At the age of sixteen I worked a job digging holes. Sometimes it was ditches, other times it was retention ponds.The work was as hard as it was simple. Every evening my boss would slip me a crumpled
I lost track of Ben while I was married. Seven years. I hadn’t seen Ben in 7 years. Ben refers to those years as my domesticated years. I lost track of a lot of things that were important to me
I fear being buried alive, but I insist on being buried when I'm dead.
We agreed to meet in a bar known as the ‘anus of the city.’ It had terrible lighting which obscured its ugly regulars. The regulars had heads like onions with names like Fred, Harry, Deborah, Henrietta. Years of drinking had withered their necks to the size of cocktail sticks and I didn’t pity them because I liked hating them.
Kentucky is chill and for the most part, doesn't try to be something it's not. I feel that way abt myself tbh.
Self-guided tour: Exhibit #9 from the National Museum of Broken Marriages
A medium says to channel the late wife through beloved objects. I press my ear to a mug, a journal, my husband’s chest.
Then I hear it. Loud as the train coming into the station. Fuckinragabagagrrahfuuck. Ah ha. Of course. The unmistakable call of the down and out drunk.
When I was twelve or thirteen my grandmother gave me a book by art historian and occultist Fred Gettings about the tarot. My grandmother really helped foster my imagination about magic.
Most of the time, I am skeptical of the notion that a writer can find his or her voice. I warn my first-year students against believing the maxim because, to me, it presupposes that every writer
Glass of Water—
Selves rasp against each other. Mother's little bucket of wisdom tipped over; teacher's sweet girl has curdled. Mere glimpse of the calm hand of an honest femme could heal—cool
I turn the knob to the right, bang my hands against the steering wheel, and deafeningly inform the world that I’m out of my cage and doing just fine.
The main thing about washing dishes at Ronny’s Café is I can come into work pretty fucked up and no one seems to notice—least of all Todd.
I immediately remembered the Sex and the City episode where Samantha wants to sleep with the Franciscan priest she refers to as Friar Fuck.
In these poems I am using ‘Chelsea Martin’ as a pseudonym for someone who is not Chelsea Martin.
I've been socialized to be alive / the quiet death of women eating salad
Dad’s side are all boring fucks. Mom’s side, god—all my mom’s brothers thought they were the outlaw rebel cowboys of New Jersey. Wild ones. Alcoholics. They were fun, while they lasted. All those men
We lie here together, gold in charred hands, / pulling the ash from each other’s hair.
As always, feel I’ve mentioned this elsewhere—But here’s how deep I’d get into something without being able to have it make sense.
This is the most difficult sermon, / The one where the disciples / Burn the hamburger buns and / Christ nearly misses his train.
I grow our loneliness in my mouth, feed you— / sweet and bleak— under a halo of buzzing stars.
The snow is beautiful and I want to die. Who could / refuse this softness?
They had taken all the milking cows but left us the wheat fields that fed them. Only Boy handles our cow creamer with two hands, respectfully, as we consider it a new-religion relic. He is too
Stephen Malkmus
Stephen Malkmus
February 13th, 2001
Matador Records
12 songs, 42 Minutes
I ripped this CD onto my half-dead laptop in the dingy radio station studio deep in the
