Taste for Rot

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The gravestone of Willa Cather bears an epigram extracted from her 1918 magnus opus. My Ántonia: "At any rate, that is happiness: to be dissolved into something complete and great." I want the engraving on my tombstone to dictate: "it's overrated."

This sentence is taken from page 81 of my novel Fish in Exile. "It," obviously, is referring to my life.

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TROUBLE AREAS

I walked up the hill the way a man would, my limbs punishing space. Figs, then ants, then glass beneath my feat. A bodysuit left behind in overgrown grass. I clutched no phone, knifed no key between my fingers. The sun dimmed to night. No need to position myself in front of buildings with cameras. No bounds, no shape defined me. Wind moved leaves against each other. A figure walked toward me and I walked toward the figure, two eyes watching as I turned to climb the steps up to my house—I didn't care. A package at my door I'd forgotten to expect. Inside: a stainless steel wand. I'd seen the object before, but couldn't place why it was for me. I turned it over in my hands. The Face Eraser, I read, yields best results when stored in the freezer, then rolled across trouble areas morning and night. I read the copy until I remembered who I am.

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THE NEW MIDWEST

Death is long. It grows. I measure my death's shadow against the doorframe give it a pencil tick for each flash of grim the world writes. My parents tried. They gave me a room with a lock on the outside, a mirror on the wall. I want to say never about a lot of things. I want to say better. I watch an orca beach herself at SeaWorld and feel the violet waters of the sound contracting in me, my death growing. it's not my death's fault that for every cage something is caged. That boys will be bad meat, and girls thrown behind dumpsters. I'm afraid by the time I make a life my death will be the new Midwest, like the forever of Kansas, where there are roadside lookouts you can climb but the only thing to see are other looksouts and all the death between them and the death before that, knowing you must somehow make room for life.

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FLOWER

I helped a child write a book. She gathered

a small heap of construction paper

and ordered it with care, making sure the edges lined up,

then handed me the packet as if I knew what came next.

It takes several layers of Scotch tape to make a sturdy spine.

She instructed me to write FLOWER with a pink marker

on the first page, also pink, and so I did,

making the page a cover, the word a title.

On the pink paper the pink marker bled a darker pink.

she read each letter in a whisper, as if telling herself

a secret, the way I used to repeat the last word of a sentence to myself,

echoing it in my mouth until I could feel it there. She nodded.

Everything was in its place. Then I offered to draw a flower

from the O in FLOWER, which I didn't call stigma,

though that's what the O signified, in nature the desperate sticky disk

always ready for pollen. with the same pink marker,

I drew the loops that would be petals. When I asked for yellow

she already had it in her hand. I filled the O,

the paper sogging toward orange, the felt tip lifting fibers with each pass.

She handed me green and I drew the stem, ignoring the space

where the ovary should have been, then scribbled a little grass

for the stem to stem from. She took the green

and drew a bubble sprouting from the flower,

then colored it in. It was a thought bubble, she said.

The flower was thinking about how it feels to be a flower.

This is where we stopped. We both knew the book,

with nothing in it, wasn't a book.

Every page following the cover would be filled in

by whoever found it. It is instinctual, this understanding.

How the decisions are made.

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INTERIOR LIFE

There's a fly in the house I can't kill.

I won't know if it's real until I kill it.

It darts through my periphery as my internet

yogi tells me that a cow

can be an opening. I turn my mat

to face the window

so I can see the tree on fire,

the red maple, but a truck that reads

MOVING? is in the way.

Imagine yourself as a child

watching, says the yogi, which I never

want to remember—

everything I had to watch.

I don't let her finish.

What she wanted was for me to take up space,

something about reclaiming joy

by thinking of my favorite childhood

TV program. Later, I give it a try

while folding laundry,

The Real Housewives of somewhere

on high volume to dominate

the persistent buzzing

in my ear. A Dwell

magazine placed on the back

of my husband's shirt

helps me get a proper folder.

Am I taking up space, with the proper fold?

In my house clothes I get on the floor

into extended child's pose and reach

for the cow opening. I press an ear

to the wood and listen for something

in another room,

in another house. What I hear

is a long conversation about me

that I didn't begin.

I hear my own voice from a distance:

I don't want to say the words of what happened.

Some days I'm floating around and don't know it

until I break the French press again.

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It's February but it's always a New Year if you want it to be.

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ALL OF THIS AND A GUTTER

before me, the world hard to think of the world bitter, round can't wait to be dead watch it move from above see if be romantic without me

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CURIOSITY IS A JOB or I READ MY BOYFRIEND A PORN STORY BUT I DON'T THINK HE LIKED IT VERY MUCH after Variety

anywhere you walk men are staged. lifting heavy boxes staring at your body and thinking about porn. not sex. porn. the act of porn. Christine sells tickets down at the porn theater. the tickets only cost $2. there are men in suits having important conversations. i think about their hearts. i spy on them. i spy on porn. i follow it. i need to be stopped. Christine loves to tell porn stories. she's really good at them. she sits all day in a glass booth. she trades a pack of cigarettes for a break. i take a long walk through a maze of boxes. it's a threat to be here. i think Christine should hang out with the women at the bar. they all want pleasure too. i'm waiting to find the time to call this boy back. it's dramatic on the floor. curled around my record player. staring at the phone. i should really call my mom back. Christine is eating food. she's talking about porn with her mouth full. she's talking about johns with her mouth full. bright lights fill the streets. an old john took Christine to a ball game once. he left half way through for a porn emergency. she's obsessed with him. i'm still trying to figure out what i like about sex. on the street i see lots of dead fish. gutted. gutless. no heads. pink inside.

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When I get to the vineyard, I notice all my coworkers are dressed a certain way—with exaggerated makeup, neon clothes, spandex. Like dolls from the ’80s. Which, I learn, is because they recently made a movie about a popular doll from the ’80s and today is the day you could dress up in homage. But I’m dressed regular. Because I didn’t know. “Well did you check [scheduling app],” my boss says. She’s got a sideways ponytail and makeup all over her face, representing a version of the doll a kid has drawn on. We’re in the walk-up bar, a converted shipping container with service windows. She’s counting cash and putting it into drawers. “No I told you, I don’t look at that shit. I refuse.” “Well there ya go dummy,” she says. She asks me if I’m gonna be ok in the customer-facing bar, because I’m usually in the service bar. She’s smiling. And I tell her that I’m trying to evolve as a person.

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you can write it on my tombstone: 'i wanted it!"

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In The Men’s Locker Room At The Gym

I’m approaching.

I’m asking if they believe in God.

Most of these naked guys?

Nonbelievers.

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my name is pronounced GAY-bree-el. i was born on Halloween, do the math. im dark and i like dark …. so dont like me . 🖤🖤 im cryz … very cryz …. dark …. drops …"waw"… ever since i was young i like to include blood in the poetry i write. i like to write about what's happening to me as i write. (if anyone would like to make me bleed by doing horrible things to me while i write about what you are doing to me, my roommates are out of town until a week from Friday.)

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I'm only pontificating—I'm not a lagomorph. I only wear this headdress of long fabric bunny ears to prove that I am fuckable. What I am, though, is boyish for my age and a person who collects little people and animals. Also, a body without organs—as I am a schizophrenic. An unorganized body, an astral being. However, I'm a medicated one. Hence the inertia. I'm an over-medicated one because I'm also an opioid-lite addict.

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