Ethan had saved $100,000 for his trip. I had $8,000.

Internet celebrity Melissa Broder’s third novel is what one Goodreads user accurately deemed an “existential horny cactus western.”

What a relief. They brought the dregs up
from the lost and found, a little respite for us all.

I

am the only man to come to Las Vegas w/an ex-gf and not fuck her—arriving two nights early on my own to hike up in

Men are tyrants with their time; but women are tyrants with the eternal.

you might smell donkey and driver if the dung laced breeze blows up your nose as my body quivers with new found knowledge of time

I rotate my foot like a hot dog and I dare myself not to scratch. I let them land on collarbone skin, thighs, the sponge under my left eye. I’ve always been like this. I’ve always had small tits. You know what they call those.

i make prices 
i blend into aisles 
i am a bottle of stool softener 

Everyone worries about mind control.

Wafts of ancient loam and wet wood. He had viewed it all with sickening fascination, the swiftness with which something so solid could be torn asunder, cored completely.

I’ve always wanted someone to tell me what I want, to sell me on a life I want to live.

The summer she was without anyone

and I had just left the other girl

in Jersey City,

Molly and I kissed at her house. We were adults

who lived with our parents. She seemed like

He was too poor to erect an everlasting monument in her likeness, all he could afford were words.  

I’m trying to do this story to get Kim’s feelings out there, but there seems to be a lot of secrecy and rumors about her death as if people are ashamed of how she died instead of why she died…

half-empty gel pens used to spawn spiked poems

Literature is happening all of the time, all around us, all at once.

i am built for harsh weather and dazzling violence

That was my youth: I developed a sickness, a ruinous crush on the man at the filling station

Life bleeds thick, porous and holy

When a cherub grows up, he hates angels.

We chased the tail laid before us. Scratching and sniffing our way to pain. We took turns leaving consciousness for a few seconds.

I was driving down the freeway listening to Third Eye Blind way too loud

My friend asks if I believe in / gay marriage

I was stationed in Osh, a forty minute flight south of the capital. I had

a decent sized apartment

1. A bottle of orange wine – half a packet of cigarettes.

2. You caught at the bar the space so crowded that people were practically caught under your armpits – grinning nervously, two pina coladas in hand.

3. A kitchen dance – or two.

4. Luther Vandross.

Part I of the book is titled Forest.