“It’s time to choose,” the prison warden gruffly informed the man on death row. 

On my way to somewhere else, I happen to pass my ex-boyfriend Rob’s apartment, months since I’ve seen him, but he’s been showing up in my sleep recently, making me roll and grumble.

Picture this: It’s 2004. I’m living in Berkeley, California. I swear I am a cool girl. I’m dating a rapper who has had some success. He’s got massive dreadlocks that differentiate him from everyone.

Catch fire overtaking

I GOT NOTHING      I HAVE / NOTHING     I HAVE

CHLAMYDIA I GOT FROM

WHAT     YOU / THINK I HAVE

EVERYTHING AND THIS I DON’T

HAVE / NOTHING      I GOT I

GOT I

That’s what your parents say when they come in with their Santa suits. But it’s not Saturday. It’s Tuesday. It’s time to go to school.

If I could purchase a lifetime subscription to a living author’s work, I’d subscribe to John McNally. His fiction is engaging and funny, his books on craft are illuminating, and his recent memoir—The

I’ve been shipped off to spend the summer with my uncle in Beijing. There is my face in the computer’s reflective meniscus, watching his stocks.

so of course let it greet you fully in the face of your body
and tackle that which sent it into the dust
and rejoice that a body can chill and still chill back.

At the age of sixteen I worked a job digging holes. Sometimes it was ditches, other times it was retention ponds.The work was as hard as it was simple. Every evening my boss would slip me a crumpled

Canvas after canvas I see my life in scenes the artist cannot know.

I lost track of Ben while I was married. Seven years. I hadn’t seen Ben in 7 years. Ben refers to those years as my domesticated years. I lost track of a lot of things that were important to me

I fear being buried alive, but I insist on being buried when I'm dead.

We agreed to meet in a bar known as the ‘anus of the city.’ It had terrible lighting which obscured its ugly regulars. The regulars had heads like onions with names like Fred, Harry, Deborah, Henrietta. Years of drinking had withered their necks to the size of cocktail sticks and I didn’t pity them because I liked hating them.

Kentucky is chill and for the most part, doesn't try to be something it's not. I feel that way abt myself tbh.

Self-guided tour: Exhibit #9 from the National Museum of Broken Marriages

A medium says to channel the late wife through beloved objects. I press my ear to a mug, a journal, my husband’s chest.

She liked to take care of me and I let her. “Sorry about the bread,” she said, handing me a full plate. “It got soggy.”

We ate in the living room, looking up every once in a while at the screen

Then I hear it. Loud as the train coming into the station. Fuckinragabagagrrahfuuck. Ah ha. Of course. The unmistakable call of the down and out drunk.

Whatever: molecules transform / and become part of my arms, my legs—that’s cool.

When I was twelve or thirteen my grandmother gave me a book by art historian and occultist Fred Gettings about the tarot. My grandmother really helped foster my imagination about magic.

Most of the time, I am skeptical of the notion that a writer can find his or her voice.  I warn my first-year students against believing the maxim because, to me, it presupposes that every writer

Glass of Water—

Selves rasp against each other. Mother's little bucket of wisdom tipped over; teacher's sweet girl has curdled. Mere glimpse of the calm hand of an honest femme could heal—cool

The main thing about washing dishes at Ronny’s Café is I can come into work pretty fucked up and no one seems to notice—least of all Todd. 

I turn the knob to the right, bang my hands against the steering wheel, and deafeningly inform the world that I’m out of my cage and doing just fine.

I immediately remembered the Sex and the City episode where Samantha wants to sleep with the Franciscan priest she refers to as Friar Fuck.

They

whoever they are they warn freak snowstorms
in spring & weak apple harvests & everyone mutters
certain doom in small talk & watches the news cycle
for the deaths of their

In these poems I am using ‘Chelsea Martin’ as a pseudonym for someone who is not Chelsea Martin.