I. xaxaxaxa
I don’t consider myself esoteric or mystical, but while tidying my desk I found a little square
sticker with just the number 8 on it; I think it fell off the new t-shirt I was

gargoyles
and sorries

See, I’m too stupid to write a poem. 
Remember when I said this, that afternoon by the lake 
in our purple & yellow short shorts,

At last, I texted him the truth: I have bipolar disorder. I’m in a hypomanic episode. I’m really not feeling well, I can’t stop crying. I’m sorry, I’m really sorry...

Revelers in various stages of undress, semi-dress, drag and fetishistic extravagance frolicked, tripping out on the music and their collective naughtiness.

I had no doubt my husband’s depression was the authentic article, just as I had no doubt that he used this depression irresponsibly, as leverage, a venal tactic, to flatter himself and defuse criticism and basically get every last fucking thing he wanted.

It’s impressive, I thought, to meet a person like this, but then if you make an effort to face the world then this is just the kind of thing that happens to you. I wondered if my clever friend was thinking the same.

She underlined the quote, “Anything can happen in life, especially nothing.”

Among the crowd at Washington Square, a young man holds aloft a slice of cardboard scrawled with permanent marker. It reads simply: I EAT ASS.

I recently started my third year of university. In my first year, I lived in the dorms and got acquainted with the people who just so happened to be experiencing their Firsts at the same

​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.

The memories form a bridge, but the boards are loose. If I step in the wrong place, my ankle twists. I fall. And then everything comes crashing down.

Drew once wrote a poem about bridges. He gave

A unneutered preteen breeze / loiters around the trees / this morning. 

Dear Jane,

I sometimes wear an old kimono I bought out of a by-the-pound box in a shop basement in Chicago and I listened to a podcast today about how I shouldn’t wear kimonos if I’m not Japanese

We started off as strangers,
you and I.
And I’ll always wonder -
if there had been others
would I have picked you?
Your brothers were already gone
by the time I got there
so I paid for

It is Winter again. I am not myself.

Cherry nausea tablets dissolve under my tongue every morning, ostensibly tricking my mind from dry-heaving, and sleeping requires triple the dosage of Trazodone

I draw the line at unboxing videos.

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. 

One of the most profound aesthetic experiences of my life involved falling asleep in an armchair in the middle of the afternoon while reading The Fairie Queene. I did not dream of Britomart and Sir