The hangover was ruining the romance. Last night I woke up a friend and made her drink wine—Chateau 2016. I had to deal with my nerves somehow.

KS

Our translation of home.

He had lost his virginity to nothing less than the beast of the swamp.

and now i teach street

kids from akron how to

use google docs, and

how to express themselves

What’s your name? Like an oak
I want to carve a heart
into our washing machine.

as all my lovers
fly out of my chest

We started as open, NOT poly. This was a very important distinction to us, despite not having a working definition of either types of relationships. It was, we both agreed, substantially less cringe

Definitely one poet holdover is just being a magpie for weird

I do this because I need a hobby. Because hobbies are things you do when nobody loves you. I watch movies too.

Mysterious beauty spot the farra on cheek.

You’ve heard of flightless fish that get flung out of
the water for wanting something special

Iron isn’t gold, but who cares? Pass me the luster, 
the hammered brass & the Perspex glitter.

By March of 2016, my cousin Josh and I were practically flat broke. We’d been having an incestuous and adulterous affair, one that elevated his title to “cuzband” (he hated that term). Four years

There was a week when my grandma was gone, I had the whole place to myself, was drinking the regular Coca Cola classic and the half sized baby Coca Cola and brought the Abercrombie pictures out in the open on the second floor. I meditated.

Sometimes I think I won’t understand what it is that I’ve lost until I write a book about it.

The great neon calamity of his own life exhausts him.

I’m not fat exactly, not fat like an orangutan or avocado, but I’m also not thin. Not thin  like those women on commercials, with bodies like Coke bottles – all dipped and smooth, tastin’  somethin’ like cherry. I’m lumpy like expired cottage cheese.

I’m interested in these conversations more than anything else, moments in which we care for and about each other in a world that says nothing’s more important than self-care after a productive day at work, where we’re constantly pit against each other, forced to compete with our peers to earn and preserve the right to exist.

She wanders a Sisyphean circuit around Berlin: to meetings with immigration lawyers, uninspiring parties, lame poetry readings.

The currency of self-loathing is everything you’ve ever said.

One night I was so drunk, I couldn’t feel my face.

her lips run right off her head

she wets the bed in stereo

Did you know emus have two sets of eyelids? One for blinking, one for dust.

Everything’s fuzzing in every direction, the flowers and the water and the stars, and the pizza is impossibly good.

Everything would be fine, sort of, if she could close this deal.

Ruth Madievsky’s debut novel All-Night Pharmacy has everything I want from a book: a toxic sister relationship, countless nights at a seedy LA nightclub, and an unexpected sapphic romance. After her