this Christmas

this Christmas i realized
i don’t have a family
i have familiar strangers
i can drink beers with
forget myself with
but not family

ever since I remembered
my mother tried to

Swallowing those pills at night was now like playing Russian roulette; the blues were, for the first time in many years, the leading cause of drug deaths in Scotland, overtaking even heroin.

Once, I thought I would forgive. Now, a year later, I’m still waiting for the feeling to appear

No, I do not want any kind of modern love, with all its entitlements,

Nipple covers.

Pasties come in every shape, size and color. They can be plain or blinged within an inch of their minuscule lives. They can have tassels attached. They go on one’s butt cheeks with

i made my mom a swear jar 
and am using the money to buy filet o fish.

Full facial tattoo or painlessly losing your lips. One has to happen. What is it going to be? What’s that facial tattoo going to be? How’re you going to face the world without those lips?

You asked Harrison who sat opposite you, if Mexico was a strong team and all he said was they might upset Argentina. He said this in reference to their game against Saudi-Arabia, you no see wetin them play against those Arab men the other day? Your hope dashed. You became a piece of meat doused with anxiety.

I have known / a hunger I would undo / my own good birth to sate
 

Between long sucks of her Newport, Jessalyn told me she was still so angry at her best friend for missing her wedding that she’d mailed her a box of crickets.

Crickets? I said.

Dead crickets.

What interested me about those stories didn’t really matter to you anyway.

Rebecca K. Reilly’s debut novel Greta & Valdin was a bestseller in her home country of New Zealand in 2021, and today it’s being released in the US and the UK. Pitched as Schitt’s Creek meets

You can tell everything about what a man will be like in bed by how he writes.  He had rhythm.

Perhaps God has entered the chat.

There is an attitude in the liberated fetal detachment

My mother always says it was my father’s fault I couldn’t get along with anyone.

Jilly says the 21-year-old is weirdly similar to me, specifically because she’s in her early 20s and has a dead dad.

Pontypridd

When I was born, they thought I was dead. My grandmother, who could neither read nor write, plunged me into a tub of cold water. I got started after that.

My father was a coal miner

My sister is more of a person than I am. She works at a bookshop and wears visually interesting outfits, ties up her blonde ringlets in a tall bun and ambles around our town in clogs. We hear her

A tired black horse lies down in a field, and doesn’t get up again.

MSN Messenger was the absolute dive of the internet in 2002

I also have a white t-shirt I like a lot that says JOHN PRINE IS PRETTY GOOD, but I don't actually wear it because it comes down to my knees.

If the Internet doesn't drain all the money soon I will kool myself )for real 

It wasn’t nice to call her eyes empty, Sondy supposed. Guileless, most people would say. Furtive, is probably what they’d call Sondy’s eyes.

And now I am left wondering how The End of the Story might have been different, what more we might have found out, had ‘Vincent’ not been a presence in that flowered armchair, had Lydia not been conscious of him invoking rules: there shouldn’t be any intimate scenes.

I am mauled by the gladness of it all.