This morning the rain, smelling of iron and mint and a place two time-zones away, falling from clouds grey and certain as innocence. The sky crying in the way humans only can once in a long while, in the way that exhausts just as it cleanses. Imagine, the earth, relieving herself like this not infrequently; imagine, the soft rain, coming in sheets, quiet as a promise.

This morning the rain against the roof of my car, a pleasant hello, each window waving her inside. She kissed my hair, misted my fingers on the wheel. The rain and I, we passed a truck, blue as a robins egg, inside the truck, a man smoking a cigarette wet from her kiss, but still lit. The sweet taste flew through the window, encompassed my car as if a memory, yes, the smell was that perfect. Imagine, the smoke making love to the rain, then imagine the taste of your own sweat falling into your smile, and you will know how I felt.

This morning I learned a thousand words for longing I did not have last dusk, so grasped by what...

You cannot coax the pleasure back into your fingers said the lover to the lover. You cannot coax when the has been pleasure unhad for months now.  What is the difference between the uncut nails and the morning sex says the lover to the other lover; the blood was not the answer, the blood was only the symptom. One lover picks up Bluets and cries, the other wants to understand, but is too deep in love to understand. 

Bluets opens with the line “Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color.” Something that began as “[a]n appreciation, an affinity” became something “more serious” and then “it became somehow personal”. The 240 prose entries that follow open us into a philosophical journey that simultaneously deny the personal and deny anything but the personal. 

I read Bluets by Maggie Neilson on the heals of reading The Argonauts, with hope that this short text would too invite me into an intimate conversation of sex, sexuality, poetry, philosophy, and o...

I admit, at twenty-two I still waste a few hours each week scrolling through Tumblr, catching up on internet-politics, laughing at Pokémon Meme’s, and re-blogging hipster lesbian posts and quotes that somehow touch me. A few days ago, I stumbled upon a “Three Minute Personality Test”, a series of questions written by Donna Marie Riley that were inspired by a similar type of prose by Jonathon Safran Foer, the writer who I, arguably, quote most-frequently. While answering the questions in my mind is an interesting though-exercise, responding with written language is more challenging, requires a more intense level of self-reflection, a level of reflection I’m interested in obtaining during this transitional period in my life.

How many people have you kissed whose names you don’t remember? I know the first names of everyone whose lips have met mine. When I was in ninth grade, still four years before a set of lips would lock with mine for the first time, before a tongue would land red and wa...

I dump the contents of a 2,000 piece puzzle onto the dining room table just as my phone lights up, what is your mission statement, gabby?, She pushes me like this, forcing me to step back from the craze of unemployment, from the job hunt, and look inward, a series of thought exercises that consistently leave me somehow more certain, confident in my knowledge of self.

I lean my forearms into the jumble on the table and let my arm hairs get coated with the light layer of sawdust that always accompanies a new puzzle. What is MY mission statement, what are my values? To train with intention, to act and react with integrity. To write with absolute rawness and honesty (poems, emails, articles, text, book), to listen with interest (to humans, music, the city), and to say yes (more than I say no). To get butterflies from love (not from fear), to listen to my instinct 100% of the time, to form genuine connections (with people, art, nature, my body). To nurture the romanticist innate to my being,...

Confession: I broke up with the rape victim after four months of insufficient foreplay.

I broke up with rape victim after four months of insufficient foreplay and felt nothing but ignominy for the dildos and their forever hardness. I broke up with morning baby voice that lasted through dinnertime prayer, the twice weekly therapy sessions, our two dry, untouched parts. Broke up with clenched fists and that suspended redness, its haunting. I broke up with our eight-month love: skinned and salted, by Cape Cod wind like a sheet flowered and puffed on the line.

I left the guiltless defense unsaid, the murmurs to rot and rust against my lips, and wiped everything that reeked of ripped labia. I shredded the listof victim’s needs: Advil, Vaseline,

Xanax, but preserved the best lostparts: the good love, our two heaving torsos. I left the cream curdling on the top shelf, the razor warning the soapdish, the bloodied boxers, the photos of us both smiling: skinny, six months in & full of future porchs...

1. Cereal and milk in a red solo cup

2. Shameless spoon-fulls of peanut butter (jar in hand)

3. Day drinking (Sunday Funday, Thirsty Thursday)

4. Burritos everyday for a month (no such thing as too many beans)

5. Smuggling apples and oranges out of the cafeteria

6. The concept of Time based on meals

7. Dixie-cup shot glasses

8. Warm xoxed wine

9. Pizza box sleds

10. Stealing signs as décor

11. Alcohol in the shower

12. Seriously using the words ‘turnt’, ‘ratchet’, ‘lit’, 'trill'.

13. Febreze instead of new laundry

14. Lying in Linkdin profile

Especially for those of us still measuring our lives in terms of the academic calendar, there is certain scent of renewal in the September air. Labor Day weekend is unanimously classified as the end of Summer, a marker that declares only four months left in the year. Billboards, commercials, and mall-lines scream “Back To School”; a scream that synonymously echoes “Back To Learning New Things” and “Turning Over a Fresh Leaf”. The feeling of productivity and rebirth accents our actions as we turn-on our brains and prepare to head back to school.

The winter months of easy-hibernation have long since passed, Summer is ending (ended) and we’re finally feeling relaxed and cleansed. Some of us are dreading returning to our routine, which we remember being monotonous and unfulfilling, while the rest of us are looking forward to reestablishing structure.

Regardless of our anticipations for the coming term, let Fall become a time to re-kindle passion, experiment extracurricularly, and take leaps...

It’s that time of year again. The duffle bags are stuffed to over-capacity, family van is filled to the point of invisibility, and shopping carts are filled with hundreds of dollars of school supplies. The lines at Wal-Mart and Bed Bath & Beyond stretch into the parking lot, the guest bedroom is cluttered with very important miscellaneous accessories (i.e. Tupperware, sparkly-neon undergarments, white-wired fairy/holiday lights), and every phone, computer, and iPad has been fixed, updated, and is officially glitch-free.

The days leading up to another first day of school are expensive and exhausting; college students hoping the investment of their summer money into cute themed graphic T-shirts will be worth it, and anxious parents hoping their investment in their child’s education will be well used. 

So what then, as college students, can we do to best utilize these four years? From conversations with college students, my own experiences, and various Facebook statuses, I have compiled the...

Self-love has been transformed from the cocky, self-absorbed embodiment of a narcissist and into the energy consuming, explicit act of valuing one’s own happiness and well-being. The term has become both popularized and part of the lexicon of therapists, friends, and advice-givers everywhere: “How do you expect anyone to love you if you don’t love yourself first?” “Do you love yourself?” “What does self-love mean to you?”. These are some of the self-love directives and interrogatives heard between friends over coffee, while sitting on the coach of a therapist, and between arguing couples.

So, what is self-love, and where can I buy it? Is it found in a tube of new mascara, in a leather-bound journal and ballpoint pen, by getting a puppy? Can it be acquired by reading more self-help books, by getting into a new relationship, or joining Tindr? The answer to these questions is ‘no’. Self-love cannot be bought nor be found in anything. Self love can only be found within ourselves.

Self-love i...

I began distance running during the early months of 2014 on a treadmill at my college gym because I was experiencing, what I now coin, “my first grown-up heartbreak”. In shabby workout shorts and an ill-fitting t-shirt publicizing a campaign I only half-heartedly support, feeling muscle-loose and head-consumed, I enter 8mph into the display, and begin what I expect to be a 2-3 mile run.

I can’t remember the point at which my 5k run transformed into an hour-long sprint, because it wasn’t an active decision. After 60 minutes the treadmill came to a halt and jerked me off. I removed the sweat-rag covering the treadmill screen to learn that I had in fact just run 8 miles, without any cognizance that my legs were sore and my lungs angry. Running to the point of oblivious mileage became my release valve. While I was running I let angered-rap scream through my ear buds, and the salty sweat stain my shirt with pride.

Running provided an escape from his leaving, who he was now sleeping with, and...