Two months in, we began to confide our secrets to each other. Her early brush with benzos. My peer-pressure-prone passivity.
Equivalence
How heartbreaking to find irises tilting
to full bloom in one direction
as if waiting for someone to come
down their path are one symptom
of light’s partiality. A heart
To our right, I feel the cool breath of a gaping canyon. It beckons, invisible behind the wall of fog, its voice the skid of tires on gravel.
Once the coffee cooled I took a sip and said, Not bad for McDonald's coffee.
And he said, It really is a good cup of coffee. Wherever you go, you can always depend on McDonald's for a good cup of coffee.
And I thought, McDonald's coffee is trash.
I get too drunk on a Tuesday night and tell him I want to marry him. We’ve known each other for six years.
I’ve become a puddle on the floor everyone dances around, stares at, hoping to see something.
And if memoirs allow us to relive the past, novels give us a chance to change it.
I WANT TO THANK YOU
for unbottling my aged Mandarin with each 晚安 / for cooking me these sardines / strewn on a
beach of rice, their eyes still intact / I want to thank you / for carrying that
You roamed in like a chuckling bear into my house of beakers, graduated cylinders, round bottom flasks, you asked to borrow an Erlenmeyer, here you go, I said, thought you were just a clumsy animal, afraid you'd break something of mine, pushed you out of the lab and you came back bearing M&M's in a petri dish, half of them a mess of Blue No. 2
I pledged to him two things: one, that I would hex the ones that hurt him, and two, that I would write him poetry.
When They Let Them Bleed: Ten Years After
It took me a long time to write “When They Let Them Bleed” – both in the practical sense, in that I recall writing it in very short bursts because it was
They whispered wow wow wow wow in wind that might've just toppled them over; they whooped; they swapped interlocked arms for tightly-squeezed hands and back again.
Whimsy is not as prominently scarred as she imagines herself to be, but this obsession with her face leads her to sabotage her relationships because her insecurity is so destructive.
i felt you were floating now with them, in a bubble in space, the bubble has a name, ecstasy, keta, speed, coke, that’s the name of the bubble.
For the better part of every year I try like heck to be a better person. Nicer. More caring. This year I’ve taken up breathing. I breathe in and I breathe out each day. Last year I learned to put less
Rome was good. Sat ninety in the summers. Leaned on his off speed when the weather got cold. Postseason, most of the district had seen him by then, we took advantage of teams whose scouts said he was
I played left field for the Tularosa Middle School Tarantulas girl’s team. I was long and brittle, like a cactus spine. Or a splinter. And I was afraid of the baseball. I batted .083 that summer and
i'm in love with the thousand yard stare
deeply towards the worn fold
of the catcher's glove
Autumn was the season of fire. Boys and houses burned pure white holes into the night, and I self-immolated in every room but the little one I shared with you.
The bartender, we start sleeping together because he likes that I know all about the tragedy of his Seattle Mariners.
One night I wait for him to get off work with two double vodka sodas at the
In 1964, I was a college freshman. Someone, I don’t pretend to know who, researched offensive statistics for all Little Leaguers in the New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut area. The unknown
I pause from scraping frost
off the car, and watch my gray
emissions wisp away
into the chill. I miss strict
seasons, and knowing
what to wear. Last week, it was 72.
When will summer
