The First January Sun I Want to Share with You

At least a handful of sunshine,
the best ataractic; I
steady myself in the russet
downpour, attempting to trace
down this new feeling,
like a

Your gym is perhaps your favorite thing about Hattiesburg. Your student budget is tight, but you’ll manage to eek out thirty a month somehow—you have for the last three years.

The day before isolation, I celebrate my birthday, unwed, the first of its kind in my adult life, my divorce from a great man with whom I shared an OK eleven years, finalized by way of a $250 internet

I’d spend the night there on Saturday nights, get up Sunday morning and drive to my church and preach. I didn’t find God because I wasn’t looking for him. I was looking for me but I didn’t find him either.

Nirvana

I don’t think it was nirvana playing
I don’t know what it was
in the ocean sometimes
warm water is pulsing under the cold surface
I don’t know if I really mean it. I mean,
maybe it’s a

Maybe you can do this. It’s not your idea. But maybe.

Previously on...
Part 3  ||  Part 2  ||  Part 1  ||  Prologue

Your boyfriend was the first...

when i’m

on coke i feel like i’m

in cruel intentions but

i have the personality

of winona ryder in

girl, interrupted

I followed him up the stairs up to his apartment and once inside he made parachutes, wrapping loose MDMA in tissue paper.

If I forget to night shift my mac it’s tragic...

We can stand here / on the corner, arguing... 

Xenia and I had been cheating on each other with the same woman for about three months

After that, I gave up / on finding a good doctor...

People I Don’t _______ to anymore. This is a prompt inspired by Chelsea Hodson’s essay, People I Don’t Talk To Anymore.

I remember the next morning, puking, shaking violently, asking for God’s mercy. There was too much light coming through the blinds. I was a living, breathing version of “Hurt.” 

I didn’t have headphones for my CD player, so when my parents were home I kept the volume low. At night when they went to bed I played it at a barely audible level and hugged the machine against my ear.

We played in our cousin’s backyard. It was always pitcher’s hand out, right field out. If you did dish it right over the barbed wire into burdock, Queen Anne's lace, thistle, milkweed, you had to

Three boys took their positions on the makeshift field. The flagstone wall edging the upper lawn was the outfield fence. One foul line was the street, the other the edge of the woods. Joey pitched.

He visited the library later that night still in his baseball gear, his eye black dancing with tears.  I'm sorry, I said, but three strikes is three strikes. His batting glove let me know he understood.