Walter Matthau, we assume, has had a bad day. Or a bad night. Or both. Hell, back it up as far as you want to go:  Week. Year. Fucking life. Drinking a beer in a Pizza Hut a few minutes into the

You’re beating him, he needs to protect / the plate and his at-bat, throw something / outside the zone! something he can’t / possibly hit, think how afraid he must be / of you.

I drove to the STD Clinic. I walked in and told a woman in an office through a window slightly larger than a fast food drive-thru window my name and appointment time. She handed me a clipboard with

Did you know mites are accruing primo destinies beneath my fur? Their spit glues each lover I’ve loved deeper into the next. I am a different, lesser value cajoled of that saliva. The trophies I

You will forget by your fourth birthday these your shifting first memories—your father’s goats at their graze, their black tongues slathered across your face, the chickens prancing and clucking upon the dirt of the yard, the spare trembling grasses and the crazed droning song of the grasshoppers, their brown juices streaking the lines of your palm.

I’ve been facing Sundays the same for a while now. The whole day feels like one of my quixotic childhood summers slamming shut. And, like that younger me full of dread, I’ve thrown off my sleep

Re: Re: Personal Ad #5 (A Kiss Worth Three Lives)

My father was in the war and told me never to ask
if a soldier ever killed a man.
It doesn’t matter.
On our third date I’ll order

When it is time to get the jugulars, we move our bodies out into the streets with our best cleavages bared. We move as one woman, but it turns out we are one dozen women from the same neighborhood. 

.I

Be a 22 year old American boy—get really drunk and embarrass yourself in front of the beautiful, freckled, 29 year old Italian Volcanologist that invited you to drinks with her 31 year

I Was A White Girl In A Crowd Of White Girls In The Park

The NSA did nothing after I left a document open on my laptop. In it, I changed your name to new and interesting terrorist

Don’t believe me if you want, but the hole just appeared one night.

I. / A yawning / Pitbull puppy / dipped in gold.

Writers in M.F.A. programs assume, and are often told, that teaching means time away from writing—that after responding to their students’ work, professors rarely have energy left for their own

The boy has horrible teeth and a bicycle. They’re yellow, his teeth, and after school the children take a tree branch to his mouth.

–

His bicycle painted in bird shit: he rides for hours

My Little Ponies™ and the Search for the Blue Crystal
or
Breaking Brony
A cross-genre work of fan fiction

The sun rises on the great and beautiful land of Equestria. Applejack trots

*
i'm gandhi on the beaches
of northern california
i take comfort
in the fact that
the government watches me
on public transportation
i can relax
i want to stop a subway
between

Hobart: We’ve seen each other at the last couple Mission Creek festivals in Iowa City, and it was there that we got to talking this last year a little about your new book, surfing,

In sandtiger bellies, the young eat the young. You could fit a new-hatched sandtiger pup in your hand, but you shouldn't; they are pink, squishy cartilage, knife-tip teeth, and only the first one survives, chasing siblings down uterine hallways: hide and seek to death. After eating all his brothers, the last one standing sucks yolk like CapriSun from his sharkmom's eggs. By the time the sharkmom gives birth, the pup is the size of a six year old child. 

It’s pity sex for both of us, me and Karen and her glass eye, in a motel room off the interstate.  

burrow

you traced along the freckles on my back
with black ink,
like a crumpled constellation

i looked at the picture and smiled,
like a lonesome girl reading her diary aloud to an

The American stillborn sense of justice has worn its grave so truthfully all things pious count no more and didn’t then. We want poignant documentaries, exposes of humanitarian needlework to rally

As I write this, on a Friday afternoon in early August, the Phillies are losing 7-2 in Washington, and Scott Hairston is walking up to the plate to pinch-hit for the Nationals. My phone is

you can call me the Boom Doctor

I have your emptied-out torso on the operating table

It is not easy to remove a heart with a spoon from the chest of a man, nor is it clean. The spoon was purchased 48 hours earlier from the Bed, Bath & Beyond on 9th Street. The Nicole Miller Moments 5 pc Flatware Set was $24.99. The salad fork, dinner knife, dinner fork, and soup spoon were disposed of. Only the teaspoon remained.

“Go back to sleep,” I hissed at Perry. It was 2:00 in the morning and we were in our newly purchased condo in Mammoth, sleeping in twin beds in the only room that was habitable. The other two

Tops Like Arrows

Dan’s Trans Am smashed into the guardrail,
him doing 75, all hopped up
on Dexatrim and Coors Lite.
I remember him, my younger brother,
 grabbing his fleshy waist when