If I tell you what’s in the bag, will you let me continue to play dumb?

“Pull over,” I said, “I’m finna yerk.”

Midway through our relationship, he had told me that whenever we had sex, he needed to think of other girls in order to stay hard. He told me everyone did it

One night Evan and I got so drunk on grape liquor that we started making out in the shower

I consider asking Richard if he’ll piss on my book but I’m still too shy.

He ordered me a martini with extra olives, just the way I like it.

A Small Gift

…is awareness, at first,

and then it may take over,

for a while, and also recede

if it must, and at times, it must.

That sometimes gentle ebb and flow,

and sometimes

Played a socialite who leaves her abusive husband to run off with an outlaw, themes
 

There areThree parts to any start. A Triptych. Trust me.  

Skaters are like theater kids with better outfits.

A Little Death

I want my gentlemen taken care of, kids nonexistent, my money on the table and it’s black on first spin.

An aggressive Doberman knocked Cindy up weeks later.

looking up at me with eyes like dogs
who’ve humped too many pillows
and now it’s time to pay the price

She feels her and this bartender, this boy, are doing sex theater. Romance theater. Everything theater.

Affection follows episodes of abuse

The secret is getting almost too in the weeds. The secret is Bujalski-maxxing.

            But by then I was dry heaving on some dark back road.

Another reading.

When a lover doesn't know your name

I could swim inside a seafoam green field. 
I could have cigarette breath again. 

Our teacher is running late, the distractingly beautiful former beauty editor emailed our group. This confirmed my suspicion that she and my teacher had a separate text thread going. She was, after

He lies there, crumpled and ragged—
a pile of unwashed laundry.

A Review of Alexandra Naughton’s Sick of Being Inside Myself

"How deep do you want to go?" the facilitator asked as I knelt before a candlelit altar. It was reckless to choose a depth in an ocean I’d never seen, but I aimed for the bottom. "Very deep," I said—a

[It began when I learned]

It began when I learned to sit                                       I began when I burned and sat
in my boredom, our poverty with                                in my