for Rachel Corso

Have you tried all our salsa flavors before?
This is mild (not medium), this is spicy, this is verde
(That means green), this is volcanic, this is you

Not listening.

“Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.” – Kurt Vonnegut

I met

Sometimes she fears her new husband is her old husband. In her mind the two take up the same space and linger in the same places. 

My new friend interrupted me to say, “You seem like you live like a real artist.”
My new friend had already been twice published by The New Yorker.
I thought maybe she had confused me with herself.

For all the hours we’ve spent with strangers, all the conversations and shared stories, we ask no one’s name—until now. 

Kneeling on cement, the lifelike nutz dangling in her face, Daniela tried to work the screwpin out of the anchor shackle, but she was unable to unjam it from the lughole, her press-ons flexing dangerously against the hitch. 

There are five categories for hurricanes; most of the buildings here were built to withstand categories one and two.

Let the okra go to waste, steal oranges from the
corner store. I'll tell you that I love you like I've
loved no one else. Our bodies are made to be
useful, move fast. The fastest man in

I walk every day until I stop talking to myself. 

No one is going anywhere, he says. You will sleep here tonight.

Karl Barth

let's forget the time we fought

and just say

that i have a specific kind of fear

it happens

sometimes 

when i am in the club

thinking about the pieces of my

"And look, I can just barely fit my arm through the wound. It's not that big."

Two teenagers are living in my house this summer, and neither has read The Catcher in the Rye. They’ve taken over the basement, binge-watching shows on Netflix and referring to Instagram as

Pierce Brosnan only has so much time left. He doesn’t know it yet, but this will be his last James Bond film. While it will gross almost half a billion dollars worldwide, it won’t take long for Die

The card reads Leo Schwezeger, MD. The only other print is a phone number and the phrase If you have to ask...

“Ah, so you’ve had an ordinary life,” she said.

i'm fucking useless and there's nothing going for me
*parents call*
everything's amazing, i'm the best i've ever been

wow it's late. i'm so tired
*yawns*
better eat a

[Previously on... Part 5  |  Part 4  |  Part 3  |  Part 2  |  Part 1]

Standing next to the homie Marge on the vast lawn full of Lana fanatics in flower crowns and Pepsi-Cola tee shirts I did not feel at home

In which we listen to ourselves being recounted in the mouth of the boyfriend 

To recover from the grand wizard of empathy’s commencement speech, I have since camped at grocery stores, when I can afford them, awaiting the flotation device of my college degree’s supposed intellectual extenuation of the human gridlock.

Worst thing I ever did I did when I was doing Hank’s cousin, Theresa. It was a crime of sloth, a crime of not-saying.

The people in my workshop suggested the stories were detailing co-dependency. From my position of fiction writer I laughed and nodded in agreement so as not to appear too sentimental towards the material. I thought of my classmates as boring and responsible and generic, and reasoned that they couldn’t understand the characters’ interactions because they were only limitedly tolerant of anything eccentric—

Painting of a Vietnamese restaurant lunch menu.

Painting of a woman being pulled out of a river
by her hair and she is smiling and her hair is dry.

Painting of a war-torn meadow:

the defining experience of Western women today is internal conflict