I. Overcast mornings in Augustsleeping in only our underwear, backsto the windows. No bodies in our bedsjust my father’s tee shirtstuck fast to my skin with sweat,a hole in the collar. I see the feetat opposite ends of the hallway,mussed with the hypnagogia between. The glass in the bathroom bears lightbut darkens the two-dimensionalplanes of […]
With her I am always just arriving. I say,“This doesn’t look like the busstop,” because it’s not. We are waitingfor a car, a black sedan,and a man named Checker. Earlier we went to a theatre on W. 106th that had beencondemned in the early millennium. She was drinking Thunderbird out ofa Starbucks coffee cup. No […]
Lost amidst the underbelly, self-help books, empty wine bottles, a box of my grandmother’s dusty old 45s (Elton’s first single and the soundtrack to every late 60s Presley film), I scramble through the refuse for the blue and silver lighter I stole from the glove compartment of my brother’s car. 14, with those Kierkegaardean sentiments […]
The flowery speech and heavy-handed metaphors started to seem more pedantic than appropriate. Lately, whenever I have a dream about you we’re either fucking under a tarp in the neighbor’s backyard with our shirts still on, or getting into fist fights about whether it will be pizza or Chinese. The discourse gets brutal after a […]
I was on the last bus outbound from New York City on a Saturday night with my notebook in my lap, struggling to pin a name to the nervous feeling that had set up shop deep inside of my gut. There was a middle-aged woman sitting across the aisle from me, one row up, carrying […]
We can fall asleep mouth-to-mouth. Candied breath plumes sighing from our pouted lips like native smoke signals. The color is blue-green, I say. It’s in my eyes, but we know it’s the same shade it has always been. Just a touch of perfume and your mother’s nicotine. I wish we knew how to ask for […]
Last night I had a dream of self-fulfilling prophecy. It started, the way most dreams do with a high speed car chase, the mellifluous ping-ping of rubber bullets hailing down on the roof, a plastic steering wheel and a horn that plays cradlesongs when honked. And, of course, me, mired in the throes of disaster, […]
I. The doctor once tried to explain to me, in very basic terms, the concept of derealization; or why I sometimes feel like a character in a novel, or a doll with a string hanging off my back when I get anxious. And I thought, I know what this is: the way my voice seemed […]
No one told me that my head would break even when my heart was happy. I can’t say what I was expecting. That my skull would crack, maybe, and the dark gray ichor inside, all heavy with the stink of August’s carapace, rotting in the autumn, would lay waste to my heart as if it […]
At lunch, Bill tells me a story about his middle-aged son. He lives in Arizona. He is building a pool. Bill does not believe this is an interesting story. He tells me, I feel disinterested in this story. So he orders the grilled chicken with a whole-wheat bun, and thinks himself quite healthy for a […]
Cotard, the Living 