I looked up at Rudy, his back hitting the air like a ruler. The mind is an act of balance, he said, looking at me. It is a lever for the body.
Our hypothetical date tomorrow is at a show for the band Tennis. I have never heard of them, but I trust him. I say I will work my magic to get us in.
I love you best
like this: sun in your hair, a heavy daze
of pollen on your eyelids.
When we talk about a writer’s work, we are talking about the things she makes: poems, essays, books. It’s a mercantile word to apply to the artistic process, and yet it’s an inescapable one. Short
Like Richie’s “Hello,” Adele’s “Hello” is also an ode to longing.
Under the pretense of repairing things, I go to prove I am not broken.
I will never read this essay out loud, so let me take some risks:
Almond, salmon, Episcopal, peony, Adidas, melancholy, mischievous.
In my head: Owl-mund, sal-MON, epic-SKO-poll.
I add force
I’ve never run for political office and have no desire to run—which is not to say that I’ve never thought about it—but I do know what it is to move, to travel, to traverse, to go around for the sake of one’s ambitions.
When I mention this flash of sexual fluidity to people, it bothers them.
Felt, for a minute, like some façade had slipped, like a glitch in the matrix. Is this in fact the car we came in? Are we who we think we are?
When I was dead, I returned to my father’s house, an old farmstead in Northwestern Ohio, and I stood alone in the gravel drive, satisfied to see that the house was just as I remembered it—small and gray, rising on a plot of land west of a moonlit apple orchard.
The curtains opened, the ballerinas emerged, toes became violins, hands, trumpets, backs, cellos.
I don’t write “I have the libido of a sloth” in my online dating profile. I don’t use my real surname now either.
The Class of 1953 Tachikawa Air Base Bride School girls were fertile, well-fed and rested.
“And then after I came out to my wife, she stumbled across People Can Change,” said the man from Fresno.
Don’t they let you? Don’t they ever let you lay down your head?
