Always, I am navigating some half-abandoned landscape— part future, part past. Whenever I have a companion, it is my ex husband—the man who, after our divorce seven years ago, moved states away, leaving me to raise our kids mostly solo. On this particular morning, it finally occurs to me that these dreams may not be normal.
Jeff O told us that he and Brian H split after watching Chasing Amy...
sat on my couch for twenty-four hours popping oxycontin while I watched a full season of Gilmore Girls. Lorelai and Rory were not on speaking terms and I missed my mom.
It doesn’t sit right anymore, so neither does he. But in the Brooklyn neighborhood where my mom grew up, he’d walk on his hands for an audience of Irish-Catholic children. Older now than he was then, they’re still in awe.
My brother always comments on how big the sky is in my little stretch of western Kentucky. We crane our necks and peer at the sickle moon, the unblinking stars.
There’s a picture of you at queer prom, in the photo booth, faces alight with total bliss.
One evening you come home to discover Boris Yeltsin standing in your kitchen.
a man stands on stage his cue cards flashing...
Twelve hours later, I surrendered to sleep at a rest stop.
The text said: Hey! I think I just saw you cross the street (I’m in the red Prius). How are you?
On Human Origins
You take a half-person’s body, then another half-person’s body, and you connect them together and put them inside the mom’s body. Then they grow and grow and grow. Then you
This is how we played: one of us would lay on top of the other fully clothed, “go dead,” and see if the other could move. He relished it. I would lay on him, every part of me heavy and slack. It was
On Day One, Larry-the-Lizard quits smoking
and eating saturated crap.
Day Two: he buys a hard pack of Dunhill King Size
on his way to Fatty Patty’s Burger Palace. Why?
Because the purplish
I bought a compilation of Michael Jackson Number Ones when the Wal-Mart Supercenter finally opened. It feels right to have viewed the future from my bedroom, door closed, music up.
In fact, even if I could reverse my reach through the years spanning us and stop you, I don’t think I would.
I return to the kitchen and walk in on Jodeci pulling a syringe out of her neck. She takes the rope from my hands and uses it as a tourniquet for my arm.
“But beauty wasn’t enough.”
– Gretchen Marquette
Nurturing as a kestrel checking your sheets for mice I am a woman designed. Because I was designed
it follows that I was
We hear them in the kitchen, leaping around with meaty thuds, and in the morning Cheryl has barricaded the kitchen door. She tells me the landlord sent someone to assess the situation.
“Okay,” I
I suppose I was in a conspiratorial mood when I told you that I don’t always feel like a man.
The last dozen years of my life could be mapped out by my Craigslist history, moments when I’ve called out into the abyss and some voice has come whistling out of the darkness with the exact inverse of my need.
Psycho Trev scared the shit out of me. He did the dishes at a Tony’s diner in town. He lived in a singlewide out in the woods and did a lot of shrooms. He had huge parties at his place too.
It was 2007, and the closest that most Americans came to hitchhiking were two new movies: The Hitcher and The Hitchhiker, a lower-budget version of the same plot. In both movies young naïve roadtrippers pick up good-looking psychopaths in the desert. In The Hitcher Sean Bean chains a teen heartthrob between two semi trucks and pulls him apart at the waist.
young girls walk alone
at night and
laugh from their bellies, sing
in jungle gym voices
to cradled stars
There is a loneliness to many things, I am finding: there is a loneliness to sidewalks, to tea bags, to guest bathroom wastebaskets. This hickory wood sits like concrete in my hands; there is also a loneliness to interacting with materials, materials that can’t know what kind of end they’re meeting.
