“But the soft

underside of every alive thing

is an offering.”

“These stretchmarks talk greasy, accused the English language

of only knowing synonyms for fat that demand diets,”

blamed it for turning words against the tongues that spoke them.

“Chamber Coda was created exclusively with the pills found in the artist’s mother’s room after a final (successful) overdose. The nation is in the midst of an opioid epidemic, but marginalized populations are at dramatically higher risks.”

“And that’s when the pulling comes in. That’s the part I don’t want to imagine. Because I don’t like to imagine that Dad could be in any greater pain than I would ever want to deal with. But I know he did it, because I’ve seen the teeth he’s pulled. He keeps them in a leather pouch in his room. And I know because I found the empty bottle of whiskey and because I saw him come into the house with his bloody tooth in his hand, root in-tact, to clean it and his mouth in the kitchen sink. I know because I saw him roll up a paper-towel and stuff it in the empty space in his gums like it was gauze and wipe off the pliers he used to do it.”

“The doctors gave you a couple months and you spent them already. I want you to die slower, to give me time to learn. I want you to die backwards. I want the hair to crawl back into your scalp and for your self-pity to wallow itself into pride. I wish you were a bird and your dying was a little stir and croak, devoid of any reflection.”

“It might as well have been a telegram because that’s what I feel when I see their headlights like shifty eyes in my rear-view, what they meant to me in retrospect, what it means now that age brings just this clarity: I don’t know the meaning of their chase.”