He says he feels like all his problems would be solved if he stopped going to that bar.

he flashed a toothless grin, all James Dean California Cool, a tan blonde blue-eyed surfer type. I imagined him as the boys Lana sang about.

Things that make sense: plants, deer, video games, sushi, beer.

When taking drugs of this caliber – drugs that show you death’s light – there is always some part of you that wants to die.

When she looks back at me, there’s a saturnine hopelessness in her eyes I understand too well.

The artist class?

Wild as the jungles they came from,
where boas flexed around their trunks —
like my other brushes with miracles,
the men who love you back, how they come
to you, gorgeous and invasive,

where Mother had hung on the wall
our Hogarth prints and crucifix

Jimmy’s thing was his violent ability in soccer. Bismarthalou’s was in his preposterous name and the mystifying way in which he spoke of his potentially fictitious motherland.

I had started doing aerobics and running in place in our townhouse living room when Chad was at the golf shop. I’d found a recipe for whole wheat banana bread and I made a loaf every Sunday and every

“There’s no reason to spread melodramatic rumors about the delay of the album,” she says

He stole my Tupperware, the largest one in a glass Pyrex set.

His white face is red. Mom taught me that people turn red like tomatoes when they’re drunk. I look around and see pink and red faces all around me.

I was telling stories. I was enjoying music. I was proselytizing. I was observing.

after Charles Bukowski

When they first met dirty talk felt like solving timed coding challenges at a job interview.

Every orgasm I am not having is a poem in process.

She was the sudden presence that filled the delivery room like a creation spirit pressing his thumb to make a wrinkle in space.

The body rotates its symbols / like a stereoscope

I fall asleep on the First Date. It happens when we're cresting the chain hill of a roller coaster called Sallie Mae.

Sex would remain forever yoked to this school shooting, grief combined with an uncanny moment of clarity: life won’t be the same after this, regardless.

I’m flinging sparks at a desk 
in the cold cell of civilization’s midnight 
 

When he stands in the living room fully erect, wearing nothing but blue corduroy shorts cut off so high the pockets peek out, he holds a bicycle chain lock above his head victoriously, like a sword from stone; a makeshift weapon, we can see it’s stained with another man’s blood.

When I was ten years old something happened, an event I never understood

I've finished packing and am leaving. Ten, nine, eight, seven . . . .

I'm sick...