Sisters remain sisters even when one is going through nuclear-grade poisoning and the other is directing a DIY haircut through a phone screen.

The last thing she remembered was Marty getting up to vomit. She considered, momentarily, getting up to help. She was still on her knees, her head turned sideways, in profile, on the couch, her arms dangling at her sides.

I was a woman obsessed, before and after the overdose.

"We all live in that space of self-doubt, and that’s what makes us real people."

Liam refuses to speak to me now. Because, for once, I took action. Non-violent-action. Well, a series of actions, actually, the first of which was to invite him out for drinks when he came home for winter break.

It still bugs me that I never understood why she’d seen Hadestown eleven times (our first date was her twelfth).

At this remark, her forehead crinkled, and it was clear that she hadn’t remembered their previous meeting. This should have come as no surprise to Lyle, who had lived forty-three-years of un-memorability. His style of dress unremarkable, his height medium, his face neither handsome nor ugly...

The thing about being a lesbian in New York City is that on the third Thursday of any given month you’ll have to stand in a hot Brooklyn bar that is absolutely teeming with gay people. At least four

I was ready to string paper streamers, wires, and sausages from my ceiling and set them on fire. I looked for any crystal chandelier to mount. I longed to feast on croissants and pickles from the tip of a spear. After shrugging off the yoke of Christian dogma, I didn’t need to bear another set of rules.

Even my skin appeared more limpid than it did when I was in my twenties, when I was always on some badly cut party drug, chain-smoking yellow American Spirits, and shoving late-night, grease-dripping food into my mouth.

Cragged rock reaches skyward, gaps in the green either burn scars or metamorphic bands. 

We finish dinner and the waiter comes with shots of limoncello for the table.

When I get home, I buy the rateyourboyfriend.com domain name for the $900 upfront fee

Darren had dropped out of art school after just six weeks, but he still insisted on referring to everything as his “practice”. Right now his practice involved sending fan letters to alt-lit

and so the wild, for me, is the trauma of loss

Poet, activist, and educator Anthony Thomas Lombardi absolutely slays the page in his debut collection murmurations from YesYes books. It is a collection steeped in survival and song—with the iconic Amy Winehouse at its center, the patron saint of the collection, Lombardi revels in variations of doomed beauty, over and over, until there is nothing left but sacred stain.

What’s the difference between a dead hooker and a Corvette?

One of the men I’ve dated has a wooden cross erected in his front yard, and another guy drives a minivan.

The first shall be last and the last shall be first, Frank said / that’s from episode 42 / 
of the telly series Kung Fu, /  ‘This Valley Has Terror’

64

What violence is there in giving someone a name, carving out Ida's real name

of these fourteen strips, lacing up the endless observations each day

in the deformed images of words that tell

Three hits and down I went. Into the floor. Puddled and leaking through the downstairs neighbor’s ceiling.

I feel too sorry, I’m too tired, and though I desperately want to change my life, I’m not in a position to, which is to say I’ve taken up the position of defending my nondefendable position. Position underneath position.

Flung like emotions, tilting to night . . .

Sex is the opposite of being a novelist, and I would rather live between them.

Being an artist is just another phase, / like a kid who eats the glue sticks

“We come here once a month,” the woman added. “To spice things up.”