“At thirteen, she’d stepped out of the forest into a place where the water was a solid sheet of green.  She was trusting then –innocent of what the color meant.”

“His pigment box rattled. / His brushes bristled / in the morning sun. / Rain had come & gone.”

“According to your back story, you have two sons. Kevin, who's eleven, right? And Keith who's fourteen. So it's Keith and his friend from next door. Uh..."Tadpole" is his name.”

Are your friends writers as well? (is poetry all you talk about?) / Define friendship (my IG friends are closer to me than God)

“My uncle drinks, my mother worries. They put me in the middle, use me as a topicof conversation when things get dull. They send me letters and out-of-print copies of their favorite books with thoughtful inscriptions.”

“Every day, people came in and pawned a piece of their lives to keep living. Sometimes they bought it back. Sometimes they didn’t. But I always saw them again.”

“My grandma calls it / your bloom. Once I saw a used pad / on the bathroom floor, and the stain / did kind of look like a flower.

“That’s when Nadine started to act as though she were built superior, even though she didn’t have the widest hips, hadn’t even shown that much before he was born, her stomach more of a suggestion than an assertion of pregnancy.”

“Form 4: Self-Care Checklist

Instructions: as a new mom it is very important for you to take self-care seriously. Please mark each form of self-care you participate in. Please see footnotes for extra detail:”

“I am reminded one morning in montparnasse cemetery / searching for markers in the fog with my new family”

“‘You don’t have to say anything.’ The blue heron is picking its way through the shallows, and they watch him finding his food. Charles said, ‘There was one time I had to kill a man with a knife.’”

“…you think about how the prettiest girl in your Catholic middle school / compared the bodies of girls who touched the bodies of boys to the body of Bathsheba.”

“…you never see kids using food stamps? Are we not rich enough for you with our brown hands gripping colorful paper that is not quite money...”

“ Like the sun, God / follows him home. Like the moon, he never marries. Chooses to adopt. / His father calls with bad news. The phone a brick in his hand.”

“The closer you get, the more the emptiness emerges. What is keeping it all together? she wonders. And Who decides where it all goes? And What’s a girl gotta do to get off this shithole rock?”

“Nell gurgled around the thing in her mouth. ‘There’s nothing to fear,’ Dr. K said. ‘Nothing’s going to happen.’ Dr. K positioned the tool near Nell’s eye. It gleamed like a horrible tooth. One last time, Nell tried to speak, not with words but with movement.”

“So she tried to chalk the hairs up to the Philz Coffee barista that he raved about at the new location near his office. But Kristy couldn’t stop seeing Carrie Bradshaw as the barista.”

“I have a dream where I let someone in; I allow him to trace my lips with his tongue, salvage my exposed flesh, offering up my throat, my cheek, every vulnerable square inch my body possesses.

“At night, when she is sleeping in the bed beside me, I pretend to sleep. When she wakes, it takes her a while to realize her lips and nose are gone.”