"High School Kids and Gonorrhea" and "Bearclaw Asshole"

There’s a story my father used to tell from his days as an ER resident. An old lady showed up for care, and when he asked her what had brought her in, she calmly raised a hand, showing him her palm. It was pierced straight through with a long darning needle.

Bet you’ve only made lahmajoon from scratch once. Bet you’ve made pierogi dough once. Bet your attempts at grandma’s pilaf recipe are crunchy and undercooked, noodles burnt, stuck to the bottom of the pot.

I approached looking at thirst traps like I did those Magic Eye 3D posters I’d stared at as a kid. If I stared long enough, I believed, I could see something real in those thirst traps.

One day, I end up on the side of the road next to a bobcat who is thrashing after being hit by a car.

I -- Book

In every house of our memories, there is a book. In the basement of mine, there is a paperback with pictures of the sea. 

The underwater camera is smeared with the blurriness of

Bread has its own history, its own holiness. Flour was pounded from prehistoric plants then roasted on the hot stones of Neanderthal fires. Ancient Egyptians milled grain between giant rocks, dark, mixed flour, imperfect loaves with heady scent.

The first six months I took hormones I was frumpy and ridiculous looking. I didn’t know anything about makeup or styling

Anything I speak, I know to speak a second time: My brother 
is dying. My brother is dying. You are not my sister 

tearing through an Italian restaurant, blistering
with what I have given her

This is how I want to remember us: the tattered rooster blanket, the wine bottle with a pen through the cork, Herc’s fur in tumbleweeds in the grass, Audrey’s red fingernails...

more intimate with the fit of a Gildan 
shirt versus this thing hovering some 
distance over my head always threatening 
grey blonde grey depending on mood
secrets held in pinprick dots

Because you are ten, pink skin streaked with freckles and sunscreen, sea salt on your lips as you run your tongue around your ice-cream, and a man with a grey wire moustache puts his hand on your leg and asks your mum when he can marry you, and the sand of his handprint sticks to your skin no matter how hard and raw you scrub it.

After the announcement & its sunder, 
              I flood the afternoon light into knots. 

Pocket a maiden name, banter into twilight & 
              its constituents. Mend the

There was no mystery to why we learned these things. Our parents told them to make the good times a little harder, or the hard times just a little bit worse. What is security but another opportunity to be creative in our fear.

Tasmanian devils (yes they are real animals) give birth to about 40 babies at a time but they only have four teats and so what that means is that the first four babies that make it to those four teats are the only ones that survive and do you know what happens next?

There were no innocent bystanders,
except a herd of deer, unable to perceive
the color orange. My method consisted
in having a plan, but I was letting the dirt
do my thinking—I’d had it around so

Kevin hates it when you leave the peaches on the counter, plump orange skin bruising when squeezed. You stare at them when you do your morning pages at 8A.M. like the productivity videos you watch,

Tim tells me that broke up is strong language to use. I wonder how he would describe our ending. Broke up implies an entity to be broken, but we never made it that far. I still don't know what we

Previously on...

Chapter 1a: Converging
Chapter 1b: Crisis 
Chapter 1c: Fighting the Fog

Chapter 2a: Two People
Chapter 2b: Divergence

I wrote this book manic, in psychosis, in withdrawal, while feeling like I was overdosing,

Our return to campus one evening to discover spray-painted in black on the university’s entrance wall, “ICI ZOO ETRANGER” (HERE IS THE FOREIGN ZOO).

Autocomplete

such a good boy you
fluffy little algorithm patched
with paws and droopy ears
bringing me sticks
always wanting
to play fetch
I throw a frisbee
into the woods
and today it

“Mom, if I was born a boy,”

“Like you were supposed to be,” without a tinge of playfulness as she scanned the bar cart in the living room for her preferred drink. She resembled a mannequin and had

Against the grinding fever of suppressed 
song, against a muzzle’s searing, sound 
is a muscle.                 The body’s rebuttal, 

a kind of clamoring                             
held

Conscious of your eyes on me, but unwilling to let you derail my mission, I whispered to myself, “You’ve ungently, Brutus…”

We go from ecstatic to great to good to therapy. I go to bed numb and wake up furious. I leave you for the couch every night. Is year seven always like this? When Marilyn Monroe makes a movie about