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

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

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

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

“See,” I said. “We’re both nihilists.”

 “I’m not a nihilist,” Matt said. He was at the kitchen sink filling his flask.

I am afraid of a heart
above a head, inversion
willing erasure, the body
surrendering to gravity, violence
a chance some call skill
but only because a girl is great
when she risks

I’ve been trying to find this quote by Chris Kraus from Aliens & Anorexia I think, but the quote is nowhere in my notebooks, even though I remember writing it down obsessively.

Previously on...

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

For the first time ever, they were being honest about their sex lives.

Flakes

In the 1970s, every grocery in my Midwestern town sells tall quarts of buttermilk. My mom uses it for pancakes, and I also drink it with salt and pepper. Once I serve it to myself so salty

Lagos gods

"the gods are exemplars of human striving" —Wole Soyinka
 

Festival aura fills the atmosphere
i rejoice for you                     moyo fun e
i rejoice for myself            

In the morning, we don’t move. I’m satisfied. I’m easy to love. I’m not freezing and still drunk.

Darling, stop being stupid, 
she says with all the tenderness she can muster,
which is not a lot, when I bring up my ex. 
At the dining table, in the gaudy rust of sunset,
she alternates between

Turns out, we decided later, it was silly to try and sell flowers at all. The user experience of flowers had to be re-tooled.

Many languages did not and some still do not include the color word blue. Color words tend to enter languages in the order of black and white (or dark and light), and next red, and next green and yellow, colors that often share one and only one word, and finally blue.

Throughout our first year in that house you woke feeling this ghost’s breath on your face, and at night, sometimes, you’d jump up frantic, swearing you’d felt its grave-clasp on your ankle or arm.

Lions and tigers and bears, oh my—when the three of us were together I wondered if I should be the tiger. But I did not feel tigerish by any metaphor. I was not sleek.