I left Texas to have him. Not for him, but for me: so that I would survive.

I sat down. Cassandra ordered a glass of wine. “I hope this wasn’t sudden,” she said.

i wonder how hard it is for her to 

reconcile being a Christian and a witch

judge and judged. how easy 

Thus commences the portion of the evening in which you retrieve the Svedka again to sober up

cause that is all we knew 

we drank liquor, smoked crack, 
escorted prostitutes around in our car,

hoping for a bisquit, or a small dead bird,
a song sweetly sung; that no one ever heard.

I listen to Queen. “Another One Bites the Dust.” The soundtrack of my life.

And I wonder if we are always standing at the street corner eating each other’s hearts.

Countless times she was quoted for her famous remark that “monogamy is a prison that free people voluntarily check themselves in for the duration of their lives.” And “can anything be more depressing and boring in life than fucking the same person over and over again, for decades?” 

In essence, there’s only one advert that can placate the masses. It’s by the surfers, slicing through the whitecaps like rotten pomegranates. It’s a thirty second trance, with a Magritte bowler hat, floating over roadkill.

i would certainly suck the islamic terrorists' cocks to save alysa li

The club isn’t so different than Plato’s cave, she thought one night after getting home from work, and while staring for a long time into her aquarium admiring its latest tenants.

With a spoon, I am turning you away.

if i tally it
every time
my tongue finds cherry

do you still
pull your thumb down my lip
sweet surrender

in the other city
the social concepts that killed me here
stay peripheral 

It’s abundantly clear that Gass sweat blood over this novel, every word chosen with the utmost care, a master at work.

I regret inventing t-shirt language model twink size

She decides that maybe being an object of consumption isn’t so bad. She even begins to enjoy the attention. Becomes aroused by the men’s overt enthusiasm for her. She is an edible woman, dolce, delectable; something to be devoured.

In the old gym, value revealed itself in nontraditional ways.

Spit flew from the man's mouth when he spoke, if he spoke.

I’m in the habit of befriending slightly older women. Maternal figures leading bohemian lives within suburban parameters. Seekers abandoned in childhood by dead(beat) moms. Motherless daughters can sniff out other motherless daughters. We wear our stale deprivation like a discontinued perfume.

There was a guy called PixelMoth13 on a late-night forum saying, “Love is a wound that repeatedly tears and stitches itself back together.” I clicked like.

She lives in Brooklyn, so I go to Brooklyn.

When I got back to your room, my makeup gone, wet strands of hair sticking to my back,

“We’re not sex workers, are we?” Grady asks one night while we’re watching Bake-Off on the sofa.

When I came of age, the rules were a little different. We were all facing the same battle back then, so it didn’t matter as much what labels we used for each other.

Rude Guy tortured me. I would go over to his house in ridiculously slutty outfits, and he would only open his door a crack, and give me a poetry quiz. Then he would let me in, but still not fuck me!

The snow is falling in big chunks, disguising the somber gray of the neighborhood I hate, Bushwick. I thought it’d grow on me by now, our second winter here; it hasn’t. On the street below is a bright