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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
How to enter my own waking so that I might feel alive. I often want / to lay down in the snow now. To be a little numb, at first, / as I’ve been since I gave birth & my bones became trestles / yielding other worlds.
Listen up! We’ve been getting our asses handed to us out there, and there’s no end in sight. I’m the best shot we’ve had at taking opposing bases down and reclaiming the map—until you showed up. Maybe we’ll stand a fighting chance. But that’s up to you and how well you handle that phaser.