WELCOME TO ROOM 009
BECOMING BLIZZARDS, DYING JUST BECAUSE
On the subway home, I said to Hugh in the faux-pouty voice that I use to challenge extreme injustice—other couples taking a vacation when it should be us, for example—“Why can’t we go on a safari?”
Notes on a Last Minute Safari
“What hill do you want to die on?” And I was like, “This hill, bitch. I’m going to die on the money hill.”
You Did This To Me
In France old people are idols. In America they’re not. Neither of us are right.
Dream Police
I like lying and singing. I like inventing things, making them up. I like mystery and the unsaid, the broken line, the incomplete. None of that worked anymore.
R.S. by Z.L.N.
This is still the beginning, this is bedtime, early on.
The Definitive Version
That’s how Janelle ends the story
in which her pet terrier is lured away and so
thoroughly devoured it’s possible to believe
he ran off to live with coyotes.
I take weather’s view.
And Now Sparky’s Wild and Free
My world
I have missed your mouth, your morning
breath coming round the wild garlic, your fat
lilacs forgetting to be the flower of death.
I am Trying to Love the Whole World
They all become the blizzard.
How I Found Out My Parents Were Siblings
A poem can give you a map for a certain kind of desire.
Terrence Hayes, Paris Review No.241
“Gram,” Selsman wrote in a moving essay, “was the first person I knew who died just because.”
Secrets of the Chat
It was 11 pm and I had to go home to go to bed because I’m American. It was 11 pm and he had to go home to make dinner because he’s Italian.
Talking to Strangers
Fairy tales have rules. You are a princess or you aren’t.
The Definitive Version
So the curtain quaintly rises. The tragedies begin.
Diary of Remorse
Putting them in the cart, I thought nothing of it, but a moment later, walking down the aisle with my fifty-nine-year-old brother-in-law, I started feeling patently, almost titanically gay.
Author, Author
How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words get it wrong. We say bread and it means according to which nation. French has no word for home, and we have no word for strict pleasure.
The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart
My new Prada sweater is soooo cute I’d look so good shooting a gun in it
Text from Owen
all the little princesses
rattling in the back of the car
singing the song of being:
I am, you are, he, she, it is—
But there will be
no conjugation in the car, oh no.
Who can speak of the future? Nobody knows anything about the future,
even the planets do not know.
Children’s Story
while my friend believes
wildness transcends the terrier
I just rise on weather
And Now Sparky’s Wild and Free
Snow always seems unreal to me as a Southern Californian. When my friends tell me they’re going to visit it, I want to ask, “Are you sure the snow is a place?”
How I Found Out My Parents Were Siblings
we break curses
kissing in the corner booth
baby-blue bras hung
from the ceiling
with George on the speakers
First Date
The book frightened me, as love does, as dreams do,
What The Hell Happened to Manhattan
As with every big-box store in Winston-Salem, it took fifteen minutes to drive there and another fifteen minutes to cross the parking lot. If the building seemed large from the outside, inside it was twice as big, the kind of space that has its own weather.
Author, Author
I want to give you more but not everything, you don’t need everything.
The Worm King’s Lullaby
Can you see the plot like dotted lines across the room?
The Worm King’s Lullaby
The reasons
you can’t touch a cloud and can’t
touch a rainbow have nothing
at all to do with each other.
We Got Used to the Surprises
and the city was at its most radiant, uncrowded in summer, though by then everything was happening more slowly—
Afternoons and Early Evenings
What was it, six o’clock? So when we left it was still light and everything could be seen for what it was,
Afternoons and Early Evenings
