You’ve probably noticed by now that I have a strong internal voice that tells me I’m an idiot. I call him The Critic. I hate him. You might have a Critic, too.

Like me, you smoke; like me, you bite your nails.

Twenty things I have learned.

The baby was dead, and there was nothing any of us could do about it.

I moved into your house without so much as asking your permission. They’d asked me what it might feel like, being here, and so many memories, too. But when I came here it had been picked as clean as the ribs of a turkey carcass. Only the bones remained, sighing in the wind.

The elastic dark loops its fat threads about me.

They zipped the woman into a bag. A year later, my mother lies on her back facing the evening sky.

Oh, my love. You are the sweet jingling of my nerves. I feel you tickling my adenosine receptors. It's like those early swooshes on childhood's swing, the sub-navel flutter, happiness' ghost.

The eye doesn’t flicker or waver. It holds you there. Except it doesn’t hold you, in any sense of the word, because it has no interest in you. It does not see you as you see yourself.