My father never drank except at Christmastime, I’ve never seen a brown bottle drain until I was seven, stayed at my grandmother’s house and knew the skank smell of alcohol, in winter where cigarette smoke looks ghostly, the ash tray a black patch of night, he sat on the steps in front of the garden shed, and I watched breathed pain billow across the snowy back yard and came back to my grandmother’s warm kitchen, where I could not smell all the taint of sin that was roadside addiction and played on the crime shows my mother watched on the TV, the dark living room in the night all my life. . .

I’m 17, and I am always in love, but never with myself. I eat lunch on a Saturday alone.mI spend fifty dollars on books.
I knit an ugly, mustard-colored scarf.

The tide pools stank of brine and salt. Chunks of rotting seaweed dried out from the sun were stuck between the shallow crags, waiting for the ocean to pull them back out into the sea. The song appeared to be coming from the direction of a cluster of several large jagged rocks.

for wiping her hands into hourglasses, say forget this picture, say wif with more teeth, veil of sand funneling itself into woman: wif.