I definitely gained traction in my twenty-ninth year. At twenty-nine, my skin cleared up, I sold a book. But the biggest accomplishment for me was that I stopped working retail and made my money solely from writing and teaching writing.

The rock is slow to change. The wave can be exploded by a breeze.

I’ve seen men punch holes in walls. They lead nowhere – I’ve looked, I tried to escape. I’ve seen what happens afterward too.

You interviewing me for Hobart is pretty much the peak of my hustle. Maybe this is me selling out. Maybe this is growing up. 

another kind of crime scene
walking to the post office with A

One time, a pair of blue Tattersalls, two Sigma Chis home from Clemson. Two, again: faded blackwatch shorts and a stretchy lavender thong, smelled like Obsession. Just that one time.

For ten years, General Motors knew about faulty ignition switches in its cars but concealed this information.

Corbin was listening to Pete Rock and CL Smooth’s T.R.O.Y. and thinking of Trina McIver when shot inside the bodega on Fourth Street.

I first came to know Miles Klee when I published him in my anthology, Watchlist: 32 Stories by Persons of Interest (a beautiful brand new edition of which is out this May from Catapult with

On stage my son forgets his line and my husband Sam whispers “The winters were hard for the settlers”

Let’s go back to the twin indigo suns/ in our eyes. To shooting holes/ through the walls of our skin, one/ metal kiss at a time...

In my country, says the bulkier, pastier, frowning president, journalism students are admitted to university according to their eloquence in abbreviating my biography.

I wanted this essay to be about love. I wanted it to also be about my grandfather and Arkansas and my copy of Ain’t Doing Too B-A-D, Bad, a live jazz record by The Bobby Bryant Sextet. 

When I lived in Michigan, I ruined baseball. I recorded every Detroit Tigers game only to fast-forward between pitches, so I could get back to stacks of paper grading, so I could be as productive

When a strawberry’s
sore, it leaks

I’m just gonna say it. Invisalign is bullshit.

Midway through the school year one of the kids in one of the other sixth grade classes hung himself, so we couldn’t call the game we played in the mornings ‘suicide’ after that. 

New ballparks keep sprouting up,
like summer sweet corn. 

Come closer reader, please,
I didn’t mean to insult you. 
I’ll let you punch me
right in my asking face.

Parker’s mental damn busts open the second he sinks a cleat into the batter’s box.  

The full moon may strike you
dumb and limp and lost
when bat readies to encounter ball
and you hit it high as the moon--
still the ump declares, You’re out!
before you’ve moved a step from home. 

I was wearing my home-made Giants uniform, as I did every day that week, laboriously sewed by mom who was not enamored of sewing. 

There’s no TV or radio here, so it’s only later we hear that our guys lost big
at home on Blake Street

I would go back now, though, live in the nervous fidget
before I said I like you & kissed her braces
with my upper lip & bled all over her teeth.

There is something about listening
To a baseball game on the radio

It was the summer of Monica Lewinsky and Mark McGwire and Armageddon. I was on a short business trip to Philadelphia—a handholding, as it is known in the office. I was sent, via Amtrak, to coddle