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.

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

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?

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).

“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

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

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

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

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

I was too shocked to scream
at the roosters to stop crowing, their throats
                robust and practiced in a language I find myself

disarming at all costs. In my first few years
of

I was with a Serbian who said, “Tonight is about your pleasure,” so I was doing great.

Previously on...

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

Chapter 2a: Two People

my family and I moved 
from Japan to America
and found solace 
in hunting mushrooms  

the kind we sought 
are called matsu-take, 
the highest grade
selling for a grand per kilo 

I do

Teenaged girls raised in the sixties, what harm could come from going with a sought after, popular guy?

It is December 21, 2020, the night of the Great Conjunction. For the first time since the 1600s, Jupiter and Saturn will be the closest to each other they’ve ever been. NASA says you’ll be able to

Then a spring day burns through with such clarity Melissa asks me to help her interview dog walkers at the dog park. Not the day nurse. Not the other aid. Me—our first outing since the

Before I was me, I was somebody else, the same as we all are. A human is constantly shedding skin like a snake. It’s just a metaphor.

I learned all the tricks in middle school; I learned how to

— after Frank Ocean, “Nikes”

You would have laughed 
at the sight of us: bodies twisted,
one foot in the air to show off
a new pair of Nikes; iPhones ringing 
with warning about deep

How many white girls of twelve and thirteen became the dreamed-about woman back home when I listened to Every Little Kiss by Bruce Hornsby and the Range?

To the left of the counter stands a dead rat on its hind legs, taxidermied, with one front paw extended and one middle finger raised. An insult that looks like benediction. A pair of antlers sit atop