She could eat. She could get a little plump, not so plump that he wouldn’t like it, but plumper than before she knew him, when she had to stay thin and dainty so she could get married and become plump, though no more than he liked.
Tracey, what am I meant to do with all this shit?
Party snacks
platters of them
orange and puffed up
Moloko rasping from a corner
there’s an awareness of space, of bug spray
You know what’s sad? When no one releases your sex tape.
And then there is the question of motherhood. And how it does or doesn’t fit into the feminist narrative, into our ideas of ourselves as liberated women.
If we accept the conventional ATF line, bootleggers are scoundrels of the worst sort, caring only for the almighty dollar, men who will poison you with hootch run through junk radiators and contaminated with everything from antifreeze to dead rats.
Girls with blue hands
I
Psychopathology
in the woods
Naked snow
Cold, bare thighs
keep the snow white.
Tie around a tree
Hide your ruby
ring in the dirt
Rub your hair
against the
Find your mark. As American as they come. Like this couple, standing a few feet to your left. Around your age, but taller, sturdier, sun-fed and muscular. Their smiles remind you of neatly racked milk bottles.
Why Everything Is Everything
for my daughter
Because earth is spinning
and spinning and circles
a yellow star. Because
gases burning, flaring
above the poles we spin
Dear Jane,
The TikTok girls are mad at you.
BIG TIME
okay i’ll be doing my best to explain myself, to say i did the best i could with what i
had and you did the same my mom will be bringing home ice cream soon
she
It was during the seventh experiment that I died, or I think I died—I mean, I must have died because if I hadn’t there surely would have been a lawsuit of some sort, and I’d know about it by now if I hadn’t died. Maybe I’d be filthy rich and wouldn’t have to keep signing up for these research studies and tests just to pay my bills. And to buy my pills.
The man who used to be my husband wanted to hook up. “Right here,” he said after parking our Nissan Sable in the road we used to live on and killing the headlights
I stared at the other campers, who stared into the center, screaming through their disbelief at what they were screaming.
So I wanted to bang this exvangelical guy and it's about to get worse:
After last night, I’m no longer allowed at The Mint Bar. You could say it’s because I choked the owner’s daughter up against the wall next to the jukebox that only plays Cash songs—pushed her hard enough that a quarter fell from the coin slot—or you could say she deserved it.
Is it weird to call Dave Housley the “Uncle” of lit mags? He’s that guy, the writer/editor/generally amazing human that everyone in the literary world seems to know. Dave is one of the original
I’m in accounting. Sally in the lab. Among her other duties, Sally is an odor judge. Her nose is rather ordinary to look at, what my grandma might have called a button nose. But Sally’s nose is legend.
The man wearing a Ray Lewis jersey doesn’t know who Ray Lewis is.
Dream Vision of Frank O’Hara
it is 4:40 and I’m drenched in moonstone, sequins, fishnets, and general getting-out
of-bedness at the corner of 11th Avenue and 30th hoping for something
We beat Brock Shamos every day. We beat him with jump ropes we stole from Mr. Randall’s P.E. class
KISS ME THRU THE PHONE
trembling string between two cans
across town fry-gravel longing compressed voice-tightrope
transposed, delivered to you I don't know how it happens-
We are always looking for something to cure us of the pain of being made of fallible meat.
The Chetrams were from Trinidad and listened to Bollywood music on the weekends. They were good, hardworking people. Their kids were polite. They were not Muslims as far as their neighbors could tell, since Chetram liked Miller Lite and the daughter wore high-waisted shorts in the summer. It was not polite to inquire.
The first time I went to Paris, I was seventeen and stayed with a man who was thirty-three, Sylvain.
