(Originally published in Lumina, 2013) It wasn’t even a metaphor. That was the name of the place: the Utopia Diner, on Amsterdam and 73rd. But it was the closest diner to the Meadow, where everyone from all the schools went to hang out, so if its name had taken on a double meaning among me and my friends, it’s because that’s usually where we were when the acid peaked. We spent so much time at the Utopia. It was like clocking in at our jobs. The waiters, gruff men with hairy hands, pot bellies, and purple pouches under the eyes; unsmiling waitresses who spoke in monotone – Uh huh, you want that with salad, we have thousand island… They knew us and we knew them. They knew we were on drugs and we knew they knew. They looked over our heads at the counter waiting for us to decide. They said, I come back when you ready. I took acid every chance I got that summer. It was the only thing that made sense to me, the only way to render myself defenseless enough to admit what I pretended not to know....

Edited by David Lehman This thoughtful, provocative, and moving poetry collection celebrates the deep tradition of eroticism in American poetry, from the editor of The Best American Poetry. These poems range across the varied landscapes of love and sex and desire—from the intimate parts of the body to the end of an affair, from passion to solitary self-pleasure. With candor and imagination, they capture the delights and torments of sex and sexuality, nudity, love, lust, and the secret life of fantasy. David Lehman, the distinguished editor of the celebrated Best American Poetry series, has culled a witty, titillating, and alluring collection that starts with Francis Scott Key, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Hart Crane, encompasses Frank O’Hara, Anne Sexton, John Updike, Charles Simic, Billy Collins, Kevin Young, and Sharon Olds, and concludes with the rising stars of a whole new generation of versifiers, including Sarah Manguso, Ravi Shankar, and Brenda Shaughnessy. In a section of...

(Originally published in Nerve.com, 2008) I was a comic, and so was he. He was one of those Kaufmanesque types; more of a performance artist, really; someone who’d come out in a blond wig and dance spastically until the audience laughed from the sheer awkwardness of it. Whereas I was more of a set-up/punch gal, with bits and jokes and routines: the phone sex bit, the abortion joke, the younger men routine. I “worked blue,” as they say; I was bawdy, and talked a lot about sex, mostly about how I wasn’t having it. I was recently single again, after a failed five-year relationship, and I was trying to drown my sorrows in anonymous applause. I didn’t like him. I didn’t hate him, the way I hated some other comics, with their racist, homophobic bullshit, but I didn’t particularly like him. A few of my female friends had made out with him – he had a reputation as something of a slut, a reputation he cultivated at every opportunity – and I thought he was a little handsy, a little bratty, a little...

(Originally published on Nerve.com, 2007) The gift box was small and square, and my face flushed as my boyfriend handed it to me. How perfect, that he would get me a ring for my twenty-seventh birthday; how excited he looked, handing it to me first thing that morning, as I propped myself up on my elbow in bed. He wasn’t down on one knee, I noticed, but that was all right. I still planned to say yes. I unwrapped the present eagerly, the sharp corners of the plastic packaging indenting my fingertips, my heart shriveling under my ribs. It wasn’t a ring. It was something that looked like a small, white plastic egg. Welcome to your tamagotchi!, the packaging said. Your new virtual pet! “Isn’t it cool?” asked Tim, grinning. “Here, lemme see it.” He reached out and swiped the toy from me, turning it over in his hands, studying the directions written in both English and Japanese. “Isn’t it cool?” he asked again. “Don’t you love it?” He handed it back to me, triumphant. “Here, turn it on. I want...

(Originally published in NYPress, 1994) The night we finally kissed, we kissed a lot. At first, she didn’t want to open her mouth to my tongue. By 4:30 am, she was coming against my thigh. At least I thought it was 4:30. I thought, If it’s 4:30, and I get in a cab right now, I can get home in ten minutes, and I can tell him we went out to eat. I had this idea where if I kissed her, if she would just kiss me, it would be okay. I would have everything I needed, and it still wouldn’t be cheating, it would be okay. An honest kiss, out of love and respect, and only once, to make the wanting go away — better, I knew, than letting it haunt me. I didn’t want to be unfaithful. After four years of hard virtue, I wore my monogamy like a medal. Yet lately I was brimming with furtive dreams, woke up fevered and damp, and I knew I had to thwart myself somehow, kiss temptation away. Just a kiss and I’d be okay. I thought, One kiss, and I’ll happily go back to...

(Originally published in NYPress, 1994) 1. Make fewer lists, or stick to the lists I make. Stop making lists of lists. Stop putting “change life” on lists of things to do. 2. Stop thinking about Eliza. Just forget all about her. Understand and internalize the idea that it is counter-productive to think about her. Stop calling and hanging up on her machine. 3. Get out more. Go see museums. Enrich myself. Stop kidding myself that walking around Soho with Sophie on a Saturday is enriching. Shoes are not art. Sophie disagrees. “Get new shoes,” she says. “Change your life.” She drives me crazy lately, with all her fabulous fatuous answers: get new shoes, fuck somebody else, just get over it. Sophie thinks of all her little philosophies as very fittingly succinct, like Zen. She reads too many magazines. “You are a classic woman who loves too much,” she tells me. We’re at Whole Foods, cruising vegetarians. Mahatma Sophie. “You’re a...