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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
In these poems I am using ‘Chelsea Martin’ as a pseudonym for someone who is not Chelsea Martin.
I've been socialized to be alive / the quiet death of women eating salad
