Oort Poetica
The way ice can become a verdant spring. Horace, you know the way we stare through lenses; how we bathe the sky in radio waves. Do you understand what it means to listen to a body
Some days, Luke told me it hurt to sit down. Those days we played in the woods.
We took tarps and string from the shed to make tents between trees. We stole pennies and nickels from the house, put
Like so many gays around the world, I remember exactly where I was when Lorde dropped “Green Light”, the first song from her 2017 instant classic Melodrama. I was in my car, on my way to work. But that’s not really all of it.
Everything that could have possibly budged already had, anything neglectable was long ago done so.
The guy on the podcast had cancer, he was dying –every day he was dying a little bit more – and he was reflecting on being a literary agent.
My writing professor said to me that in order to get better, you had to dismantle the person you were, because that person was killing you. I kept wondering: Why did a killer love me?
Mama was a truck. A Ford Bronco, to be exact.
I attribute my apostasy to Michael Jackson’s HIStory
"Six fine fish in that dirty pond! They're gonna die there anyway!" he told me. "They're gonna suffocate on all that mud."
My trip had begun in Seattle, where the past few years had served up one setback after the next. I had been cut loose by my latest not-quite-boyfriend.
Twenty seven notes Gabriel Smith took at Bethnal Bust Up, York Hall, London, March 7th
If boxing is a sport, then it is the most tragic of all sports because more than any human activity it
She said: in my home, I want to feel at home. I want to feel as though I am swaddled in blanket, as though the walls pump food right to my gut. I water the plants, all seven or eight, some dying. I feed the cat
You don’t see her for several years after that, minus a brief and sweet span of days that following summer, in your usual place. You play Bob Dylan’s Mama, You Been on My Mind squeezed on a piano bench with her.
The first time I met Courtney, she told me she loved my ballet flats. We were wearing the same $14.99 shoes. She hated her curly hair and middle name and Democrats.
Your gym is perhaps your favorite thing about Hattiesburg. Your student budget is tight, but you’ll manage to eek out thirty a month somehow—you have for the last three years.
The day before isolation, I celebrate my birthday, unwed, the first of its kind in my adult life, my divorce from a great man with whom I shared an OK eleven years, finalized by way of a $250 internet
I’d spend the night there on Saturday nights, get up Sunday morning and drive to my church and preach. I didn’t find God because I wasn’t looking for him. I was looking for me but I didn’t find him either.
1. Driving east on I-94 from 8:41 to 8:55 I saw brief glimpses of beauty.
My favorite blurb about Amy Long's essay collection, Codependence, is Joshua Mohr saying: "Long leads her readers into emotional investigations and she has the courage to never flinch." To do what
“Don’t flatter yourself,” I said, turning to the man in the seat beside me. Though he didn’t appear to speak English, he intuited my rejection. Loneliness, like love, is an international language.
Maybe you can do this. It’s not your idea. But maybe.
I’d learned from Rock of Love that a diabetic’s rollercoaster blood sugar is a constant interruptor at best.
