How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, or “Asshole”
Never
call
him
back.
People Are Assholes!
you look so good
that size, that shape,
with that traumatic scar
accentuated, sitting
silent while I neg you
into love
all the things we meant to say,
we mean when we say, we are mean
we crumple our fingers together,
fists not balled, balls are smooth,
these are nobs of flesh pulsing
stupid ugly mean bitch bastard
selfish useless cuts fruit
the wrong way
never does anything
with the toilet seat
closes doors too quickly
has a small dick, brain, career trajectory
quick shots scour,
from the pink of the mouth, travel
like chipped nails
until they catch in our throat
your mother is a monster
your first husband cheated for a reason
everyone you love died because of something you did
someone said, “love means
not ever having to say you’re sorry”
what a fucking asshole.
You Did That on Your Own
You were the one who took that nervous elevator ride.
You were the one who purchased Spanx and Crocs.
You misunderstood.
You put your tongue too far down his throat.
You forgot to get gas.
You insulted everyone’s best friend.
You peed your pants a little bit, just that one time.
You dated two people at the same time but only
for three months.
You cut off those jeans into jorts.
You took chances.
You took his childhood teddy bear instead of the blame.
You threw a dozen rotten pears.
You invited everyone to your poetry reading.
You did something to someone else.
Definitely, Maybe
A poetic memoir
One time, you yelled from the bottom
floor that you had feelings for this guy, and he said
“Maybe after Christmas” from his balcony.
One time, you asked a guy out and he said,
“Maybe, but not right now. I went out with
________ for nine days
and I haven’t really recovered.”
One time, you asked a guy
for the third date, and the last text
you ever received from him was
“Maybe next week.”
One time, a guy was high on MDMA,
shirtless, dancing, sweating.
You asked him if he wanted
to get out of here, and he smiled, said, “Definitely.”
He paused, then he said, “Maybe.”
He paused again, then said, “Definitely, maybe.”
In a Movie about Weddings
No One Wants to Attend
a found poem
I absolutely loved it.
It was great.
It had the right people to play each character.
The acting was
fantastic and the movie
was very entertaining and hillariouse
espesially the part were
that one girl gets her hair died
blue.
When I first saw this movie I was like oh my gosh
this is wonderful but not as great as twilight
but I will say that all of the other reviews
are way to mean and harsh.
Do not be a devil.
In a Movie about Weddings
No One Wants to Attend 2
Even Less Interested
an adapted found poem
I absolutely loved it?
It was great?
It had the right people to play each character?
The acting was
fantastic? And the movie
was very entertaining and hilarious?
So I Married a Poet
There was a time when Mike Myers was cute. So cute.
There was a time when Mike Myers was a poet. Wasn’t that a funny time?
There was a time when romantic comedies were like jokes about men versus women. They were everywhere.
There was a time when Mike Myers was a poet and the poet made money in the nineties. In the nineties poetry was so hot.
There was a time when if you wanted a fun montage of meat being chopped up by a sexy lady with enormous hair, then you were in luck.
There she goes again!
There was a time before Gerard Butler.
Is it more believable that a poet earned a living wage or that anyone would ever want to have sex with Gerard Butler?
There was a time before Gerard Butler jokes.
There was a time when you could marry a poet and poems had to rhyme:
Poet, sweet poet.
You are like beef.
You add a bay leaf.
You make a stew in my heart.
Funny Face
If you are a bookseller
and you become a model
and get to parade
all over Paris
photographed in couture
the last thing you should do
is fall in love with Fred Astaire
when you could just
get drunk and high
and sing and dance
your way through
a jumping beatnik bar
(especially after the high-high
of a disastrous fashion show)
so don’t get married.
Read all the philosophy,
but keep the Givenchy.
But Hocus Pocus Isn’t Even a Rom Com?
for Charles Demers
Bette Midler put a spell on you, and now you are hers.
The quickest way to a woman’s heart is through her yabbos;
your virginity, both a blessing and a curse.
The way you dance until the dawn, it lures,
the same way your head falls off so easily.
Bette Midler put a spell on you, and now you are hers.
You kissed her under the glow of the book. Salt in her purse
couldn’t save her from your laid-back Hollywood style:
your virginity both a blessing and a curse.
If you ever figured out that love cures
all failures and errors, welp, apologies to Sarah Jessica Parker,
Bette Midler put a spell on you, and now you are hers.
Max, did you ever take the moment to notice opening books ensures
society will fall into the depths of evil,
your virginity, both a blessing and a curse?
Or did you not know that when the time comes
it will all turn to dust: yabbos, cats, and all?
Bette Midler put a spell on you, and now you are hers,
your virginity, both a blessing and a curse.
You Are the Devil, I (Should) Have Said
I keep a list in a pink notebook of cute personal memories. A dream journal of reality. Moments that would make great romantic scenes on film. That time someone pushed his hand under my shirt uninvited and I laughed about it, even though he was insulted, because we were all preteens and watching Earth Girls Are Easy. That time the guy with a leather jacket and Dep-gelled hair tried to push me out of a car on the highway because I wasn’t being “the one,” because his joke wasn’t funny. That time that guy yelled at me because, instead of having sex with him on Christmas Eve, I told him I didn’t love him, even though he’d made me sign a contract that stated that I would expressly have sex with him as a super-romantic Christmas gift. That time I cried in bed until salt marked red half moons under each eye, until I felt I’d paid for mistakes I wasn’t sur
e about. The scenes before the girl makes up with the guy, before the guy forgives the girl for being a bitch.
Montage
Change clothes, change accessories, change your hairstyle, change the colour of your hair, change styles, change your clothes, remove your eyeglasses, bake a cake, bake a cake and leave it on his doorstep, get your tail lights fixed, look up all of your exes, look up all of your exes and find out what they are up to, try all the cakes, try all of the wedding cakes, change clothes, try on dresses, try on dresses and change clothes, get your friends to try on dresses, change clothes, learn to smoke, quit smoking, try all of the cakes, learn a new skill, learn another new skill, try yoga, finish your opera, finish your puzzle, walk along the beach, walk through the city, walk across the entire country, start a business, take meditation classes, meditate, sit in a swing pensively reflecting on your life, look off-screen with a knowing smile, fade to the next day.
Romantic Comedies for Young Girls
Hollow Ship to Hell
for Ariel
You saw him on the ship
destined to wreck.
Pulled him from the flames
and laid his body to beach.
I was a fish once too,
fins for feet, flapping on the beach only for moments
before the air burned my skin.
So I slit my body in half,
cut my flesh into two feet, and
placed myself into his life
at every moment to catch
his attention.
One day, my body began to seal itself.
Skin tightened and my gills
grew back. I was up late one night in his bed
and the air began to burn my skin
again, my body craving the ocean.
Now, he cuts his skin to create gills
but can never stay under water long enough
to keep from floating upwards.
Tries to weight himself with concrete,
tries to anchor.
The Rose
for Belle
What happens after
you suffer through
beasts and a wedding,
everyone you knew
changed into old flesh?
You were so smart. I always thought
it was about books, ideas,
stories, adventure, living life
through the eyes of another,
pretending because life
wasn’t so fucking great.
I’d been dismissed too
for talking about thinking,
pressing my nose to books,
creating new spaces in my body
for knowledge.
When you’re young
all the sexy misogynists,
provincial gym monkeys
show off their brawn.
Their triangle torsos
look just like a beast’s.
Maybe Stockholm Syndrome
isn’t any less romantic
than cocktease guilt?
But once you got involved in your own fairy tale,
it’s so meta, the magical rose,
like the kind ladies throw
to knights, like the kind
someone in a different story
will compare to your vagina.
Those stories are outdated.
What happens when
you’re crafted into delicate stained glass,
when you’ve transformed
into something flat and lifeless?
Emotionally Broken
Romantic comedies are dead because we’re emotionally broken.
Romantic comedies are dead because romance is dead.
Romantic comedies are dead because everyone is fulfilled.
Romantic comedies are dead because no one reads
poetry anymore.
Romantic comedies are dead because the government decided to kill them.
Romantic comedies are dead because of the word “bromance.”
Romantic comedies are dead because of the word “sext.”
Romantic comedies are dead because someone’s mother watches the W Network on mute.
Romantic comedies are dead because What Women Want.
Romantic comedies are dead because there is no way anyone could love Bradley Cooper.
Romantic comedies are dead because pyrotechnicians rule the world, litter occasions with fireworks.
Romantic comedies are dead because Nora Ephron is dead.
Romantic comedies are dead because Reese Witherspoon
won an Oscar.
Romantic comedies are dead because box office is our metric, our soulmate, our hollow ship to Hell.
Because You Watched 27 Dresses
You wait for men on towers
or hesitate just before the moment you
board the plane. You become his assistant and quit
when he is fired. You go to 27 weddings and work
for the prime minister of England. You lose your husband
and spend years following his letters from the grave
making shoes. You open up a small bookshop next to a large corporate
bookstore that sells mainly soaps and candles. You become a reporter who masquerades
as a young teen in high school to sell a story about what’s cool. You let depression sink
into your body, purchase the most expensive bedsheets, pay for the most high-profile therapist you can find, who helps you start a new business so you can continue to credit-card your sorrow away.
Overboard
Even an heiress with amnesia
falls in love with a sea dog
and his rough craft, four sons
and being poor, working hard.
The message is always:
Don’t be scared of falling
because you’ll land
in sexy arms of love.
And you might. Your torso
might press into another’s,
your mouths might mash
together, your parts might bump
to orgasm. You’ll end up
entwined like a sailor’s knot,
duped into believing in another life,
because you don’t recall owning a yacht.
Being scared
doesn’t mean you won’t find
love, lust, a torso to rest
your body parts on.
Stay wary. Love changes,
abandons you in a small-town
hospital to party with barely legals.
Our brains fail us at the best of times.
Your body can take chances,
can function upright or fallen down.
Don’t think, move. Reclaim your yacht.
Steady now. You’re steering yourself.
He’s Just Not That into You
Not that he’s just into you.
He just wants to get into you.
I Am So Lonely, I Am So Fucking Lonely, lol, SEND, Obvious Child
for Gabe Liedman
1
I’m onstage, and crickets deafen
ears and tumbleweeds roll
around me, he left, and they
build love around puppies
and a home, and I am a piece
of shit, here I am, a big piece
of shit. I tweet, I am so miserable
lol, SEND. I tweet, where
are you when I need you, lol,
SEND. I refresh pages,
delete history, empty trash
bins, drink all the fucking
white wine my white body
can handle. Break. Like
a condom. Break. Like
wind. What if love was
the warm intensity of
a fart in your face?
2
What if the camera moves a little
to the left, and it just stays on you?
What if
this is the rom com, and it’s
just me and you? what if geographic
distance wasn’t real? What if the daggers
you stare with, those who fall for each
other, what if they are so lonely,
lol, what if you are the main
character, and the movie
has just begun?
He Grasps at Emotion, or The Proposal
for Sandra Bullock
The family asks you to tell them about the proposal, how he did it, and you make up a lie on the spot. But it isn’t easy for you. You know what it would be like if he was real and if he asked you the way you wanted.
You would be
watching a movie in the park, and it would be something like Pretty Woman. He would turn to you and say, “Let’s do this every year, for the rest of our lives.” Small tumblers of wine clinking, the wind congratulates you. A small constellation of kisses make out the night as Kit hollers “Cinder-fucking-rella” and that’s exactly how it all feels. You would say to yourself, “This is what people talk about when they talk about ‘happy’.”
But you aren’t
in a park, and Pretty Woman is just a movie. You ball up your emotions the way you always do and carry them in a large Louis Vuitton satchel that drags behind. You bundle it all up again, because you prefer the feeling of safety, and you were never good at uncertainty, but you go through psychology tests every night before you go to bed, because you’re not sure you feel anything at all.
You’re Supposed to Be Engaged
for Cher
A meat slicer can be an aphrodisiac. Even when you’re supposed to be engaged. Especially then. Everyone thinks you’re too old to start again. But you’re a 37-year-old goddamn widow and the edict is clear: grey hair, big sweaters, Nonna-style on this upcoming, your second, marriage. But the meat slicer. The slim cuts. The wooden hand. Something about the contrast of wobbly deli meat and hard lumber. So many euphemisms together. Your fiancé proposed in a hurry before flying to his dying mother. When death in Sicily calls, all mama’s boys must answer. I always thought it strange that no one understood that you were better than all of them until you fucked Nicholas Cage and dyed your hair goth black. Fluffing a perm, however, is always an indication that a woman is in full bloom. So you’re supposed to be engaged. So what? You can do whatever you want. Call men wolves because they are, retell their stories for them because they’ve changed their narratives, victimized beyond repair. You’re supposed to be engaged but you cheat. Your fiancé breaks it off, not because you cheated, but because he’s superstitious. The mama’s boy’s mama will die if you wed. That’s not love. Who wants a freak like that anyway? There are better freaks. You’re supposed to be engaged, but you changed your mind.