Driving Home from Blackbird Saloon to Look at Pictures of Myself ~ Cerrillos, New Mexico

Staring at the surface of my body is the closest I can get to never seeing you again. My face was built a thousand years ago, before photographs, before hands. All at once I feel the message the professor sent to me back then.

More of us will die from drowning here than from dehydrating at our own speeds. I keep my eyes open. I stop on the side of the road to reach for a bottle of clear water rolling around my back seat. My thirst petrifies me. I drink more than I admit. I like to hear the desert, the eyes of crepuscular animals moving around for what they can see. The fantasy of rock smashed over a ponytail. I look out past the last glare of the sky flickering on the adobe estates and remember the professor once advising that instead of writing about my adolescent addiction, I should write about my past with rich men. There were other things she didn’t tell me. Understand a woman has nothing to do with her envy. I resume driving back to my computer screen.

Roofied in Public

I miss the days of getting roofied in public, the nights easy to remember only for how fast they came. I miss when I could wildly do whatever I want off one tab dissolving in a bottle of Grey Goose, such as dance up on the speaker in sequined bras without exposing my nipples. I miss that I will never come down with emotional baggage, to interrupt my licking of baby powder off my finger. How I was your VIP Miami Beach, your velvet rope opening, your group entry. I was your blonde by nature, your collagen without tan lines. The only plastic surgery I ever needed was a boob job, but I stuffed my bra with marmalade. I turned down Jeremy Shockey.

The next day, girlfriends at the diner, we pieced our street smarts back into the metered spot, where we’d left the car. In our booth, we figured out who is happier than who without hating each other. Then suddenly, we’d long to be old hags, our faces painted white, dragging our cauldrons through the end of time, the smell of barf, the smell of spitting out, pushed to the side. Everyone we know would already be dead. We’d be watching from our cave in a tree, watching the way you want yourself to seem.

You’d like to believe that all I want is to speak to you in lines of poetry, such as: I am the mood board to your movie. The feeling of getting what you want is not actually a feeling. Thinking of you is the same thing as thinking of me. I am the yearn in the clump of cells ripening in your mother’s womb. Your need for food and water. You want me so bad you might die on your floor. You are the sperm donation I don’t have to pay for.

I am not trying to be sarcastic. This is my personality. If you don’t believe it let me take you for coffee, rub my OCD all over you. Meet me by the counter on campus, students call me professor because I teach them how to use a poem as an OD, because I read more than I suck. I never read Moby Dick. I teach my girls to grow up and get rich, then walk myself home in my Golden Goose, tuck myself in to monochrome sheets.

I need to Rohypnol you with champagne to work on my performance. I failed out of medical school. I didn’t even apply. I debit money from my savings account full of my therapy copays I can use to buy my own mansion. SELL is my four-letter pin, take out the x. Say it backwards and it will always sound like less than it is.  I can take a bath in the 3D money I print. I can love myself hard enough against my washing machine, become my own obligation. I can install a Ring cam and watch myself in my Mercedes, parked in my own driveway, understanding myself to all the way deep down enough to where I have no fucking idea, to where I feel so much I can’t even fucking feel. I have tried everything in my mansion except for translating the word saudade into English, except for writing poetry for Substack.

But if all of this amounted to me showing up outside your house in the Hamptons, would you give me a ride to the beach? Would you look for me or look at me.

The best thing for the future of a word like consent is to just stop talking about all of it.

Schadenfraude

There is the German psychological term for relief or even for pleasure, when we feel something

[     ] happen to someone else.

A road at night needs a woman wearing a long white t-shirt walking miles toward the phone in the general store. The woman has PMS, decides not to hitchhike. She follows a straight line. I wanted to pull over and brush her blonde hair, hand her a box of Crest vivid white strips.

The word succinct sounds friendly, not at all like what it means, the way the word detox comes softly, the x happens twice.

I want words to be easy. I want metonyms, visual aids. No, I want neoteny. I am confusing myself. I want to climb landscapes that will kill me. I want to know two sides of misery. No, of mercy. Enter transubstantiation. Both succinct and detox have sounds I’m yet to pronounce, refractions of others’ stories that have become so completely my own I forget them. If regret is for decisions we never saw coming, if guilt is for decisions we should have expected, what is the word for when we inoculate ourselves with our own language. 

I don’t know why mornings are sad. I don’t have my license. I don’t know how to hitchhike. I want to curl on my side, in the position she died in. She came into the world with nothing until she learned that first word she left with: Mother.