Baby Birds
Miriam Gordis
Getting chemical poisoning together seemed romantic, the closest you could come to being entombed, Pompeii-style, in each other’s arms.
I found a wallet today that contained $200, some credit cards, and some family pictures—my family now.
I get in bed, move my mouth over her nipple.
“Do you mind if I moan?” she says.
The cooks told me jokes with no punchline and sang popular Chinese songs while I chucked grasshoppers in the garbage.
I tell her this is all I’m getting, because this is all I deserve.
Getting chemical poisoning together seemed romantic, the closest you could come to being entombed, Pompeii-style, in each other’s arms.
In terms of a break-up, gonorrhea is a god-send.
all these changes in my life were made without my consent
I wanted you to count on me—if not as a lover, then at least as an object for your using.
Normalcy has no moment to collapse because it is absent from the start.
Sometimes he’ll cum on my face, and I’ll have to hear about it in one of his poems.
This place looks haunted as shit.
You touch everything you see. You want everything you touch.
Picture me, splayed on the bed on top of Liz. I’m wearing a pink thong, she’s still in her jeans. She spanks me; I deserve it. She spanks me again. My breath flees my lungs, a flock of geese taking
Uncle Dale says, “We’re lucky that none of us can fly.”
We found ourselves in Kohl’s a few months later. I was home for the holidays, and Mom and I were standing in the women’s department, staring at shelves of bargain business casual.
The human race was absurd and overwrought. Men were feeble-minded narcissists and women, acoustic blowhorns with an endless flurry of wind.
your uncle has a whiteboard on his wall and on it it says TO DO: TELL TERRY YOU LOVE HER. he wrote that you don’t know how many years ago. terry was his girlfriend but she’s dead now
Against cloudless skies, any of the available disorders are at your disposal.
I swore off intimacy for a long time and tried to replicate the feeling with a heating pad, a body pillow, and a vibrator but ended up most nights just crying in bed with a bottle of vodka.
I said to Martin Amis once, told him Augie March is a jazz beat novel and he said his son reckons that
I felt like a fool in the rain as I sat under the shower head.