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. 

Bobby was going down, not on a woman or a man but fast and with extreme force into the frost covered asphalt of a Holiday Inn parking lot, five minutes from the Detroit airport.

If I have to die, I want to die for love

My father is talking fast, telling me how the redhead is waiting for him.

Once her parents were reliably asleep she helped herself to a long hot shower, a respite which was what she imagined drugs must be like.

Gone, like T9 texting, is the once exciting novelty of being important, popular, scandalous

One night—which was, as it turned out, my last night camming

“Must have been rich kids,” says Al. “A lot harder to make money staying anonymous.”

Mai Knicker

when congress bans our faves we will smuggle them through customs and call it praxis

The solar system running sloppy
down the sides of your vest.

It all started with a wrong clap. I remember that because Dave was saying that when she was born, her dad got mad that she clapped on the 1 and the 3 and not the 2 and the 4. He was clapping weird.

what do i fucking care what gloria e. thinks of me?

do i not have the right to nitrous oxide 

I knew the talk about a baby was another red flag, but the more uncontrollable Amelie became, the deeper I got hooked. I couldn’t go back to what my life was before. I think it had been drowned the

I get insecure when you say things like

I was born when you were 15

The thing about Grandma is that she seems to show up unannounced and she doesn’t care about the substance of the prayers, just that they end in Amen.

 I know Max is probably hard by the time we get to the overlook at the dam. He puts the car in park and tells me he mixed a cd, just for me, because I’m so special.

- I can’t believe this is

As a young boy, I lived in the Bronx in the mid-1980s during a time when it was infamous for its squalor, a third-world dilapidation captured in movies like Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver. I remember

The sleet has stopped but the cold is something unthinkable. It lends a deathly permanence to the still, heavy darkness. I stand shivering on the sidewalk and look up at the Hollywood sign. I try to

The only noise I hear is the hum of electricity, subtle as the sound of the universe whispering.

Larry David sees me crying about AIDS

I am not sorry about most things I’ve done; I really do try my best to be good.

My opponent was curly-haired and perpetually smirking. Everything around him – his fancy collared shirt, shoes, wristbands, tennis bag – was emblazoned with an Adidas logo