The written word, music, visual arts. These, if done well, are the unconscious sneaking past the curtain. Using language to self-implode Logic. Some real Matrix shit.

We're given breath, also the mystery of life.

If I tell you what’s in the bag, will you let me continue to play dumb?

Midway through our relationship, he had told me that whenever we had sex, he needed to think of other girls in order to stay hard. He told me everyone did it

One night Evan and I got so drunk on grape liquor that we started making out in the shower

I consider asking Richard if he’ll piss on my book but I’m still too shy.

A Small Gift

…is awareness, at first,

and then it may take over,

for a while, and also recede

if it must, and at times, it must.

That sometimes gentle ebb and flow,

and sometimes

A Little Death

An aggressive Doberman knocked Cindy up weeks later.

She feels her and this bartender, this boy, are doing sex theater. Romance theater. Everything theater.

Another reading.

He lies there, crumpled and ragged—
a pile of unwashed laundry.

A Review of Alexandra Naughton’s Sick of Being Inside Myself

Charley and I met freshman year of college. She was the blonde one, whereas I was not. I was never the blonde one. We went to college on a big hill, warm in the summer, warm in the winter. We both

She sang along to the songs, swaying on the spot, and seemed to know all the lyrics. She smiled at him and grabbed him when their big hit came on, singing “There she goes” at his face, until, grudgingly, he sang along too. Then she kissed him

I kept swinging, and he started headbanging to the music.

In this book, I kept using the word “buzz” in various forms. Buzz, buzzy. I think I even got the word “bloodbuzz” in there, which I stole from the band The National.

Those long walks and unresolved questions gave him an appetite. For skin and flesh. The allure of degeneration presented itself again. This time as a salve for pain.

They traded stories the way people pass a cigarette back and forth.

“If you knew me, you’d already know the answer to that,” she said. We were fighting I realized.