To try to allay his doubt, or figure out of it’s real, [Li] mentally consults his in-progress novel, as if it were a friend. He intuits, in an intuition described by the line you quoted, that his doubt is wrong, is habitual and self-sabotalogical.

If a ghost is the impression you leave after you, then the divot you leave in your old bed is a ghost. 

Within 1-3 weeks, the body will begin to actively decay. This is when the organs, muscles, and skin will liquify. The hair, bones, and cartilage will remain.

Gratitude is not the response she expected. She smiled through thin lips, missing the hoped-for fight.

The whole first week after moving into his Brooklyn apartment – our apartment he keeps correcting me – I’m horribly constipated.

Gunderson could hear the vehicle’s noisy carping from eight blocks away, like a herd of wild trashcans rolling down the street.

Oh, Anya!

I’ll dig a pit where it can roam, feed off the aporia of my lust, wash its hooves in semen, soak in pools of piss.

The show literally fuckin has to go on.

Oh, absolutely a mistake to have given the wealthy Protein Bar Daddy my number.

Steady State Phenomenon in Muharraq Before

This is the invention of a spectacle. The verge of fungible wealth, dirigibles
of electricity. A thunder of dust and rickshaw sermons in Muharraq

Playin’_The_Keys

i love to dance, sing, write, chill, read
and play the keys, but sometimes, life
doesn’t allow me to hang out
and do my thing, which means
i have to divide my time into many

Your fingers began peeling the fruit, tossing orange scraps among the dirty straw. In the right light, they could have passed for blood.

Here’s the thing about choosing songs to give as gifts to people: it starts off being about them but really, it’s about you.

Adhi awoke on his third birthday, struck by the sudden knowledge that he had previously been a 48 year-old man by the name of Samuel Razia.

The Census Taker Asks Me to Tell Her About Myself

Well Terri, I’m afraid
of catfish—not their tunneling mouths,
but the paradoxical combination
of predator and prey in cat/fish—

I’m afraid of

My son is fifteen when he asks the first question I am unable to answer.

Useful tips for a woman

1.
When the drawstring comes off from the petticoat, you need to look at it as an opportunity to learn patience.

Pin a safety pin to the end of the drawstring and push

When the Santa Anas whipped into town, everyone became a little crazier. They invited the wildfires as if to burn the witches amongst us. 

Upon receiving the Pritzker Prize at 42, Welk gained a modest international celebrity and spent his 40s and early 50s galivanting around Europe, Southeast Asia and various island nations overseeing a dizzying array of projects that he believed, in some small way, changed the world for the better.

In early June of the never-ending 2020, I attended an anti-curfew, anti-police terror demonstration in my hometown of Oakland, California.

It was a warm evening as myself and a couple friends

Junior year of college, he touched the scab on the crease of my mouth where concealer failed me. I get these in the winter too, he said, and then, I have a cream.

It’s all about the timing

It’s as simple and invasive as a chime on my phone. A banner news alert, which, for most people, involves elections and wars and natural disasters and celebrity

Snake Day

God is strange. He killed my father,
     and He is everywhere, all of the time.

He is spread across the twinkling shingles and the clean, white siding
     of this windowless

I’m a mineralogist now,

I tell Jake, as I show him my crystals
all neatly displayed in boxes. It makes

me feel like a scientist. But I use
the crystals to cure the bad things in my

life, to

At the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, I browse the gift shop. It’s scented lavender from a leg-shaped diffuser in the corner.