“Sometimes after a day at work you just have to have a drink,” she told me. I wanted to tell her that there was a hair in my BLT the night before. Instead I said “Oh I know,” and watched her exhale a plume of Kool smoke.
The History of Bass Players, Zombies
I forgot about the salty air and the heat coming off his skin.
The History of Bass Players – excerpt
He kissed me in the middle of that wild undergrowth, dry grass, avocado and lemon trees, and then after that every time he played I felt something anchor in my chest, the lower octave, his crazy hair obscuring the intensity I pretended to see in his eyes.
Brokedown
He’s so new that kissing him feels like a relapse.
No Tell Motel
You only felt pain radiating through your bones, your fingers tight on the steering wheel, your other hand pressing down against your thigh to calm the ache.
Low Tide in D Minor
That love is still there, moving through amygdala to hypothalamus, tangled in my hair, sticky on my thighs.
My AVM
There’s a foot long scar dissecting my torso. It starts at the top of my rib cage and extends down, at a slight diagonal angle, to just below my pubic bone.
Refraction
If you wear night-vision goggles, you can see certain wavelengths behind your sternum; infrared radiating through hairline cracks in your heart.
Seventeen
I remember the first time I left town after having a boyfriend. I don’t know if he was really a boyfriend because he still had a wife.
Drive
That night we fought about his wife. We were drunk. He had to buy the beers because I was only eighteen.
Kicking in Malibu
My skin is hot and bumpy, my hair hurts where it is attached to my scalp. There is a growing fire in my chest and I feel like it’s burning me from the inside out.
“The Santa Ana” by Joan Didion
The Pacific turned ominously glossy during a Santa Ana period, and one woke in the night troubled not only by the peacocks screaming in the olive trees but by the eerie absence of surf. The heat was surreal.
