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from "A Mapplethorpe Fiction, Part 1":
Candace, meanwhile, has disrobed and stands there naked, fleshy, un-tan, bored almost, and when Mapplethorpe finishes his Polaroid distribution he walks to where Candace is and taps her absently on the ass and she sort of snaps to attention and smiles at him. They know each other, I guess, or at least enough for this exchange to pass by as wordlessly as it does. I wonder for a moment if they might have been lovers at one time, had sex, maybe years ago, and now they're just drinking buddies, or worse, maybe there are nights of heroin and coke and polyamorous, pornographic ecstasies, and this is what Candace gives him in exchange for joints and dope and time with the in-crowd.
from "A Girl, Her Grandma, a Penthouse in Florida":
This is me sitting at the kitchen table in my grandmother's penthouse apartment in Florida. This is me and Grandma sitting at the kitchen table after lunchtime on a weekday in Florida with my sister without our parents. This is a weekday of vacation that would probably include a swim later or a game of pick-up sticks, or piano music. This is not a vacation moment.
This is lunch passing by on the clock, lunch passing by way after lunch is supposed to be over and me still at the table, and my grandmother still at the table, and something not right, not right at all, between us, something like thunder between us, like the rumble of thunder coming, like pre-thunder. This is a rumble of thunder. This is me at five years old with a too-big helping of cooked carrots holding valuable real estate on Grandma's luncheon china. This is a helping of cooked carrots on my plate not being eaten. This is me not eating a very big helping of cooked carrots. This is a grandmother watching a granddaughter not eat what she had been given to eat.
from "Blind/Date":
And I rolled my eyes like it was going to be messy, can't commit to dinner at this time, calendar uncertain, you understand, but alright, coffee, and yes, you can give him my number and yes, I'll be home tonight if he wants to call and do you spell his name with a "v" or a "ph" and how do you know him by the way. And she's building him up, a kind of best friend apparently, someone she's known for years, a close friend of hers, really smart, really funny, really sweet, really really really, I think you guys would really hit it off, she says. And it feels, for a moment, like an extravagance, a secret, a naughty bedtime story, a man named Stephen who will have my phone number by tonight. And in the curve of the late afternoon, propelled by this anonymous Stephen, this smart, funny, really really really Stephen, by the end of the day, the boyfriend turns into flaccid fantasy, into aging deception. The boyfriend, spent of all electric potential, falls, unceremoniously, by the wayside.
from "The Phrase Emotional Bandwidth - and other reasons this affair will never work out":
The phrase "emotional bandwidth." You said this the other night, when we went out to that bar, to hear music. I had no idea what you were talking about, but because the music was loud and there were a gazillion other people jostling for a view of the stage, I just nodded like a doll and gave you one of those smiles that's supposed to say, "Don't worry, someone out there really gets you." But then you said it again, on the way back to your house, after we'd made out in my car in what was probably one of the most dangerous areas of town, the streetlights giving off this lurid, drug-induced glow. And when you said it that second time I was forced to listen and acknowledge you saying this to me, no grunge-rock or sweaty crowds to blame, and I still don't know what you meant. But it was the phrase itself that did me in, finally, this strange pairing of words, the marriage of sociology and technology, and I got this terrible preview about what life with you would be like, how you'd be expressing yourself down the line to relatives, to children, to me, which means that in some tiny little space I'd actually been thinking this was going somewhere, I was making a space for you, imagining – even if it were vague and filmy and obtuse – something of a future with you. But when you said those words, "emotional bandwidth," it didn't even matter to me what you were actually talking about, whether it was about us or about you or about me. I didn't care what you were trying to say. I tuned the rest of it out. I only heard the phrase "emotional bandwidth" and something in me just died right then, my fascination with you, I guess, my fascination with us.
addtional essays: