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The Revolution Is Exhausting
& there is nowhere safe 
to menstruate & hell 
is round like birth control 
I fumble with on the uncanny 
toilet & I emerge, grouchily
into the season finale 
of my life, innocently matte 
yet wet at the corners
shy yet bloated & humming 
trance-like with millennial-pink 
mediocrity & I take myself 
to the post-workday rally 
arms brittle & numb as I hold 
up my sign & never get hurt
knowing tonight I will be alive 
in the kitchen with you, unhooked 
as the smoke alarm & pouring 
vodka into coconut la croix 
& admiring your ski lift lips
our unshaven legs fully helixed 
& all quotidian struggles smothered 
or briefly eclipsed by the pop
fizz foam of sea-salted ardor

Sonnet for 2020
My manicurist is so damn excited I'm engaged.
My father is alive. Stay in touch, he texts.

A friend divulges over ice cream she lets her husband 
come on her in the shower when she's not in the mood. 

He just pulls back the curtain and goes to town. Everyone 
​is too heartbroken to make valentines once they grow up. 

As a child, I always had scissors clutched in my hand,
ready to make shit. As an adult, I'm distracted. I'm livid 

except when I'm comforted—which I think means 
I'm a patriot. I know I love my partner because I let her 

watch me cry. Kids fear things staying the same. 
Then, each day, one more thing is never the same.

Turns out the revolution was about intimacy after all.
I propose marriage in a delicatessen. We split a matzo ball.

Second Life
​In my second life I notice small heaps of roadkill 
either more often or in new ways—difficult to tell

if an animal died in a moment of desperation
or ambition, crushed into its most velveteen parts.

In my second life there are no mothers and 
also many mothers volunteering for the job

and whisperings that maybe I, too, am secretly
a mother, per the children's furniture catalogs

wedged into my mailslot and baby formula samples 
that land on my doorstep, already gone to waste.

In my second life cold yogurt hurts my teeth and 
there are chicken carcasses in the trash, plucked 

from soup, the likes of which my post-college kitchen 
appliances have never seen. For my love, I shop

for earrings, candy, novelty spatulas; take a last-minute train
to see her when she's feeling low—I'm romantic, maybe 

for the very first time. Otherwise, I'm still trying 
to figure out what smells in the fridge. I don’t recall

​much about college aside from the loneliness,
the grappling with uncomfortable truths—anxious

kisses and a personality of parlor tricks birthed 
on the perimeter of daunting, snowy woods.

I’m a poet but I’m also ordinary. In my second life
I hunger. And so often, in a quiet room, a woman 

​considers me, peering over the rim of her eyeglasses, 
and insists I, too, have the right to be in the sun.
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  • HOME
  • WINTER 2022 ISSUE
  • SUBMISSIONS
    • Submission Form
  • ABOUT
  • LITTLE BLACK BOOK
    • A NOTE FROM THE EDITORS
  • SHOP