Contents
At Home
Outlaw
Freedom Isn’t Free
The Only Thing
After My Mother Apologized for My Childhood, We Went to Brunch
Pray the Gay Away
Outside the Lines
Something Had to Make Them That Way
Fuck off, Sharon
A Private Education
My Father Gets in My Face
More to the Story
Blast
Stone Jesus
Maybe My Mother Had So Much Stuff Because She Was Lonely
My Father Was Frank O’Hara
Mom in Casket I Picked Out
What Is That Song You Sing for the Dead?
April, 1986
Truth
First Word
Stop Lying
A Lonely Heart Is Ruthless
God Is Not Mocked
Reprobate
I Never Went Back
He Lied
My 1990s
Nothing Changed
For God Hath Not Given Us the Spirit of Fear
I Get Lonely
Stupid Beauty
Untitled
Plathoholic: A Party Game
Revision
How to Describe What It Felt Like
twentysomething
A Friend Says You Can Promise the Dying Anything
Last Ocean
Literal
Three Months Before She Died We Went to Dollywood
The World of Men
I’m Glad We Don’t Know
When We Know My Mother Will Never Wake up Again
Billy
My Father Asks Me for a Buzz Cut
Afterlife
What If Tonight Is the Night You Figure Out the Math Equation
Happy Ending
Last Word
Some Days Everything I Do I Do
My Father’s Father
Most People Live in Ugly Houses
I’m Not Making This Up
Family Text
Letter to My Sister
Holiday
Fourteen Mondays
Anniversary
Notes
Acknowledgments