.”
--Mira Braneck, The Paris Review Daily
Garielle Lutz is the author of The Complete Gary Lutz, among other books.
"[Her Lesser Work] is a collection of mordant and formally inventive stories circling themes of, let’s say, desire and escape within repressive structures."
-Walker Caplan, Literary Hub
"Her Lesser Work is full of power and it takes risks and it's alive and real and it fixes a very sharp eye on the shit humans do to each other and themselves."
-Lindsay Lerman, LitReactor