Our eyelashes brushed like they would weave together by themselves, turning us into one wild thing. I say, “I think I missed you before I met you even.

It was always a relief when she came home to him. Like water or food. Like music or that moment when you cut yourself with a knife and squeeze the skin and no blood oozes out.

Any alphabet book for children where 'P is for Patti' Smith and 'X is for the women whose names we don't know' is something I can recommend, especially when the book is as well written, representationa lly diverse and vividly illustrated as this one.

Pulling heads off Barbies, sticking them on the TV antenna and ruining the reception. But thats how witch babies are.

You asked me who I thought I was before. I said maybe I was a fish because I love water and you said, you thought a mermaid, maybe. If you were a mermaid, you said, if you were a mermaid, I was the sea.

But death is stronger than that and when you cover your eyes you are the one who can't see the dark. The dark still sees you.

If Los Angeles is a woman reclining billboard model with collagen-puffed lips and silicone-inflated breasts, a woman in a magenta convertible with heart-shaped sunglasses and cotton candy hair; if Los Angeles is this woman, then the San Fernando Valley is her teenybopper sister. The teenybopper sister snaps bug stretchy pink bubbles over her tongue and checks her lipgloss in the rearview mirror, . . . Teeny plays the radio too loud and bites her nails, wondering if the glitter polish will poison her.