The Day I Drove to Dubuque (an Hour and Fifteen Minutes One-Way) to Find Out I Had $1.09 Left on a Books-A-Million Gift Card
poetry in real life is January in Iowa,
watching from my
Not long after the bugs started crawling out of my sink, the diamond on my engagement ring fell off.
When I opened my eyes, I noticed something large there lying on the ground beneath a half-fallen tree.
If a middle-aged man sobs in a dark room and nobody is around to hear it, does anyone say, “It’s just a cat. Get over it?”
Ten years ago, I made a temporary move from New York to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a research fellowship for my novel. Within a month, I met Gino, a tall lawyer with a pronounced Roman nose,
Regarding my best self, she’s referring to yours truly, the one who keeps Michelangelo and Caravaggio from canceling each other.
We will have an easy drunken conversation I won’t remember.
And at its core, it’s a book about candor and creation and intimacy and talking about things that often go unsaid.
She said she made boys fall in love with her. I said I was above her manipulations but I cried when she left. When she posted pictures with other guys I felt awful. I tried not to talk to her. Her messages came less and less until finally the feeling calloused.
i impart resonance on the amber zen
in a manifestation of waterford
and drink down the vacuity to expedite
enlightenment:
a numb tongue and thawing cheek and the ringing reaching
As a baby dyke, I’d waded into sex and romance like a kid at a water park, slowly and then all at once. Now I was on the sidelines.
He’s from Modesto, which is clear without him telling everyone in his row and ours that he’s from Modesto. “Takes me only an hour to get here…because let’s just say…I don’t always drive the speed limit,” he says...
Let’s say you go to the beach. And let’s say it’s on your own for the first time. And let’s say you’re 13 and look 15. Maybe 16. And let’s say your mom doesn’t know you’re going alone, because Olivia was coming, but the little chickenshit went and told her mom, that stuck-up bitch from Scarsdale, who said why the hell does your father even bother paying for flute lessons?
Half Brits, half Americans. Special Relationship Rule No. 1: Love thy neighbo(u)r.
On Penguins in Brooklyn
the protagonist feels like
she’s never leaving,
stuck on a moving walkway
in the middle of cincinnati
international airport
in kentucky,
headphones dangling,
she
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.
