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Romantic Love
Poetry
Happysad
Gobbling tortilla chips with gleeful abandon, I forget to chew, and one triangle catches in my throat. Instantaneous panic. Sudden, deep, mammalian fear.
May 2024Poetry
Dear Woman Who Tried to Pick Me Up at a Hollywood Club in 1998
What if I’d said yes? Imagine I go home with you that night, / when I’m twenty, and when we wake up in the morning, / you ask, You know you snore? You laugh at my / nighttime retainer, which I’ll wear for the rest of my life, and say, You look hot.
May 2024Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Sex in the In-Between
He looked hardy, and, God, I’m a sucker for hardiness. Show me a pocketknife and callused hands, and I’m ready to let you feel me up. His profile had a photo of him holding a giant golden eagle in Mongolia. Looking back, I can see it was partly the eagle I swiped right on.
May 2024
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Occupation: Fool
Any comedian will tell you, losing an audience’s attention for even a split second can snowball. Handle it wrong, and you may die onstage like Elvis on the toilet, like Lenny Bruce beside the toilet, like William Howard Taft in a bathtub near a toilet.
May 2024
Poetry
When I Come to Get My Things
I am amazed at how much of my shit I left / with her, and to see it piled in her hallway / clears space in me for what? // I wander my new emptiness / as the small bag of her things I’ve brought / weighs down my hand
April 2024
Poetry
Spring Garden Street
I had left her sitting on the front stoop / and crossed the street / to light my cigarette—April / in the early evening, / the pear trees with their arms full / of white blossoms, comfortless as ghosts.
February 2024Fiction
Falling Action in Hoboken
There is something hard in me, a seedlike malignancy. I can’t say how it got there or when, but I can’t remember the last time I felt pure love or sadness or joy. It’s always a mix of things, some confused and muted in-between.
February 2024
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Abandon All Expectations
The fish is now thrashing at the surface. Unlike every other captain I have seen, Cuervo uses a net, not a gaff, to bring it aboard. He has enough experience to know that, by the time a full-grown yellowtail is brought to the boat, it has essentially fought itself to death. Rich lets the captain take over, and Cuervo handles the marvelous creature with a tenderness that has been missing from most of my charter-fishing experiences.
January 2024
Fiction
Basements
I was considered “good,” considered a “good influence.” It amazed me — like the cool feeling of Marshall’s tongue on my labia had amazed me — that I could possess all of these qualities; that I could be both warm and cold, virtuous and defiant; and that someone could love me for all of it.
January 2024
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