This new doctor smiles as he enters the room, as if we’re sharing a joke though we’ve never met before. “Tell me,” he says, “how many people get your name right on the first try?”

i used to write on adderall like a million years ago or when drinking also but thats stopped. like once, last year, i wrote a short story while drinking, and i cant even remember where i saved it so idek if its any good, bc after a while i got distracted and started watching YouTube makeup reviews.

I think about cataloguing all the days I feel like dying. But then I think Ivan would find the death catalog. Ivan would use it against me.

Of course there’s little difference between now and any other time, in relation to the unforeseeable aspects of tragedy taking place; it is just as likely that some improbable event occurs here in the restaurant as any other place, including the drive home, during which all it would take is a flick of the wrist from any of the countless passing strangers to change your lives.

Like if I were at this apartment in 2009 I’d be talking to some guy with scraggly teeth and pockmarked skin and a hoodie but he’d also be like, unconventionally handsome, but you could tell the last time he talked to his mom he said some fucked up shit and probably beat up his siblings growing up, and I’d be thinking ‘this seems like…my only option…’ 

We decided that quarantine

would be fuckintine

except then I got a UTI

People I Don’t _______ to anymore. This is a prompt inspired by Chelsea Hodson’s essay, People I Don’t Talk To Anymore.

I write about dark things a lot but not without at least some hope…or hope for hope.

I have seen charlatans and I have seen television ministers, and  I was beginning to get that vibe.

I wrote for twenty years without anyone paying me or offering me confirmation or telling me that what I wrote would be welcomed by the world. Quite the contrary. 

The visor mirror in the passenger seat was missing, but in its place was a sticker that read You’re Beautiful. 

“But you named him Davey and my name is David. You might change it up next time.”

“I know your name,” she said.

Being sleep deprived while in quarantine is like living in this dream I had a few days ago where I died but didn’t lose consciousness and for the rest of the dream I floated over a muddy creek with no ability to interact with the world in any way.

"Gary” always felt like a misnomer to me, something I had to put up with to keep the peace.

He had a little radio, and on the mornings it snowed, he listened over and over to the lists of school closings until he knew them by heart: Kellerville area, Longstead area, Mount Holly area, all the outlying place-names, all the Our Lady of’s. Sometimes there was only a two-hour delay, and he wondered what it must be like, to have the boon of two extra hours like that.

I remember the next morning, puking, shaking violently, asking for God’s mercy. There was too much light coming through the blinds. I was a living, breathing version of “Hurt.” 

I didn’t have headphones for my CD player, so when my parents were home I kept the volume low. At night when they went to bed I played it at a barely audible level and hugged the machine against my ear.

We have shirts!

They know his name at Carraba’s.
He’s never gotten a parking ticket.
His Christmas display isn’t the biggest
but it still makes people weep in their Mazdas.

After every funeral, we play car tag. Lift keys from our front hallways, still dressed in black skirts and skinny ties, pair into the... more

This boy wants a cat for the idea of a cat. Real responsibility chokes him. This boy wants to embody the... more

We played in our cousin’s backyard. It was always pitcher’s hand out, right field out. If you did dish it right over the barbed wire into... more

The boys laced under cover of dark and ran the bases, or rather, ran to where the bases had once been. They floated over scars on the infield, phones glowing like shadow balls at the corners.

I will marry my fiancée in a few months
and that is a pitch I never saw coming