[B]y fleeing the city to live on the outskirts of nowhere—a place so far off the beaten path that even Duras’s aging Mr. Andesmas would have felt isolated—I was of course trying to escape from none other than myself.

She wakes up sad. She can't shit. She spreads out the foil. no creases. folds it in half. She puts the stuff in the crease. holds a lighter under it. A zippo. then smokes it. Well smokes the smoke. It's like kissing god or the…

I catch a glimpse of myself in the small mirror on the adjacent wall and find myself becoming shy at my own reflection, which is ludicrous in theory, shying away from oneself, but as I lock onto the few freckles I have spread neatly on both cheeks...

She wonders if he will do the dishes. He said that he would, but that doesn’t mean anything. He said he would do them last week, said he would save money, said he would come home last night. He didn’t do any of those things, either.

I laughed maniacally in my head at the thought, but I kept picking at it all the same, the bunnies had plans for us.

Emma Louise is walking over a concrete bridge when she spies, out of the corner of her eye, a man fishing, waist deep, in the river tumbling below. She is thinking that the water must be very cold on this autumn day, when she sees an extraordinary thing.

She asked if I needed to be measured for size “to make sure they feel really good on you,” her lips all gloss and smile. I was nineteen and knew my size but changes in weight had caused fluctuations before so maybe I'd be different…

Listen to him barking in the night. Fear shifts on the bed next to you, hogging the covers. Stare at the ceiling and wonder what to do. Forget his birthday. Forget he is forty-two. Forget the phone call from Berkeley twenty-one years…

Bill texted me at 3:44, invited me to join him at Chip's, where he was having a drink. Chip's Bar is a great dive, and I accepted without hesitation. Ten minutes later I was on a crowded bus filled mostly with fat people, and twenty minutes after that I was…

You’re never really asleep. I am never awake. But as the darkness fades, I read. Your body tells my story.

No jagged bits of crust were thrust up/ through the prairie’s black gumbo/ to give us cataclysmic mountain views.

forced to submit/ to reasonableness// and universal healthcare.

The ocean smelled like decomposed plant life and clinically despicable vagina, but I still spoke of its power and my fear of it in moonlit clichés and she still listened.

"I'm in a wrestling movie!" you shouted.

Even word dancers need rest.