then
the eagle is healed

It is warm in the theatre. The chair is comfortable. The trailers ended and most of the films looked good. A Coca Cola ad begins playing, which is the second to last thing they show before the movie.

She walks around like a colt in a kitchen I don’t know, bluish crescent bruise on her calf flashing every couple of turns at me.

I would take you as you are and were
over all this dead air.

I met the man who would become my Uncle through an insane-clown-posse-adjacent dishwasher coworker who wanted us to star in his uncomfortably misogynistic Instagram horror movie.

I had just moved

When the sun went down, I saw the man on the sidewalk. He had fallen onto his suitcase with a shopping bag at his feet. The light turned green. A car honked behind me. I drove ahead, but a pedestrian

I wanted him to understand my fascination with small creatures.

His dismissal to reduce me to my womanhood and paycheck fucked me.

Am I too old?              Nah,

I’ve yet to wear

my trousers rolled.

But      this morning

coffee in bed,              my wife 

and I scrolling — 

Hers:               prison

She wrapped her arm around his back in a quick half-hug that made it easy for him to tuck the envelope in her purse. She excused herself to the bathroom so she could count it.

I looked him up on Instagram. The only thing publicly linked to him was a photo of his smiling face in the cockpit of a 737, posted by the National Gay Pilots Association from 2020.

I left Texas to have him. Not for him, but for me: so that I would survive.

I sat down. Cassandra ordered a glass of wine. “I hope this wasn’t sudden,” she said.

i wonder how hard it is for her to 

reconcile being a Christian and a witch

judge and judged. how easy 

Thus commences the portion of the evening in which you retrieve the Svedka again to sober up

cause that is all we knew 

we drank liquor, smoked crack, 
escorted prostitutes around in our car,

hoping for a bisquit, or a small dead bird,
a song sweetly sung; that no one ever heard.

I listen to Queen. “Another One Bites the Dust.” The soundtrack of my life.

Countless times she was quoted for her famous remark that “monogamy is a prison that free people voluntarily check themselves in for the duration of their lives.” And “can anything be more depressing and boring in life than fucking the same person over and over again, for decades?” 

And I wonder if we are always standing at the street corner eating each other’s hearts.

In essence, there’s only one advert that can placate the masses. It’s by the surfers, slicing through the whitecaps like rotten pomegranates. It’s a thirty second trance, with a Magritte bowler hat, floating over roadkill.

i would certainly suck the islamic terrorists' cocks to save alysa li

The club isn’t so different than Plato’s cave, she thought one night after getting home from work, and while staring for a long time into her aquarium admiring its latest tenants.

With a spoon, I am turning you away.

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.

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