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I look at pictures of myself sometimes
And I can see my skeleton
Skull all hard
Around the eyes
Where they sink in a little
These pictures are rare but becoming less so

It’s blue around the eye sockets
Like a mortal gleam

I can be plain-spoken when I have to be
When I see the network of capillaries mewling close to the surface

Over time there will be less and less youthful pictures of me until I perish

Lana Del Rey says: “I love the look of girls with red lips and shiny skin”
She says this after she poses for British GQ naked
Her butt smashed up against a floor surface
Hugging her knees to her chest
Covering her vagina and stomach

I love this woman I think
But she must be lying right now
This cannot be what she is thinking
Sitting there looking just like how my brain thinks
Being my brain twin on the magazine
Covering the exact right two things

Because even though as a person I’m not
As a woman I’m just so

I’m confused because if I was in that white room
And I put on red lips and shiny skin I would feel wrong
Foody and gleaming
Roasting
Creamy
Uncomfortably warm
I would want to minimize the surface
Like she’s doing

Looking fucked up in a photo is hard

Under the skin
The soft skin I allegedly own
That is disappearing from me every day
That is a temporary boon for me and my loves to touch
Is a skeleton

Under the vagina and guts
Even in a Lana
A skeleton hides

Ready to grin in your face
Ready to fuck your shit up like a nightmare
Ready to be a pile of dead bones in the moonlight

I was sitting on the rooftop of my apartment building in May waiting for July’s fireworks. I was cleaning high-rise condos in Manhattan, teaching fourth grade in Queens, eating wheat bread and American cheese sandwiches that the government delivered to the school. I was writing everything down as if I knew what I was seeing.

I look through his inboxes. He has three addresses: one for activity as an author, almost entirely devoted to his publicist, whom he bombards with slightly flirtatious and falsely jocular messages: “I wonder why I haven’t been invited to the radio program From the Bookshop, since I understand it’s about literature, and I happen to write books . .

It was Janine Stromboni, an old acquaintance from high school, one of the few girls Mona had liked, even though they’d had zero in common. Janine looked much the same: huge hair, liquid eyeliner, fake nails, tight jeans.

This interview focuses on Zhang’s book Dear Jenny We Are All Find. Andy Fitch: From this project’s first line onward, we find prose formatting, often a prose pace, but also careful lineation accenting rhyme and sound play. Some sections contain blank spaces or slashes instead of punctuation.

On an early Sunday morning a reporter called to ask me questions about women with AIDS. Don’t waste your time with me, I told her, I’m nothing more in the scheme of things than a rather charming statistical anomaly. Meaning?

The day I was 18, Sally and I had a reunion because we were still friends though we saw less and less of each other. We went to Pupi’s, a place devoted to cake, overlooking the Strip. I invited her to this surprise birthday party my mother was giving me that night (though she would never do anything so unforgivable as actually surprise me; I hate surprises).

She had feigned not to hear him and had walked on. She had not turned her head until she was out of the village, she expected at every moment to hear him come bounding up behind her. Had he done so, she thought she would have turned round and snarled at him.

Our lips had achieved a reconciliation, our kiss of dalliance held firm.

Recently, someone asked Myriam Gurba a pointed question about Painting Their Portraits in Winter(Manic D Press), her new collection of short stories. He wanted to know what her book was about and, more specifically, who she’d written it for, exactly. “I told him, ‘I wrote this for Mexican girls who sit alone in their bedrooms at night painting their fingernails black,’” the 38-year-old writer and visual artist says, by phone from Long Beach.