if i tally it
every time
my tongue finds cherry

do you still
pull your thumb down my lip
sweet surrender

in the other city
the social concepts that killed me here
stay peripheral 

It’s abundantly clear that Gass sweat blood over this novel, every word chosen with the utmost care, a master at work.

I regret inventing t-shirt language model twink size

She decides that maybe being an object of consumption isn’t so bad. She even begins to enjoy the attention. Becomes aroused by the men’s overt enthusiasm for her. She is an edible woman, dolce, delectable; something to be devoured.

In the old gym, value revealed itself in nontraditional ways.

Spit flew from the man's mouth when he spoke, if he spoke.

I’m in the habit of befriending slightly older women. Maternal figures leading bohemian lives within suburban parameters. Seekers abandoned in childhood by dead(beat) moms. Motherless daughters can sniff out other motherless daughters. We wear our stale deprivation like a discontinued perfume.

There was a guy called PixelMoth13 on a late-night forum saying, “Love is a wound that repeatedly tears and stitches itself back together.” I clicked like.

She lives in Brooklyn, so I go to Brooklyn.

When I got back to your room, my makeup gone, wet strands of hair sticking to my back,

“We’re not sex workers, are we?” Grady asks one night while we’re watching Bake-Off on the sofa.

When I came of age, the rules were a little different. We were all facing the same battle back then, so it didn’t matter as much what labels we used for each other.

Rude Guy tortured me. I would go over to his house in ridiculously slutty outfits, and he would only open his door a crack, and give me a poetry quiz. Then he would let me in, but still not fuck me!

The snow is falling in big chunks, disguising the somber gray of the neighborhood I hate, Bushwick. I thought it’d grow on me by now, our second winter here; it hasn’t. On the street below is a bright

She was about three weeks into the East Hollywood apartment just a few blocks away south of Thai Town, which meant she was three weeks into a new life where the most consistent relationship she was

Do you do sexting sessions at all? he commented under a photo. He scrolled on, rubbing his crotch, the malaise placated but still lurking on the horizon.

DING!

Key moments of our togetherness keep flashing before my eyes, lingering there.

cadillac blue and sprite can green

Like, what the fuck is this dude’s problem?

You told me you understood when I tried to explain why my face was so pale, my eyes so sunken, my hands so shaky. I was sure I was crazy—you not only said I wasn’t crazy, but asked me point blank if I was a spy.

I got a tattoo on my ass at her behest.

I’m still waiting for the day that my cum tastes like water and not martyrdom.

We fumbled about with each other for a few years, but things blew over before we could settle into anything like conjugality.

And as I darkened, I needed nothing.

Jaia Hamid Bashir spoke with Hobart editor, Breen Nolan, about her debut poetry collection, The Afterlife of Sweetness, how she sees the self as a kind of fiction and her love of making

in large, friendly, white type on the chest, is the name of a sex toy for men.