It’s 7:23PM aboard the Amtrak Pacific Surfliner (rivaled in nominal charm only by its sister, the Sunset Limited). It has just departed downtown Los Angeles’s Union Station and, in a few pink and lavender-soaked sunset hours, will arrive at the Santa Fe Depot in San Diego, California. For me, San…

As many of you likely know or suspect, I am a prolific Instagram mirror-selfie poster. Today, after being RUDELY CALLED OUT for one of my stunning displays of narcissism, I made a joke about having written a thesis on the mirror-selfie as a radical act. Of course I was then…

By the time I found Cabaret Ludwig, Rachel Wetzsteon was already gone. Poetry magazine was doing a purge of their archives and I, bookish in boarding school, signed up to receive 3 free copies of one of their volumes. I remember agonizing over whom the other two copies would be…

i like rhyming poems but this isn’t one this is too fragile a thing for such rigid composure this is a feeling too fleeting to trap in a birdcage this is my heart in the palm of my hand and i’m offering it to you like the ocean dark and unexplored– maybe there’s something divine…

DAY 1: Carpets

they say I’ve got something dark inside like my blood is pools of india ink my lungs two sleeping bats– wings waiting to unfold like I’ve got night skies constellating inside my head the roots of a tree trembling down the trunk of my body like I’ve got dust trailing…

she undressed you to drown you She undressed you to drown you. She unbuttoned your shirt and untucked your tails she sat you on the edge of the tub and you only saw Her long hair, falling in her face Her lashes, thick from this angle Your head became light with the steam…

http://la.eater.com/2016/10/3/13151762/cha-cha-cha-closed-virgil-village-silver-lake Sometime about a year ago, my friend Gabby and I were trying to have brunch at Sqrl. We had tried a couple times before, but each attempt was thwarted by an unconscionably long line, and neither of us is the type to justify an hour’s wait for a meal…

I moved to America when I was eight, became a citizen just shy of my eighteenth birthday. In second grade, when I found out I was moving to Los Angeles, the word felt like gold in my mouth, full of the promise of Froot Loops and Nickelodeon and a house…