Say thank you
for what they’ve done: the late night call
to AAA, the five spot for a hot dog, the cups
of coffee & scones

The fantasies I’ve been having
Are so awful

My mother’s screams woke me up.

I have come to teach you love / and the solitude that comes / with ultimate strength.

In late July, in the mid-nineties, I begged Mom and her fiancé Paul to buy me a big ball at Roses department store.

Showboat said he'd like to take me out sometime. I asked why.

“Because I think you’re attractive, and so we can hang out somewhere other than the coffee trailer,” he said.

It was October, ten

I want to perform for you, pretend to be good enough for you.

Do we keep our husbands’ secrets,
or distribute them like sweets 
amongst ourselves?

Australian author Lexi Freiman’s second novel, The Book of Ayn, is the funniest book of the year. In it, a writer named Anna struggles to find meaning after being canceled for her “classist” book. To

Booze, Bullshit & Buttfucking is one of those books you can only describe with negative adjectives, despite your enjoyment of it. It’s quick and easy and invigorating in the way stimulants often

I think I’ve lost the practiced falseness of what it means
to be impossibly young. The fingernail moon
hangs over the welt on my goosepimpled thigh. Where
does the world go when not inside me?

I am supposed to call myself a survivor, but honestly I don’t think surviving is what I’ve been doing.

Under a contrived knit brow, his eyes aimlessly drifted among a thicket of words, until they happened to stop on depling, noun, German to Middle English, a child born to older parents, and thus he found a new label for himself, more succinct than his mother’s change-of-life baby and less piercing than faggot, which Joey Novakis and his friends would blurt as they passed him in the school hallways.

There are times when you just want to go up to no one in particular, and say, “Fuck you and the nutsack that held nightmare-you for x amount of time,” even if, and perhaps especially when, the eventual target is your own face.

1. A well to do woman hosts an orgy that gets gate crashed by a vanilla couple (I just want to be included).
2. A boy is seduced by his ex-girlfriend’s hot mom on the Fourth of July (I’m facing my fear of MILFs).

waking up with
the desire to lay here
to look around the room
and notice things

What does a lifetime of loneliness look like, feel like in the body? Athena Dixon examines this question in her second book, The Loneliness Files, published by Tin House, and edited by one of my

The first man is the only one that kills you.

—COLETTE, La Naissance du Jour

Who is Angel? Who am I.

Have you ever loved a mirror?

Laughed, on suicide watch, until Kool-Aid spilled

Is my dick the one getting off in a peanut can?

What most people don’t know is that most of your town butchers are on some kind of pill, powder, or liquid, to get them through the day.