It’s not the contraption itself that I love—this pair of shells of steel and lace—but the woman who measures me and tests my straps as if armoring me for battle.
She understands the place she was born into is full of shadows. They slip into her open cracks, slide oozing into the gutters of her ribs, spill against the long, unbroken lines of her legs.
As they headed back into town in Smiley’s pickup, she could only feel like they had all done something wrong, something to be ashamed of. Something they could never talk about again.
I learned to sleep as light as a new mother, in increments of minutes rather than hours, listening as I dreamed for a rustling of clothing, a knife unsheathed, and then I stopped sleeping altogether.
It's easy in the sense that all you have to do is get in the car and fire up the app. It's hard in that it requires long, monotonous hours to be fruitful, and constant vigilance to stay safe. San Francisco is a tough city to drive.
As a witness should I run to her? Make sure she's not suffering a stroke or an aneurysm? I pictured a headline demanding the whereabouts of a witness who'd left the scene of a potential homicide.
We think that Tinder is just for fun, swiping like in a videogame, like the 1980s game Frogger where the frog hops across the freeway and tries to avoid getting flattened by cars—this is how we feel about dating.
Before I am beautiful I'm in the hairdresser’s chair, / perched atop two phone books, holding my ear. My reflection / in the bathroom mirror is a landscape painting.
You return, at last. / At the edge no longer./ At the margin’s curve no longer. / Circular no longer. / In the embers of unfading foam. / The sputum of inscrutable lava.
The other day I received my first offer for term life insurance (how are corporations so prescient?), which has the effect of reminding a man he’s going to die, just as a baby has the effect of reminding a man that if he dies, it shouldn’t be for nothing.
He never finished a performance without making a prediction. His predictions, if right, would immediately boost his prestige and reverence so much so that when he passed his offering bowl around afterwards people would be more than willing to part with their hard-earned cash.
By recreating the past, I do not mean going back in a sentimental nostalgic way, but by rebellion and opposition to a world in which we see more and more borders, and walls.
Either way, whatever the city’s doing, it’s enough to change the color of the sky to this bone-white dome, the color of talc, and if they can take the blue out of the sky, they can take something from me. But it’s weird, not knowing what.
time when the turning birds silver time exploding brined like sweet lemons time wolves bark skunks slip into coops fishing line knots up roads slick proud with ice the boys I fuck all eat candy
And it was ordinary, that year, / when the artillery fired blanks, / and the glass hail panicking / the crowd vanished / where it landed, / and there was no hail, / but only the prosody of sleet.