"At three am, everything is different. The skyline floats / on the east river while the emperor looms dark and silent. / Nothing means what it did when sleep fills your throat."
"There’s this photograph of my dad, from the late 1990s, in an old album somewhere on a bookshelf. He is standing on a rock, laughing. His hair is wavy, and he’s tan. The ocean is behind him. "
“‘You ever see someone choke on one of those?' Vito asked the vendor, pointing to a hot dog. From the other side of the metallic counter, the vendor’s eyes slowly shifted up from his phone." Fiction.
" I was a person who didn’t watch scary movies. I had no interest in them, and I had no problem telling whichever friends I was hanging out with that I would not watch or go to see any kind of horror or thriller film."
"Beth has been in traffic now for a horrendously long time. She has severe road rage, the diagnostic kind for which she has a sponsor. She calls as I leave work to tell me this in her quintessential Beth parlance, her voice an odd but unambiguous synthesis of Bobby Durst and Lindsay Lohan."
