Magnificent Octopus

The other evening I sit with a friend on his balcony having a glass of wine and sharing insights into our hearts and brains and those of our...

Our love was so strong that it felt like a presence in the communal apartment, as if it were another tenant. It had an amorphous shape and w...

"I will never do that again," she said. "Be the one who loves less." 26 Knots , by Bindu Suresh, is a love story, is sev...

"Sad sells." This might sound sadistic but it's true; people want to see their sadness reflected back at them because it makes...

Priestesses smelled like forbearance and cheap incense, not raw earth and full bellies. When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain is an exquisi...

"What's your passion?" How I hate that question. Passionately.  It's a phrase that gained traction over the last couple de...

It is not difficult to fall in love. First her eyes staring at him last night, her youth and that faint impudence — nothing vulgar, just eno...

We humans are, in the end, stupid creatures who cannot help desiring that someone know us as we are.  Our first night together, we made love...

Accuracy above all things. You will never remember the great if you do not remember the small. The Empress of Salt and Fortune , by Nghi Vo,...

The ink and the blood in the turquoise water: these are the colors inside the fucking. Is blue the color of hope or of despair? Bluets , by ...

We are so schooled, he said, in the doctrine of self-acceptance that the idea of refusing to accept yourself becomes quite radical. I don...

Without agreeing to do so, we made it a thing not to call anything by its name, not to talk of cocks and vaginas and not to make love the wa...

(Too good to be true. It's not true. It stung me in the heart.)  A----o The trouble with you, dear, is that your name is so damn Shakesp...

Allegedly you are not supposed to cut to the chase and ask your fellow dater to tell you about the time he was most soul-crushingly lonely. ...

Whatever kind of woman you are, even when you're a lot of kinds of women, you're still always just a woman, which is to say you'...

He lives in Germany (he says), but will be here on business this week. We've been messaging for over a year, but we've never met fac...

I feel compelled to put closure on this book (possibly on this year of love) — My Year of Love , by Paul Nizon. Published in 1981, it has th...

I think that in my case the erotic awareness of life, or, rather, its awakening coincided with the awakening of my urge to write; the two oc...

We think erotic energy is everywhere — in the deep breath that fills our lungs as we step out into a warm spring morning, in the cold water ...

These emails took away her peace of mind. They evidently awoke that dormant section of her brain where those years had been stored, parcelle...