Coolness is an anchor, a fortress, a cold and remote puritanism.
1.
Remember when you would sit on the floor of my lavender painted room when I was 15 and you were 21? You’d twirl a dreadlock around your finger looking up at the wall of Teen People Magazine
Once upon a time, long before she was on Good Morning America, I met the kindest writer on Twitter. Not only was she a relatable mother-writer, but she also understood Scrivener. This was absolutely
The other day she showed up at André’s apartment in the middle of the night with a red rose and, in the bottom of her purse, a steak knife...
Each day it paints the clearest possible picture of the gulch you’ve driven your life into.
a monstera I brought as a housewarming gift; bookcases betraying a brilliant, associative mind—the LOTR trilogy, a chess board, tomes on capitalism and ecology, The Power Broker, an anthology of gay poetry, more Caro books on LBJ, a poetry book I’d gifted atop the dusty shelves
It’s 2018 and my husband and I are on the couch, watching what will end up being the longest World Series game in history— 18 innings, seven hours and twenty minutes. The Los Angeles Dodgers are
"Style, jokes, slapstick, serious ideas, and shit-talk"
A Flash Book Review of "The Apology" and Brief Interview with Christian TeBordo
When you work in an office (or maybe any job, but in my
Southward
You are the big blue sky
I never thought you would have
The moment when you turn your head over
So the water freezes
So the ginkgo falls
So the wall full of photos is also pale
And
Maybe it won’t work for you. Maybe you are too smart, or too cemented in your physicality. Or you’ve run your brain through more powerful substances than I have. But if you want to try to leave your
Often when I got poor grades as a child, and I often did, I would be told that if I wanted to be the CEO of Playboy I had to do better in school.
just looked outside
to see what’s going on
whatever it
is thursday
precious, beautiful
whatever as ever
and i can’t
pry my hand
off the windowsill
i’m driving the future
it’s a
You had one of those
shag haircuts that all lesbians
in Brooklyn have we sipped
your favorite pink drink
From champagne flutes as the
sun bled crimson and the air
crisped between us you’ve
You’ve heard of Leigh Chadwick, of course. She’s a force of nature, a clear, true Twitter voice, even your favorite poet, perhaps? She’s a writer whose poetry combines form and imagery in unique,
We rely upon these narratives, asking them to explain away uncertainties about why we are the way we are, about how we have come to be in the world just like this. We ask them to prove to us that we have been here at all.
He sits alone on the beach with his feet in the sand, cigarette in mouth, eyes on the water, though there’s no one out here who knows him, and it’s not clear what he wants, unless what he wants is to be alone, in which case he picked the wrong part of the strand.
I worried I had magically bloated between 9 a.m. and lunch time, even though I’d only eaten the prescribed six saltine crackers.
The weather is hot. The air conditioning is broken. Everyone’s body is aching. “You’re old enough to know.” Our parents, he says, agree: it is time for us to understand openings, to recognize that we are not pinatas. We are not stuffed with sugary candies in tight plastic wrappers. Streamers and noisemakers will not burst forth from our chests. We should not go at one another with baseball bats. Openings are not occasions for blindfolds.
Hiring Bodyman
This city hates me
I get so tired
of waiting
for you
I groom myself
Now all I have to do
is show up at your door
& you’ll call me sweetheart
forever
I hate
A river coursing with so much life it broke through the surface. I liked that.
S and I were together nearly a year before the band really got back on the road. Their six-week tour started in Minneapolis.
that was the year that all the carnivals came to town. sounds like a fake small town thing, but when you live in a small town, all the things that happen are fake small town things, except they’re
The summer I was allergic to tap water was the summer I lost all my friends. School was out but nobody wanted to be around me except for Joel who wasn’t really my friend to begin with but sort of became one afterwards. It was understandable. I couldn’t shower and, well, to be perfectly honest, I smelled bad. Joel didn’t seem to mind, though. He worked the check-out at the general store and taped his ear to his head.
We’ll leave your hair for the birds, she’d say, so they’ll build their nests to keep themselves and their babies protected.
You asked if I wanted to send you the latest version of my story as a Google doc so you could add comments. You offered to send me one of your stories in return.
And V, who had been high all day and drinking since around 4pm, suddenly realized how fucking bored she was of all of it, of once again drinking her way through grad school in a cool city going to goth nights with people she was or wasn’t in love with and so V thought about getting up mid-sentence and leaving and calling her old sponsor and hitting up a late night AA meeting or maybe even just going home and getting some sleep or crying but instead she just listened to herself charmingly talk about nothing until she couldn’t stand it and asked the girl to dance.
