A trashbag-blue tattoo of a spider stained her left big toe. D-O-O-M read the tops of her other four toes. She had a taste for chicken nuggets and cocaine and never showed initiative. “Assessory”

Some accounting’s underway, composed of chiding, shifts in tone, redirections. Surely one or two rumors eventually craft a context where they’re true. 

Recently I came across a paper I wrote in college at the prestigious University of Florida in 1999 about vengeful ghosts.

I am so many places
              lonely. I think
I savor it, just me & Canada
boundary water speaking.

The water is not deep here
              but tannin colored,
cold,

They all felt it when the house moved, but only Mae made a sound, something small and guttural, something involuntary and low.

The air in the bedroom sags with mist that won’t touch anything. It hangs around the built-in bed, and stationary lamp, and my sisters and Ma. I can’t be in there. The noises are terrible, and the haze smells like evergreens. It makes me homesick.

I could never / be a girl who wears a bikini top in place of a bra / like all the other girls in South Florida, who put vodka / in their Gatorade bottles and were, I think, much happier...

Mother is sitting in the kitchen with the Bible and a fresh stack of paper. A cigarette smokes in the ashtray and the sink is full of dishes. “It’s not what you think,” I whisper to the boy I have brought home. Later I will suck his thoughts dry. 

Family Album, Romance and Circumstantial Evidence

In one of the last scenes of High Fidelity, John Cusack drinks a beer. Actually, he doesn't. And that's kind of the beauty of it. He treats a beer the way I don't think I've ever seen anyone treat

Bean cures hetero monogamy of squareness

Inside the restaurant two beams of sunlight hit Spencer’s table at seemingly impossible angles. They meet on his butter dish, which has a single olive pit in it. It seems like outside the sun could be doubled.

Once, I heard a boxing coach say you don’t punch a thing if you really want to achieve your objective—which is pure harm—you punch through. Since that day, I have often thought of the other side.

It’s not unheard of now for people to be replaced by look-alikes.  Troubled people, mostly.  Unhappy people.  

I have stolen this prayer from my friend Giancarlo Ditrapano.  

We can bump / Gucci and Sosa and Future while we sip lean with Sprite, / and talk Drill like Foucault talks about nutjobs, and talk / dying like Chiraq rappers. Like we’ve been there. We / haven’t.

I went to the Antiques Roadshow with my mother’s green marble frog in the inside pocket of the jacket of the black suit I wore to her funeral that morning. I had taken the frog from her house. I wanted to know what it was worth. 

I fell in love with a woman who had a face like she meditated.

Mary Miller gets inside heads. I mean this in a non-creepy, invasive way, of course. It's a gift—some writers do wordsmash, some writers do atmospherics, and some writers—like Mary—do

In the woods beyond the property line, Henry and I find what decades ago used to be a farmer’s burn pile. Under years’ worth of leaf litter and yesterday’s snowfall there are remains, hard things fire could not destroy: twisted and rusted metal and scores of glittering glass bottles.

flipping out total blond and brunette loser pal road trip butt munch style and going 80s rampage at their sperm.

Somebody has replaced my chair with a child. It was a beautiful chair. A rocking chair fashioned by my father.

It makes no sense.

Though, of course, one mustn’t give credence to anything in

On August 23, 2013 I checked into an inpatient treatment center in middle-of-nowhere Ohio to get off heroin and other drugs. Besides detoxing me safely, teaching me things about drug addiction and

This one's massive. We're just going to get right into it.

Kyle, our friend, is the author of the new collection, Praying Drunk.

—Ed.

The title page says that this is a book of

My girlfriend moved out. She gave me back the lease the next day. “I’m not sorry,” she said, but she agreed to stay for afternoon coffee. We sat by the window. The coffeepot gurgled.

“I want a