When my school friends play, they pretend to be mothers. I pretend to be God.

I sat as still as I could muster on the ride to Dairy Queen. It felt like anything could topple this dream.

I have been lonely in so many cities
and now I am lonely in absence
of the city

I know the ways that grief
can gnaw to gouge you hollow—gluttonous
and unashamed

“What hurt you into poetry?” I once heard the southern poet Natasha Trethewey ask. Something must.

Trying to focus on something despite the pings of notifications or the mental buzzing of our own worries, through the physical demands of needy children or of our own bodies, seems to me a near-universal experience in our current age.

You wove a blanket of wool that covers me, the threads
like worms. My grief is an empty womb as pink as quartz.
Everything is wrong.

Whereas the story of, say, the middle-class Rolling Stones, is probably fundamentally comedic—do we not see Mick Jagger with some regularity on Saturday Night Live?—that of the Beatles feels essentially tragic.

“Watch the road, hero,” she said.

He laughed but his eyes didn’t sway. They loved her bite, and I loved how swiftly Sai could make a rotten fruit out of any man.