Parties are what elude us, what join and separate the many bodies of Machado’s title, the procedural bodies, the queer bodies, the mother-bodies, all the violent and violated women stalked by Law & Order’s silver hammer, talking back now as they love and vanish and erupt in mysterious blemishes and fall, photographed as if dead, never more or less than alive. Strike through the mask of first-person, convulse into the scarred beauty of these sentences, lean into these pregnant words: pops, grapefruit, bottle, blades. Sick and scared with eros, entranced into dalliance, making love in the world they never made.