[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

Charley and I met freshman year of college. She was the blonde one, whereas I was not. I was never the blonde one. We went to college on a big hill, warm in the summer, warm in the winter. We both

She sang along to the songs, swaying on the spot, and seemed to know all the lyrics. She smiled at him and grabbed him when their big hit came on, singing “There she goes” at his face, until, grudgingly, he sang along too. Then she kissed him

It's the fourth week out of five of our Zoom writers' workshop, and I've finally gotten used to the rhythm of my Wednesday nights. There's my teacher, in New York City, the sweet nerdy man from

I kept swinging, and he started headbanging to the music.

In this book, I kept using the word “buzz” in various forms. Buzz, buzzy. I think I even got the word “bloodbuzz” in there, which I stole from the band The National.

Someone kissed the love of their life at the party.

The world might 
not be here tomorrow,
but she still draws 
a perfect outline 
around her 
lips and eyes. 

Those long walks and unresolved questions gave him an appetite. For skin and flesh. The allure of degeneration presented itself again. This time as a salve for pain.

Bob Dylan concert. Of course, Bob Dylan.

Death is not a proper noun.

They traded stories the way people pass a cigarette back and forth.

I return from a trip to Florida over the long weekend with my high school friends to my writers' workshop. We were in Miami to celebrate our collective 30th birthdays, and hit all my favorite things

“If you knew me, you’d already know the answer to that,” she said. We were fighting I realized.

He did whatever Lulu told him, but not in a desperate way and they started having fun together again.

Best writing advice you’ve received? 
Press on the bruise. 

I add “Ripple” to the playlist and cry, imagine her cradling my broken body the same way I held her own: like it was the world’s rarest treasure. Like I’d never let go.

The next day, she threatened to slit my throat in the dead of night, said my sheets would run redder than every last cunt in Orange County.

HOW COULD SHE POSSIBLY KNOW? How much her words would affect me?

There were all these portraits of me hung on the walls and they would dance on the frames,
 the shadow people that spiritually strapped my body to the mattress.

He wanted to eat her out while she read his book aloud.

Freshly thirty and newly heartbroken, the second class of our writers' workshop found me at a very midlife crisis time in my life. On Monday, things ended with the man I thought I might

“You want to go to Heaven with me tonight?” Juniper delicately dropped one of the pieces of sandwich into her mouth.

The universe seemed filled with women, aside from my brother and I it was all women and they did everything and chatted amiably amongst themselves,

I couldn’t help feeling they abandoned me in our womanhood when it wasn’t their stop.

The cow udder, Freud wrote, was in its form a penis and in its nature a breast, and therefore the intermediary between penis and breast. The blowjob was therefore the image of innocence.