Put simply, Swinehart writes like Wallace, and this similarity reminds me of something Wallace once said in an interview with Richard Powers and John O’Brien about his ideal reader: “If stuff is going well, it feels like I’m talking to somebody. Or like there’s somebody there. And I think it’s somebody rather suspiciously like me.”
if you listen to duran duran while prancing around in nature and it's mostly overcast, you will feel like you're missing, but not loved enough to be put on a milk carton
Amazing fucking Grace,
tell them
how you’re production
and I’m consumption
and how we mess around
with gender roles
Every morning I’d wake up, walk to Target and take a hangover dump in their nice clean bathroom
James served ten years in prison. His crucial impasse occurred a week after his life in the clink—under a neon sign that read Green Goddess.
It's easier for me to write a poem wherein I don't have to reassure my reader that I'm going to be okay, because I don't know the answer.
“They don’t mind you sleeping with their wives?” I asked
Dash wore a jean jacket. He’s been wearing the same one for 15 years. The one in his Tinder picture. Dash, 29, one mile away. He sent me a screenshot of that, even though I had gone off online dating.
“Nice? Becca threw a drink in a guy's face for touching her ass last night, and you missed it because you were off talking to a nice guy?” She used air quotes around the word nice.
Jimmy was dead, and I had slept with all of the eligible coworkers.
I give them all a careful look and say things like, “Oooh, this is an extra special egg.”
Finally, one small voice from the tiniest of the nieces near the couch squeaked, “Fuck Gregor.”
Now when I see someone hurting, from the loss of a lover, I never say, “You’ll get over it.”
There's some man on the internet and I think he's stalking [redacted] and [redacted] and [redacted]
The sensation of my stomach eating itself into a lovely inward slope sustains me. Keep smiling.
Judging from popular discourse, the novel is in serious jeopardy, perhaps even an endangered artform, having been beset by a myriad of threats that include the advent of the digital age and a
Rawdogging reality
isn’t for the faint of heart
Charlie would never have to be persuaded to eat pussy, I thought to myself as my date’s tongue fumbled with the flaps around my clit.
I couldn’t help but wonder if I was just feeling bad for myself. She was alive. We’re all so strange. It really breaks my heart sometimes. Marisol wanted a young man’s cock. I wanted to give her rose petals. Oh, how full of shit I was.
The following is an excerpt from Smith’s forthcoming acid western novel.
Clem is a worldly fella, but he’s not much for talking so I get fragments here and there. Got to the West from Russia the
She had sent me a video of herself in the bath listening to Elvis, and I watched that over and over.
I’d love to keep her locked away in legends, but she walks and grows among us.
I dreamt of the mystery woman, still faceless, and I woke up haunted.
