Sheila was startled when Walter slipped his hand down the front of her Levi’s. It was not what she was expecting in broad daylight, at a church picnic.

Santosh, one of the hostel staff, said the slow Wi-Fi was caused by last night’s monsoon rain. I didn’t believe him. This is the same Santosh who freely talked about his anti-consumerist sentiment only to later take me to a silk shop where he and the hawker made me feel bad about refusing to buy a 1200 rupee silk scarf for my mother. I was not traveling to gather.

TRANSMITTED VIA FACSIMILE

RE: Los Angeles County case #24789. Letter was balled up and tied to a padlock, found thrown through the southern-most window at Love-Hewitt estate. Status: Unsolved

You are in luck! It is easy to spend many long hours at the DMV, where you can be close to your love.

I’m tired of crashing balls in borrowed gowns. I’m tired of prohibitive return policies.

At the Co-op I pinched an Ancho chili with my fingers. There weren’t any tongs--only metal tablespoons caked in spelt flour and paprika.

Lying in Brett’s King-sized waterbed, I wondered if this was going to be one of those life moments you always remember because you want to hold onto it forever or because as much as you try you can never forget it.

You would have been / my first kiss if you hadn’t always / beat me in Street Fighter.

The fence was wooden and went like this: slat, picket, picket, slat, post. Slat, picket, picket, slat, post. The girl’s name was Mary. The fence’s name was Paul.

In 2015, we wake up lonelier than we’ve ever been. I can’t stand, we say, as though our muscles have been scraped away, misplaced somewhere else.

I was a bad dancer and Dariusz was a weird one, and on Fridays we’d run into each other and have conniptions together to whatever was playing live.

He wears the hell out of his gas station jacket, khaki and covered in

patches.

As a kid—soon after moving to a new house, in a new town—I became obsessed with Fuzzy, the dog next door.

you put the penny next to the periscope

and made them kiss

like it was their birthday in the year

you forgot to get the kitchen reupholstered

It was my twentieth birthday, and my boyfriend asked me to close my eyes and hold out my hand.

The tower is not a phallus, it’s the iron tongue

of the Earth which tastes the void in the skies.

She had never been this close to a boy, close enough to feel the scratch of chest hairs on her back, the rough, warm pressure of fingers cinching her waist.

In 2010, I unexpectedly secured a media badge via my university’s magazine to see a space shuttle launch at Kennedy Space Center.

SLUG POEM

(after Elizabeth Spires)

I want to say how I feel about you

animated booger, kin of phlegm ingesting your

I take things

Things that aren’t mine

Why would I take my own things?