She doesn’t want me around the customers, so she assigns me the task of writing down every ISBN number in the store. While recording numbers, I listen to the formulaic pop music blasting through the store’s speakers and think about my ex-boyfriend—any of them—and how much I miss him. If I think about it, I miss everyone I’ve ever met. It takes me days, weeks, months—what feels like forever—to write all the numbers down. In fact, I’m positive there’s an alternate universe where I’m still only halfway done, watching the FedEx guy roll in more carts stacked with boxes for the impending fall semester while Taylor Swift plays throughout the store. There are so many alternate universes and all of them are terrifying.
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MyMerrill offers up that other bond
between you—that same same desire, to put
it modestly. You are split open by
the women, grabbing, moving synchronized.
I was back up against the wall, trying to look like I belonged, when Julian Gould walked in. I’d heard stories of his own parties, late night and lawless, where he made people feel, with his disregard for tomorrow, like the hard work they were doing was not only serious and worthwhile but that it had desserts. We’d met once before—our introduction so brief I doubted he’d remember. I watched him notice me.
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I see my whole life as preparation for the way I paint. Even though my roots in the rural American Midwest are a major influence of my work, I believe my paintings can can speak to people from a variety of places and experiences.
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A feigned gentleness and then
here is the knife. The only color worth dying for
is pink. My gender is
a knife that I use to pare my tongue.
Two tongues. One for each man.
You are standing atop the highest hill on the island, affording sweeping vistas of the mighty Atlantic Ocean on one side and the gentler waters of Vineyard Sound on the other. An historic clapboard Methodist church stood on this very hill when I bought it, requiring me to hire a teenaged pothead to burn it to the ground in the dead of night.
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What seizes my heart the first time I see The Sensational Sebastian is how he fastens his eyes on me, only me, as he lets go of the trapeze and catapults himself through the air in his emerald suit. A man built for flying.
Read MoreI’ve noticed this
growth on my cat’s right
cheekbone. It seemed to be
growing by the day.
“I’m scared you’re going to get caught out there. Not paying attention, not stopping for lights. Think of your abduction,” our father said, holding our shoulders as if he’d always feared God. We pulled up our pants and tucked in our skin. “Don’t stop for bleating lights,” he said again. Those lights paint the skin colors that aren’t ours.
We remember this in the backseat. Away from home. We are with friends, in their car full of smoke. Bleat, bleat. We cannot breathe. We are frozen with thoughts of better places to be. The lights pass us by. Everyone but us erupts in human laughter.
Read Morewhat is a man
—but
blood and sack
pricks of light
gone with the water
gone with the fire
I attended a séance
at a house in the suburbs
the medium was a
twelve-year-old boy
making crumbs
of a peanut butter sandwich
A boy answers the door, though no one knocked
and the door hadn’t asked a question.
As girls of the cul-de-sac it was our job to show the new ones
how it was done. Show them the head full of bees, the shapes
we continued to resurrect before getting it right.
The church could hold a thousand people, and was maybe half full. A couple of dozen were family members of the five brides and five grooms; the others were there to witness the experiment.
Read MoreThe first peach wing became
a quick red devotion, her purple nails
reflecting in the body of the black
lighter. The whole bird went powder
singing take me
out tonight. The squirrel was denser
and ran orange through blue
Before I turn over the ignition, I slide my arms forward until my hands touch the inside of the windshield. I flick the back of my fingers against the glass and hear the click of my nails. I don’t know why; it’s something my father used to do when he drove. Something about luck. Like the way he spit on a fishhook or bait before casting out.
Read MoreAdonis has already arrived
in New York City.
This is what
my mother tells me.
Some say the name’s from the Aramaic, “a field of blood,” and others
say potters were wanderers, vagrants, rootless ones, the dispossessed
and friendless.
For those few seconds I could feel everything that had happened to me and everything that would happen to me riding through my blood, overlaid in a kind of thick textured darkness behind my closed eyes and I felt my adolescent loneliness as fully as I ever would. I was filled with my lonely breath. I was the god of my solitary self, alone there in it.
Read MoreYou could drop a grand piano
from a fifth story window
and smash the box to bits
but that would also smash the girl.
Nothing living would be left.