it must have been the fifth...

Outside a window a stag picks at an apple core,
its antlers, tilted downwards, catch on a branch,
it stumbles, takes a breath, regains its footing.
                        A wooden sign—nondescript

I like sex in fiction to be full of ambivalence—undeniable lust mixed with doubt or disgust. I have done things with lovers I don’t want to tell anyone. 

Previously on...

Chapter 1a: Converging
Chapter 1b: Crisis 

I started high school miserable. By my sophomore year, I was looping Sinead O’Connor on my headphones, the album with “Nothing Compares to You” and “I am Stretched on your Grave,” and trying not to

"The Courtyard" and "Double Jeopardy"

In contrast to wild animals, pets are timelines left on the floor. These models of accelerated, abridged lives can be found to the right of the Lazy Boy and the magazine rack.

one from the spit where I watched them...

"He slept among a pile of used truck tires ..."

For as long as Mark could remember, he had wanted to save someone from a wolf. He had wanted it to happen in a specific way. Peculiar even.

Two cop cars nose to rear...

Song: “Seventeen”

You can’t skateboard over road work. But you can wipe your bloody hands on your jeans; blood doesn’t look right going down a drain. Later you see a twenty dollar bill on the

Not knowing was better than being disappointed. If I didn’t know what TGOYI meant, it could mean anything.

None of us have The Touch,

Though we have felt The Touch

*

We are all (all of us

Wearing leopard-print dusters Just once,

I was thirty hands tall (like one whole horse

Standing on

I’m standing on top of Drew Barrymore’s star and the song’s issuing from a hot-purple Sony boom box someone set up a few feet away.

If you cut my leg and peel away the muscle, there’s a family living inside

                             After Qu Yuan

In my country, our insults give benefit of doubt. Nǐ yǒu bìng— 
You are sick—                                              as if there’s an

On that spirited Emmy night,
when the camera cut to you
and you radiating in red satin
said to the world
“It’s an honor just to be Asian”
I lost my breath.
Time stopped,
blindsided by this

oh longed-for, awaited beloved. she says my name
        wrong and makes me come hard. i catalog
lovers like this, coins in kitchen water. six years on,
         type thirsty into google

with the flies, small handfuls of sunlight, sensation only one degree
removed from excess.

What to press a heart to, what color pulled up from the earth.

I’m looking for my time machine.

          (Dol Hareubang, Jeju Island, South Korea)

And there you sit, your basalt belly swollen heavy,
a gentle smile playing at your stone lips. To say I
sought you out would be a bald-faced

I wasn’t attracted to him at all but I was single and alone on New Year’s so I listened to him go on and on about birdwatching.

One guy told me I didn’t look like my online photos while we sat al fresco in a bougie hotel in Venice. He smelled of vinegar. I ordered two crab sandwiches. I ate one and got the other to go.

When I return home, Samuelson is still in the living room with his friend Jake. I hear them talking as I enter our apartment through the back door. They don’t know I’m home yet, as I had stepped out

I steer the moon over my right shoulder, vertebrae
lodged above coyote ridge, winding plains road
I drive all the night’s hungers down. White light
clasping the devil’s backbone. Today snow

“Hey, are you up?”