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In a fit of New Year’s can-do-ism, Victoria promised herself she’d find love by the end of the weekend. She waited for her Friday date, sipping the lightest beer that Hound and Wolf served, which compensated with cherry flavor for what it lacked in proof. It tasted like expired children’s medicine, was impossible to drink …

I would like to withdraw my complaint with its quiet rattling of a car’sengine as it shakes down Market Street. Like the window fan that stopsclanking one August night, when it’s not heat that sweats us awakebut a bottle of Nero and the body’s ceaseless churning. Nothing iswrong. Or, the universe is edgeless but finite. …

In the winter a woman brings the oceanin a crate, goes about separating the seacucumbers from the starfish from the hermitcrabs and anemones into saltwater binslining the room like a secret magicshow in a museum, the curatora mermaid who grew legs in the tide poolat a place called San Diego, thirtymiles south and too far …

Compact Jazz recording, 1989Nina Simone, accompanying herself on piano Every instant is at once a giver and a plunderer.—Gaston Bachelard In 1980, my mother lay dying. Her death that July guided me north to a high Victorian mansion in upstate New York and, within just three days, to my beloved. He too was mourning—his marriage …

Would you make love to me if I had two heads?I promise it’ll be fun, a two-for-the-price-of-one big-box-department-store-weekly-special:Just add water! And my extra head magically sprouts out of my neck, birthing quicker than the Chia PetI was dying to bring home back in the nineties, with a grocery cart full and checkout-stand tabloids and scandaland …

1 On the morning of December 24, 1979, a woman walking her dog near the Blue Ridge Parkway outside Boone, North Carolina, discovered my grandfather’s near-naked body lying in a ditch, one bullet in his head, nine bullets in his chest. He was sixty-eight; I was twelve. In the spring of the following year, on …

I needed money after the move. That was my excuse. But really I couldn’t bear to live in another house with it, knowing it was in the side table, in the drawer above my vibrator. Unfired for years—so much potential. The inheritance came with a small box of bullets, the cardboard foxed but nearly full, …

while quarantining, you wear the partitioned office room of asummer home, lent to you as charity so you would not infectyour grandmotherYou are told to not rummage through the office room’s items.That the homeowners are “private people.”after the buccal surgery, our last guest appeared as if a wraithin the thickness of the sauna mottled weave …

Listen to Gabriel Arquilevich read “from Sixty-Four Trips to Vons”: IX The parking- lot birds hop between carslike little dogs with wings looking for treats, making less of a call than a twisting scream from their metal- tree forest of concrete. Perched on a Funyun by my door, one bird hammers the snack into pieces …

As a child I loved all things related to travel. Watching my mother study an open suitcase at home as she puzzled over how to fit an extra pair of walking shoes. The smell of my father’s small leather carry-on. The shiny floors of airports. The taste of Goldfish crackers while waiting to board. And …