You can believe it or not, all of this / heartbreaking / drag

a man gives just enough / to thunderous applause / and we made a statue/ of it.

On the eve of Phoenix’ 23rd birthday, we sing, all the / furniture pushed up against the balloon-adorned walls of / their living room, the New York kind, compact, quaint a / broker might say when he is trying to sell this fantasy.

I dream that Hoseok is my bus driver. We hightail a heist at the British Museum, returning stolen art to their rightful owners.

I vaguely knew about Dua Lipa before I saw her in concert: pop star, Albanian, that hit single with Da Baby. Mostly I’d come to associate her with my friend Isaiah.

i open my hands & eat the bird inside the ball of light, the song of the bird of the devil burns a hole in my body & out of it a streak of feathers

His beard uncombed / as starlight. His crime couldn’t sing / without a tongue

At the end of our fourth date, Amy and I have our first kiss. SEVENTEEN’s “Left / & Right” autoplays on YouTube in the background.

All she wanted was to look like all the other brown girls. They were everywhere, versions of the girl she’d prayed to look like in high school. Girls whose bodies and faces she craved. Girls she wished she could be. Girls her mom hated that she resembled.

The Stonewood mall in the late-1980s had been a site of several aspirational misfires to fit in, be seen.

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In Delaware Water Gap, I met a stranger I’d been looking for since Georgia. We both stayed the night in town, at a donation-based hostel in the basement of a church.

beneath the night’s embroidery, / hold me.

He left the door unlocked, in case I arrived before he got back from teaching. I thought I’d timed the drive from Durham to ensure an appearance well after school let out, but he didn’t answer when I knocked and it was quiet and dim in the apartment.

Singing always ended with a death in this house.

Love is an improbable / shaking / of hips / on a dancefloor called Nevertheless,

She worked in a supermarket before Showing women the way to the leeks, soaking the mop, affixing stickers to the cheeks of apples

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I’d bicycle home after teaching, pumping the pedals so hard I hoped the blurred street would crack beneath them. I’d learned early how to leap—from hotel maid to fine dining server, student to teacher, dying desert town to rain-drenched city. So I left. I filled out applications, fielded phone interviews, signed a contract and flew to Hanoi, sight unseen.

Music was serious to me — and so was anger.

The shoebill pesters its mother for a drink, says David Attenborough.