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.

My last suicide attempt was in a park called Jesus Green. I said ‘last’ because I gave up, not because it worked. Writing plays tricks with life and death so you need to make things clear.

I’m Writing from the Other Side of the Universe to Ask You How the Weather Is

This is a soft rain, my father says, his forehead a creased encyclopedia page. It is mao mao yu in Chinese, syllables

Seventeen days since you spoke your last words to me. They repeat themselves in my mind, I never want to forget them.

Song for 2 Phones

     What is that?
The line outside
the Maria Bamford standup
we went to last year.
          Send it to me.
     What is that?
A sugar maple on the hill
shedding Gatorade

I am not a pinch, a spoonful, a half a cup of light rivering down into the stomach where, I should know, the heart truly resides.

George Simmons used to sling crack on 42nd St.—why his uptown boys always called him The Midtown Turn. Now he’s 54—and everybody calls him Pop. He’s been running the streets for decades. “The streets

I didn’t turn around because I wasn’t entirely sure my name was being called and even so there was no one I wanted to talk to on the street in the middle of this particular Tuesday.

Traffic

It’s 60 degrees in January so the birds have decided to just stick it out because who can afford the time-share anyway and the flowers bloom completely off-key like the conductor is drunk

The first time I was shot I was fifteen and I deserved it. I broke into a run-down lurch, an ancient moonshiners' abandoned cabin in the forest.

It had been a long frustrating day, but at least he was now bathing in a bowl of milk.

And yet, and yet, from the rear pew of my mind came a rude slurping as my straw probed the ice of a Pepsi.

We get back together, because of course we do. He is better, now. Therapy helps both of us.