About two weeks into the Coronavirus Quarantine, I began noticing some odd behaviors.

Lunar Flesh

Your daughter wraps her arms around your waist and asks, Does everyone have a skeleton inside? 

Already dinner is on the table. Brown rice, sticky rice, ginger duck, little saucers

Late June on the North Side of Town

We are in a paleteria eating lime & chamoy ice cream—
or is it sorbet? On our walk over here we talked
about ginkgo leaves & how they offer the

The boy’s hair was like the sand. He looked good. They all did, bruiseless in the sun. Striped towels in primary colors lay beneath them, shovels and tilting turrets walled them in. Sonia cupped a

the only person who texts me is my mom

mostly about how her back hurts
i send her a
proverb that says: you are as old as your spine
she replies: then i must be dead
my mom is always

Moonlight hiccups through the dirty windows, jumps around on our faces as the truck hits potholes. We’re already gone, smoking cigarettes.

And oh god it’s wonderful sitting here, drinking too much coffee, eating too many pastries, and loving everything about this moment. 

"On Trepidation" and "When I'm Lonely, I Shop Online for Things I Don't Need"

"32 questions for a photograph" and "Blue Door"

It doesn’t sit right anymore, so neither does he. But in the Brooklyn neighborhood where my mom grew up, he’d walk on his hands for an audience of Irish-Catholic children. Older now than he was then, they’re still in awe. 

One evening you come home to discover Boris Yeltsin standing in your kitchen.

The text said: Hey! I think I just saw you cross the street (I’m in the red Prius). How are you?

This is how we played: one of us would lay on top of the other fully clothed, “go dead,” and see if the other could move. He relished it. I would lay on him, every part of me heavy and slack. It was

I bought a compilation of Michael Jackson Number Ones when the Wal-Mart Supercenter finally opened. It feels right to have viewed the future from my bedroom, door closed, music up.

I return to the kitchen and walk in on Jodeci pulling a syringe out of her neck. She takes the rope from my hands and uses it as a tourniquet for my arm.

In fact, even if I could reverse my reach through the years spanning us and stop you, I don’t think I would.

I suppose I was in a conspiratorial mood when I told you that I don’t always feel like a man.

It was 2007, and the closest that most Americans came to hitchhiking were two new movies: The Hitcher and The Hitchhiker, a lower-budget version of the same plot. In both movies young naïve roadtrippers pick up good-looking psychopaths in the desert. In The Hitcher Sean Bean chains a teen heartthrob between two semi trucks and pulls him apart at the waist.