His silver hair is slicked back and he wears a chocolate turtleneck and enough cologne to bathe a cat. The kids in class call him Horman the Hormone. I could be carving swastikas into my forehead and he wouldn’t notice.

You spend your nights with gnats in June, where beer bottles / rise out of garbage cans, and you never recycle or read the news.

These are the stone-shaped shivers of an evolutionary fracture, a worm cut in half that still lives.

Hold on but a moment, I say at the phone, hold on a moment, he's reaching, precariously, and yes, yes of course what you're telling me is important to me, I say, very important, nothing could be more important to me. Yes I am listening. Yes I understand. The rope is loose.

The walls are near. The wall is cold. Mustn’t keep a finger on the wall. Back under the sheets.

Oh Sigourney— / sweating, tugging hard at that helmet— / don’t worry, I’m sure it will come right off.

...no man with a hair on his chest was going to let you cram a fistful of grease down his pants without a respectable fight.

at the strawberry ball, all the catering is / done by college swim-team boys...

I sit on my bony ass at the east end of the alley and watch the sky pink up, like a stranglehold on the world's been loosened.