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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. |
