“An enactment of the truth, proof that our skin will always revolt in such a way? Black girls, black women, are there, in those six seconds, silent, waiting, invisibly unleashed, always present and living, fighting to be alive.“

“The Robitussin takes a really long time to kick in so I am sober for an entire sermon. I keep waiting for some sort of interesting visual or sensory hallucination but there is just this guy with an acoustic guitar praising Jesus, and my girlfriend who is waiting until marriage to have sex. “

“At the top, you brace yourself against the pitch as your father clambers up the sloped roof to the hatch. A hot wind rakes the top of the cornfields. From here you can see all the way to Marysville.”

“I imagine the nudists rising / early to eat cheese, drinkcafé au lait, before / heading”

“To learn beauty through the lack is how music unwinds its throttle. You must be quiet in its breathing, little avalanche. You are secondary. Every knot in a series must say this to its neighbor. If you listen closely, lace sounds like a pack of firecrackers wishing in little blasts.”

“I wade in. I’ve always had compulsion to submerse myself, even when the ocean does nothing to welcome me. The water is the color and temperature of microwaved chicken broth. I lay back, the softness of my body holding me on the surface of the water. The waves are slowly building, stirred up by the first gusts of the looming storm. I’ve never seen it so windy here before.”

“That time working as a production assistant on the overnight film shoot in Connecticut and the old, cheap white tennis shoes I was wearing got wet and stunk so badly that everyone could smell something awful, and I couldn’t bring myself to tell the stranger I was sharing a room with that it was my shoes that were causing the stink we could not identify. I poured hand soap on them in the bathroom. Nothing worked.”

“I have to wipe down the spice bottles with disinfectant before using them and I worry that despite the bleach I’ll catch some kind of plague but I’m also tickled. My mouse is a fancy mouse.”

The structure’s design will be twofold, primarily taking the form of a large stone “tree,” akin to a mobile over a crib, with frying pans, baking sheets, mixing bowls, spatulas, serving forks, kitchen knives hanging from wires of various lengths strung from the branches.

“Oh, Mary, oh woman clothed in sunlight, blessed above all women, a body soft as chalk. So rudely forced.”

“from feathers and freckles the sky with constellations. / Morning reminds me how closely we sleep”

“Was there more to the exchange? Did we talk more? Did we flirt? I don’t remember. I know I watched Emily and her red curls clamber happily into the back of a car and I told myself, as I told others when retelling the story, that to die with my friends would be preferable to walking back to the hostel and being abducted alone. The Young-Girl will never stop flattering herself for having "Common Sense.””

“to ask if he thought this could be long-term, this safety, / this him. Thank you for eating it before I learned his answer. / And this morning, four a.m., I reach into your mouth, find”

“ *Weeks later, Claus disclosed to the Altaposten—a newspaper located in his hometown of Alta—that the incident was not an incident at all but had all the elements to become one. During his interview, Claus explained that he “sat there and discovered all of a sudden that [the] use of the [Marius] stool could have unfortunate consequences for a man”. Cut the comedy out of the tall tale, and what remains is an eight-holed seat, posing a threat to lives and/or genitals. The safety of any naked soul who might contemplate the use of a Marius stool must take precedent. “

“winter—in under a week. / By now I’ve learned / I can only grow the things “

“It was Bobby’s fifth birthday. He blew out the candles except for one, which he then proceeded to throw in my direction, being that he thought that I had stolen his Special Day.”

“She fills the closet of the guest bedroom with her new wardrobe and gets to work on the projects that you abandoned, that you came to dismiss as “beautifully impractical.”

“I want to throw the bear in the garbage. But I consult my parenting book to make sure. The book says that under no circumstance am I to throw the bear in the garbage. Children, it says, must learn to appreciate the gifts they are given. “Living with the bear will teach your child habits of gratitude and self-reflection.”

“Mom and I walk through the door of the tattoo parlor. We don’t have an appointment or a care. It’s her forty-sixth birthday, twenty years since she fell into a coma with her brain tumor, twenty years since it crushed her optic nerves, and we’re dead-set on celebrating in a semi-rebellious way. “

“The limited news footage on our black and white TV portrays a nation struck with grief, a feeling of betrayal hanging darkly over it. There are women on TV, wailing loudly, beating their chests, mourning the loss of Indira, their guardian angel. There are angry men filling the air with cries of “Khoon ka badla khoon” – Blood will avenge blood. “