Before the internet had all the answers,
before Siri, before Alexa,
before TikTok teens with ring lights
explained the universe in under thirty seconds—
I had my dad.

Dad was my Wikipedia.
Dad

They said it was a record-breaking storm. I wasn’t paying attention. I was trying to find a clean bowl and wondering if the radiator was supposed to make that noise. I didn’t think anyone would be out

In those days, it was popular to ask, What would Jesus do? I crucified myself for days.

Look longingly
out the window. Wait for myself to come home.

County Holding

In county holding, girls recite the future from memory.

Sleep is an escape. Blankets for those with perfect zeros.

In county holding, the girls, they’re always using the

We shouldn’t have become friends. Everything about our separate lives suggested we wouldn’t meet—me in the comfort of my sunny Los Angeles home, framed by blue skies, and Frank confined by barbed wire

The hamster was actually a mouse. We were calling a lot of things by the wrong names back then.

Silly’s hands were tangled in his hair. His gaze snapped back to mine. “You didn’t hurt me, Elle. Not at all.”

One time years ago, a friend threw herself a birthday party and bought her own birthday cake, which I found surprising. She said, of course I bought my own cake. Who else was going to do it? I think it’s the same with book promotion. You have to buy your own cake, and make an event of it.

I mean,
it’s only love.

My dad described heaven as a sports bar.

Somebody is going to roofie them, I said. Dave laughed uncertainly. 

It was the summer of 2018, and I had just returned home to California from Italy, where my relationship exploded after we had lived together for only four months.

He warned me once about being all-in with poetry.

It doesn’t have to hurt.

I look at the curtain. I haven’t touched the red box since my new friend from Russian class opened it. It feels like a different object now that she’s touched it.

but allwhite right unvexed real people-pleaser

You are not proud of the answers you’ve given him. But as you leave, it strikes you – you are proud you’ve answered him with the truth.

Perhaps this is why trans people crave romantic love with a curdling, obscure undercurrent of self-doubt, of rage.

“Are you being held against your will?”

“I think so? There’s kind of an implication.”

“An implication?”

When you rearrange my insides you leave me for dead.

I think the interview went pretty well, although at one point I remember asking the interviewer to speak slower this time, using simpler words, words with no syllables if possible. 

Please dont forget to play. Can you remember 
the last time you danced?

After three flights, two chicken buses, and a strange bout of illness, I arrived in El Nido, a small backpacker nest at the far edge of the Philippines.

Wind in the ears like / Water ungathering / In and out of baskets.

When his heart is an ashtray—cigarette butts put out on a surface that will not flinch