It’s the same with flag football. True fact: no one wants to be there. Not the players, not the coaches, not the refs—not even the women who sell mouth guards and water bottles at the games. The only people who believe in the whole painful exercise are the mothers in the stands, the women who want their sons to play football (because there’s some prestige in that) but don’t want them to get hurt. And the more they get into it, the more they cheer and cry out things like “Way to pull that flag, Taylor!” the more the boys on the field want to disappear.

The funny thing about the story is she got a flat tire on the way to school that morning, thought could my day get any worse?

The Cop-Watch Advocates demanded to know Zapata’s name, and filmed the suspect and his pool of blood with great enthusiasm. The suspect, though, was cleared by a medical team. Meanwhile, several of his victims began loudly telling their stories to the sergeant, which made for much less compelling cinematography.

Oh, sky that certain clear cold blue, we go/back. We are washing dishes here/suds between our fingers. Indoor. But fear/places us in the car. Plays the announcers/voice crumbling like block towers. Fall.

I/wander off to/a carnival where/madmen think/away strange/and unimaginable/things, like becoming/small as a grain/of salt, disappearing,/almost invisible.

They say ignorance is bliss.  Which means the less you know the happier you are.  It follows then that learning something new costs some happiness.  But people learn new things all the time so that means your whole life you become less happy.

The earth beneath our boots became a slippery soup of water and blood. Bodies stacked up four and five deep. We took to throwing corpses over the timberworks to make room for the fighting. Some of them bodies took so many musket balls they fell apart in your hands when you tried to heave them over.

When I got to 34th Street, I decided to go into Macy’s. I was thinking about the dead tooth. In time it would turn black. I walked past the rows of makeup counters and realized that I had no idea if I was pretty.  Growing up around Louise, her sisters and I learned that it didn’t matter if we were pretty – all that mattered was that we were not Louise. I stepped up to a lipstick display and found the matte brick-colored shade that everyone wore that year. In a business card-sized mirror on a counter display I watched as I dragged the matte brick color back and forth across my dry lips. I smiled, revealing the dead front tooth. It was like all the other teeth – white, luminous. I put the lipstick back in the display and walked out of the store, back out onto Broadway.