Too Like the Lightning

Prose poems to my almost loves . . . street harassers, catcallers, online creepers, followers-on-the-street, and other sundry unsavories. All poems are true; I take requests via Twitter direct message @toounadvised.

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To the Flapper

A prose poem to the man who flapped his cock and balls at me from a dark driveway off 16th Street when I was twenty-two and newly transplanted, wide-eyed and filled with anxiety and hope, to the big city. The thought never crossed my mind that I might see a stranger’s cock and balls that night. I was dipping shaky, self-conscious toes into a career in the theatre. I was moonishly in love with a boy who had said more than once that it wasn’t gonna happen. I was in a losing battle with debt. These were the things that filled my yearning, uninitiated twenty-two-year-old mind as I walked north on 16th Street--a stranger’s cock and balls could not have been further from my thoughts. And so, when you called to me from your place in the shadows with soft, wet kissing sounds, my reaction was not, “Aha, there must be a man in that darkness preparing to give me a look at his cock and balls.” No. What came into my innocent post-co-ed consciousness was, “It is spring and it is warm and it is evening, and I am hearing the sounds of a couple in love, bidding each other goodnight in some private corner off this broad regal avenue in our nation’s capital.” Imagine then, my consternation, when I turned toward the sound, and saw not a couple but a lone man. A man with lips puckered, making kissy noises at me. A man with his pants open and gaping. A man with forefinger and thumb wrapped securely around the base of both shaft and scrotum, the better to flap with my dear, up and down up and down, in my general direction. I was, regrettably, transfixed. Regrettably, I say, but not altogether damnably. A mind that expects to see a scene of sweet and more or less innocent romance and is met instead with a triad of cock and balls flapping up and down up and down can be forgiven a temporary lag between receiving the stimulus and deciding how on earth to react to the stimulus. We are not, in the aggregate, a people practiced in responses to surprise flapping cock and balls. After a moment’s hesitation, I turned away, my face frozen somewhere between disbelief and amazement at the sheer limitlessness of the human condition, with its attendant trials and foibles and anguishes and proclivities to flapping complete sets of genitalia at young and largely naive passers-by in the springtime. A few steps later, I asked myself, calmly, whether I should start to laugh or start to cry. I settled half-heartedly on the former, and continued north up 16th Street, howling a strangled aria to your flapping nighttime cock and balls. You, my unknown suitor, almost gentle in your need for my notice, standing in the silent vulnerability of your offer. “This is me. Here I am.” Flap flap. Flap flap.

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To the Facebook Commenter

For Megan.

A prose poem to Matthew, the Facebook commenter who says women should post pretty selfies rather than engaging in politics. Oh, Matthew, you make me nostalgic for a simpler time. A time before women felt such pressure to keep our social media presence curated with memes about red wine, pyramid schemes selling lip balms, misspellings of “your” and “you’re,” and selfies. A time before men felt such pressure to keep their social media presence curated with advice to women about how to keep our social media presence curated. 2016 is just too scary and complicated, you know? There’s all this shattered glass ceiling everywhere! Seriously, a girl could chip a nail. Do you wanna get out of here? Back to when things were easy and . . . great again? How about 1919? I’ll wear a girdle for you, and you’ll sign documents for me. I’ll set my hair with hot irons, and you’ll own property. I’ll be too pretty to think, and you’ll cast one ballot for the both of us. Come with me, Matthew. Our buggy’s waiting.

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To the Stationery Connoisseur

For Bridget.

A prose poem to the guy who leaves women completely baffling Post-Its. Finally. Finally! A man who appreciates office supplies as much as I do. Baby, you don’t have to have clear or coherent messaging, as long as the delivery is so tidy, so organized, so administratively sound. Let’s hit Staples together. I’ve got coupons. I want to kiss you under the fluorescent lights of Aisle 7. That’s right: the ink and toner aisle, daddy. I want to take you home, along with several reams of bright white 8 1/2″ x 11″ laser paper for us to roll around on. I’ll come out of the bathroom wearing nothing but a negligee constructed entirely of those file folders with the color-coded tabs. Let me highlight every line and ridge of your body. No, literally. Let me draw on you with a neon yellow marker. I will run my tongue along your edges, the way I don’t have to lick those self-adhesive envelopes with the peel away sticky strip. I will file you; I will declutter you; I will alphabetize, tabulate, codify, and index you. Honey. Let’s get clerical.

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To the Convicted

A prose poem to Brock Turner. I imagine you’re thinking today about time. About the six months ahead of you and how you’ll fill them. One hundred and eighty-three days. Upwards of four thousand hours. Two hundred and sixty-three thousand minutes--and some change. I have some thoughts about what you could do with all that time. You could take some correspondence courses. But . . . then again . . . six months is not enough time for you to complete your bachelor’s. Or even your associate’s. You might choose instead to self-educate. Pick up, say, the Holy Bible. But . . . even if you read and reflect on one hundred and fifty verses every day, you will not have finished the book in six months. Same is true of the works of Shakespeare. Even reading one act of a play every day, you’d still have one play left over after six months. Maybe something a little more modern? Listen to one Beatles song a day . . . but you’ll only cover about half of their oeuvre. Watch a Criterion Collection film a day . . . and you’ll get about a quarter of the way through the list. It’s too bad there just won’t be enough time. But you know what? I’ll tell you what you could do in six months’ time. You could turn a woman’s life inside out. Heck. You could do that in twenty minutes of action.

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To the Gender Studies Experts

For Sarah.

A prose poem to a carful of cockstrokes and their fragile masculinity. Maleness and femaleness are, of course, a complex convergence of biology and mores, DNA expression--and social expression. Who is to tell us what makes a woman, and what makes a man? Plato’s Symposium? The Kinsey Institute? RuPaul’s Drag Race? The North Carolina General Assembly? Or, perhaps, the question is best left to you, four bros cruising campus at night. As I walked home after dark, you pulled up alongside me and let loose the standard guy-on-girl litany: the whistles, the hoots, the “Hey babys.” Gender exists on a slip’n’slide of a continuum, but that night, you were so very firmly on the “male” side, the “puff and bluster” side, the “look at us mightily swinging our giant dicks” side. And how badly you wanted me to know my place in relation to yours. So it was a bit perplexing when, in response to my silence, you revved the engine and peeled away, tossing a final rejoinder out the window into your wake: “You look like a man, bitch.” In a single sentence, you brought our culture’s deepest discomforts into sharp relief. I could dissect that one sentence for a thousand poems and never come out the other side. One moment my femininity attracts your attention, the next, you rebuke me for masculinity. I was brazen enough to be a woman in public, so you shame me for mannishness. Not to mention, of course, the paralyzing cognitive dissonance of those two opposing epithets in one breath, man and bitch. And further still, the self-incriminating homophobia of four bros caught catcalling a girl who, in their own estimation, looks like a man. We could fall into the rabbit hole of that one sentence--“You look like a man, bitch”--for an eternity. In fact, a decade later, I am still falling. Just me and you . . . a carful of cockstrokes . . . tumbling, plummeting, frozen forever in perpetual free fall through the abyss.

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To the Childcare Specialists

A prose poem to the group of drunk guys who catcalled me as I walked by with a sleeping infant strapped to my chest. You guys are into MILFs? That’s so edgy of you! But wait, would it change things if I told you this baby isn’t actually mine? I’m just helping out a friend while she works tonight. How do you feel about babysitters? BILFs, if you will. Is that a thing? Hey, maybe me, this sleeping angelic form in my arms, and the four of you could all start a babysitters club together! We’ll post flyers, have meetings in my mom’s basement, and be the subjects of a series of young adult novels with fuschia and teal covers! Oh, is that not what you had in mind? No, it’s cool, I get it. You’re realists about childcare. It’s diaper duty and boiling silicone nipples that really turns you on, isn’t it? Wow, I really lucked out tonight. Let’s all go back to my place and fold nappies while we discuss how society’s pigeonholing of women into either sainted mothers or insatiable vamps is so 1994. Obvi, the modern girl can totes be both at the same time! Oh, yeah, def bring your cooler of Pabst.

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To the Idiot

For Kate.

A prose poem to the man who offered this passing positive affirmation: "You would make a good wife. I like big women." There's a saying: every cap has its bottle. How lucky, how astonishingly, breathtakingly lucky we are, my one true love, that we've found each other. A bottle and its cap. You think big women make good wives? What a stunning coincidence! I think idiots make good husbands. Marry me. Be my only. I'll be an independent, free-thinking, self-actualized woman; you'll sit on the La-Z-Boy mouth-breathing. I'll be surrounded by loving, supportive, mutually inspiring friendships; you'll stare out the car window and read the billboards out loud in a monotone. I'll continue to advance in my career, garnering respect and feeling both fulfilled and challenged; you'll gape slack-jawed at your browser, refreshing the same page of college football stats again . . . and again . . . and just . . . one . . . more . . . time. You singular being. You snowflake. You cap to my bottle. You complete me.

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To the #Snowzilla2016 Opportunist

A prose poem to the construction worker who "just wanted to talk" while I was digging my car out of a Kilimanjaro of snow. Huh? What? Oh. . . . Hi there. *shovel* *grunt* *pause* I'm . . . fine. . . . How are you? Did you . . . need something? *shovel* Well . . . as you can see . . . I am . . . shoveling . . . a literal blizzard off of my car . . . while streams of cold sweat . . . run down my face and into my scarf . . . so . . . no, thanks, I don't really feel like . . . having a conversation. *gasp* *shovel* *pause* How am I doing? I thought we covered that ground already. *scoop scoop* My cheeks . . . are chapped and I'm . . . standing . . . up to my thighs in snow . . . so, to answer your question . . . I'm completely bewildered that I'm getting hit on, thanks. *shovel* *heave* *pant* Look, this is . . . flattering . . . but . . . I kind of need my . . . lung power right now, so . . . *shovel* . . . *shovel* . . . *gasp* . . . *shovel* . . . Are you still here?

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To the Street Pisser

A prose poem to the guy who whipped it out and let flow a stream of urine in the middle of the street, right in front of me. It was just after midnight, on a deserted side street off Connecticut Avenue. The lamplight had turned the asphalt, and the night around it, a sort of maudlin Casablanca blue-gray. I parked my car, stepped out, and began to cross the silent street. And just then, you stepped out too. We met like two duelists in an old Western. The street was empty but for us. The air was pregnant. And you, my surprising one, were quick on the draw. You whipped it out and pissed in the street, legs confidently akimbo, shoulders back, gaze steady. More surprising, even, than the sheer audacity of pissing in the street for an audience of one is that you were wearing a sweater vest and loafers. My darling, my heart, my god among men . . . you were wearing a sweater vest and loafers. And you were pissing in the street. Who are you? It’s entirely possible that you just didn’t see me there, twenty feet away, on an otherwise lonely and lamplit street. But I hope not. I hope that the memory I cling to is a true one: that our eyes met over the rivulet of pee between us, and that for a moment, however briefly, we were one.

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To the Online Dating Poet

For Sarah.

A prose poem to the online dating poet. Baby, I commend you for turning your astute critical eye on my appearance. Please indulge me as I return the favor for your poetry. Your style immediately—from the poem’s preamble—signals to the reader that you are no writer to be constrained by convention. You have time for the oxford comma, but not for a complete spelling of monosyllables like “you” and “in.” I read this as a bold challenge to the establishment: you will keep us on our toes, ever shifting, ever defying categorization. And then, your transgressions of structure. The first line—or is it lines?—of your very first verse is—are?—an enigma. (See, baby, I too can toy with subject/verb agreement, as if it were a joke, a plaything for our private amusement.) You’ve forgone line breaks, and yet you’ve employed capitalizations that might in fact be read as heralds to new lines. Form, you announce to the reader, is an illusion that you will bend to your will. This defiant challenge to convention continues with your use of meter. By which I mean: you haven’t used it. Or more precisely, sometimes you have and sometimes you haven’t, as if meter were a cheap trick, to tumble into accidentally if at all. And then. Oh, lover, and then. The cornerstone of your art: the parallelism. Like a trusty alarm clock, an ailing sheep, a smoke alarm signaling that it has been five goddamn years and it is high time we change its long-suffering battery, you bleat and rebleat and bleat again that timeless phrase, that siren song to women everywhere: “You are beautiful.” Again and again, like tide on sandstone, you batter at my resistance. “You are beautiful.” Why? I ask you. Why? How do you know this secret about me? “Because you have a heart,” you whisper in reply. “Because you have a brain.” And finally, the coup de grace: “No matter what people say to you.” With a casual disdain for all rules that make poetry poetry, with a triumphant, “No thanks!” to any of the time-honored ways a more conformist man might make himself attractive to a woman . . . you infiltrate my battlements. You conquer me.

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To the Lurking Yokels

A prose poem to two yokels lurking weirdly in an SUV at the edge of a gas station parking lot at night. Picture the scene, my sweet ones. You: two dudes enjoying a Thursday night sitting in a parked vehicle in the shadows of a deserted location. Me: a woman alone at 11 PM just trying to fill my tank and get home. You: leaning out of your SUV window and into the darkness, calling me “baby.” Me: so utterly skeeved that I peeled out of there with only 3.124 gallons of gas, when what I really needed was a full tank, because I’ve got a busy schedule, dammit, and not a moment to stop a second time to fill the remaining 11.876 gallons of negative space. Your technique is so flawless. Park in an odd and boring spot, let darkness fall, and wait for the ladies to roll in. When they arrive, cause them thorough inconvenience. If I hadn’t been in such a silly rush to drive away--my gas cap still unscrewed and dangling--the three of us might really have had a future together. We could park in that creepy little nook under the overpass, listening to Metallica and passing around a bag of Bugles and a 20-oz Mountain Dew. Then, at random intervals, when I least expect it, you could keep me on my toes by throwing a wrench in my agenda. Come on, you sexy beasts. Interrupt me when I’m in the middle of buying my groceries, so that I have to spend the whole week without my favorite blend of Greek yogurt and honey. Distract me while I’m paying the bills, so that the Verizon check goes unsigned and my cable unceremoniously canceled. Stop my doctor mid-Pap smear. No no, it’s okay, I’ll just reschedule. Anything for you, my two bold beautiful lurking yokel darlings.

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To the Shouter

For Morgan.

A prose poem to the street harasser who just turns up the volume. "How you doin' tonight?" You asked me, sotto voce. And then again, still in dulcet tones, but with rising fervor: "How you DOIN’ tonight?" And, finally, a third time, your throaty baritone ricocheting off the night air: "HOW YOU DOIN' TONIGHT?" I like that you understand passion and volume to be equivalent. You're obviously a subtle man, delicate in sensibilities, refined in delivery. Might you and I continue the conversation? Let's scream sweet nothings right into each other's faces. I want to roll over in the morning to discover your warm body swathed in a tangle of bedsheets and dappled sunlight, and shout "GOOD MORNING, LOVER" into your tender eardrum. I want to grow old with you, accumulating noise complaints and early-onset hearing loss. Someday, when we are frail and gray, my love for you will rest gently in the simple exchanges between us. "Baby, it's your brother on the phone. . . . No, I KNOW your mother's dead, it's your BROTHER. Just pick up. JUST PICK UP THE PHONE. God, I burn for you."

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To Donald Trump

A prose poem to Donald Trump. I lie awake in the pre-dawn gray, imagining what it would be like to be your lover. This is what all women in America are doing, consciously or unconsciously, including your colleagues. What would I cry out as I clasp your solid trunk to my breast? Donald? Don? Donny? You call women dogs, so maybe I'll just call you stallion. Or rather . . . new-birthed foal. All knobby, buckling knees and vulnerability. Sheer, insatiable need. You see, Donald (Don, Donny), I’m not interested in the interior of your private jet. What I want is the soft, pink underbelly of your heart. Show me your tender woundedness. Show me the frightened, hurting child within. Offer me the ache of your loneliness, huge and cut jagged as Wall Street, changeable and quivering as contemporary capitalism, and I will cup it gently in the shelter of my hands. Donald (Don, Donny), give me the urgency of your quest for approval, the unslaked thirst of your personhood. Donald (Don, Donny), I will quench you.

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To the Admirer of Poop Scooping

For Katie.

A prose poem to the man who honked at me while I was bent over to scoop my dog's poop. I imagine myself from your perspective: a flash of derrière as you speed by on a lazy Sunday morning. I can't disagree with your sense of aesthetics. The female form, after all, is at its best in the attitude required for poop scooping. Knees gently bent in casual arabesque, rump rising and round against the midmorning sky. You appreciate a finely drawn scene when you see one: the delicate art of womanhood so tantalizingly juxtaposed against the mundanity of Sunday morning dog shit. The sacred and the profane. I'm awed by your intuitive grasp of the sublime in everyday existence. You and I are the kind of couple that might one day read aloud to one another from the verses of Coleridge while passing back and forth a handle of Skol, gagging as it goes down like lighter fluid. We're the kind of highbrow raunch artists who could find a nook for a quickie in St. Peter's. Let's go bowling in evening attire. Let's waltz barefoot in a field of cow patties. You say you like the look of my bum while I'm sluicing dog poo off the dew-wet grass? I say I like your style.

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To the Metro Maker-Over

A prose poem to the guy who stands outside the Metro telling women, “You’re prettier when you smile.” Sorry, pardon me, what? I’d be prettier if I smile? Oh my god, is this a woman-on-the-street makeover? Are you with Glamour or Cosmo or something? Oh my god, this is so exciting. I never win anything! So, I’d be prettier if I smiled? Let’s try it. I’m smiling. What do you think? Better? On a scale of one to ten, how much improved? Wait, you should probably rate me before the smile, and then after the smile, so we can calculate the differential more scientifically, or whatever. When will I be in the magazine? Is this all there is for my “before" and “after"? Just not smiling and then smiling? Because typically these makeover pieces involve, like, at least one new outfit and then maybe a hair cut. Do you do hair? I was thinking maybe an angled bob, but that might be too severe. I don’t know, you’re the expert. Maybe lowlights? Where are you going?

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To the Wordless Communicator

For Abbie.

A prose poem to the gentleman who makes “nice rack” gestures at women as they pass. You and I, we don’t need words. Words are for those shallow, quotidian couples who love like the needle of a record player rebounding endlessly over the same groove. “How was your day?” “I’m swinging by Whole Foods, what do we need?” “Don’t use the upstairs toilet; it’s backed up again.” You and I, we transcend. We don’t speak—we meld. And so, when you hover your cupped hands a few inches over your chest and pump your fingers, in and out, in and out . . . I know. You don’t need words to tell me I’ve got a nice rack because you and I, baby, we speak a subtler language. We speak the language of lovers’ bodies moving in such harmony that even the most delicate honking of a hand is enough to let me know that I am understood. I am seen. I am heard.

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To the Tinder Propositioner

For Melissa.

A prose poem to Mike, who wants to know, if he may Ask, Y Tinder lady says no. Messages 1 and 2 were bold and brash. Declarative. You had something to offer and you knew I wanted it. But Message 3 took a sharp turn. Like a rose bud unfurling in the slow warmth of early dawn, you delicately peeled back those dauntless outer petals to reveal a soft, vulnerable center. “To be honest,” you wrote. To be honest. Let’s run away together, Honest Mike—let’s be a fearlessly unguarded super couple dropping truth bombs on the masses and their lives of quiet obfuscation. Better yet: let’s start a husband-and-wife marketing firm, with a bent toward upholding truth in advertising. We’ll coach our clients on how to manage expectations with catchphrases like, “Capable but never above the bar!” and “Decent until proven unsatisfactory.” And when our company goes under, we’ll file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy and divorce concurrently, because, to be honest, we both knew we were never actually cut out for success. Not the first time around, anyway.