Eva Hagberg Fisher's forthcoming book (out next week) How To Be Loved figuratively fell in my lap. I was at coffee with a friend, saying I needed a new book to read, but I needed that book to be about recovery because I just needed to be heard and understood, and lo and behold, my inbox pinged.

A Godly woman has to make a living, after all.

I tried to look / like I was looking for someone above...

My friend told me, it’s just about you needing control. I did not respond when she said this. Considering nothing is just about anything.

"We argue about whether we should be more frightened" and "I tried to lose myself once"

I took a ferry there with Babas—I was calling her Babas—she was calling me Clod I think.

That this was the case for him. 

He writes a bad poem and it’s a love poem and it’s for her and he sits down on the floor and then he stands up and goes into the kitchen and opens the refrigerator door and sees that there’s an apple in the bottom drawer.

He watched the door, and saw that it wanted to open.

Today I bought blue yarn and brand-new silver nails...

She had grown up and now lived in a cold climate that encouraged looking down.

Yoda sat atop the wreckage of his escape pod, still creaking from skidding into the murky swamp hours prior

Please God forgive me. Please God forgive me.

The day my brother died, my mom ran naked in the street.

You’re in Miami and you're driving under the banyans and the palms and you're heading away from the tennis courts by the water and you're looking at the sky above the parkway and you're heading home and sometimes it feels like you'll always be in Miami.

"Blooper Reel" and "A History of Sex"

The guy at the hardware store convinced me to buy a bag of concrete mix.

I remember playing some songs at four in the morning and asking if you liked them. What the songs sounded like doesn’t matter now. I only knew a little about songs back then but I know a bit more

The bum drags himself off the floor. Then comes on nice. Real buddy buddy shit.

A few of the Greater Mosquitoes jogged by with their boards across the flats, all chest and teeth and bleach-brown hair and headed joyous to the break.  They ran full on down the slope, stepped high

While the atmosphere pumps steroids into hurricanes, let me feel the Ecuadorian sun on my face.

"Wild Seeds of Plums" and "Old Name"

It’s weird at first. The tenants through the wall. Inhabiting what used to be one-half of their home. The clanging pots and toilet flushes, heavy footsteps. The second truck in the driveway beside

“Hide the Tzahal patch,” he warned before seeing me off.

And while I could mythologize those years as a win for self-actualization—I did start that band—it was also a time of anxiety and frustration. 

Trigger

Up north she took her daughter for a walk to see the woods. Their host’s big yellow dog came along. The snow was deep. The dog was off and ranging. She crept under a fir tree and showed her