look up, look up.
It knocked the wind out of me. It was just the way
it happened—farm houses dotted with
Christmas lights, the air too cold to breathe now,
a sad Christmas song on the radio,
my chest caving in on itself
I pulled over just to see what it would feel like,
but the moon disappeared, I’m not lying
pulled from under my feet, the moon, it was you
you were there and then you were not
and this isn’t a dream.
this is what dying feels like,
what it means to knife and be knifed
by the one that you loved
and to keep driving home anyway—
oh, my love, what have I done
FIVE
Started from the bottom,
now I can pay my bar tab
June 2013, Singing at the Staples Center and Everyone Looks Hungry
My dad was a blue shell of a bad man. Mom talks about his brain surgery, says it like this: “it changed him,” says it slowly, says it deliberately, nodding her head to agree with herself. She is slow like this because we both know what happens after. Clusters of dirt in my hair, forgotten meals, the bright lights, empty, empty, empty, and the pit. Shame is a pit. Fills my name with a bunch of songs I don’t know, don’t care to know, someday will wake up and sing them out loud. It’s not your fault, it’s not your fault, stupid white choruses of apology eyes over and over. I say stupid in this way because my mom acts like I remember. I don’t remember anything. I’m crying in the green room. My body isn’t mine, it’s my father’s, it’s father’s day. They’re chanting my name in the arena. Get it together. Ten thousand people tonight.
We both know what happens after. Bright lights, empty, empty, empty, crying to my own pitless song. Ten thousand people singing my stupid name, nod, my body isn’t mine. It’s Father’s Day.
Mom says slowly, deliberately: “Your body is an arena.”
I am a blue meal of remembering. Ten thousand people in the pit tonight, they’re all bad fathers.
The Talk Show Host
I.
the question they most grin with crest-white teeth and artificial inflection translates to: “aren’t you so much better than who you were before?”
I don’t know, billy.
I feel the same. I feel love all the time.
I feel invaded sometimes.
I feel happy tears when I see people holding hands.
I am still many pages in a fucked-up book,
illustrating all the ways that trauma creates art
you know what. I feel powerful, billy. I feel seven years old. I am doing okay. I am sad that I can’t even keep a plant alive and I miss my family. I love to sing and I love to write and I love that it is my job, but it also complicates passion for art when you depend on it for rent.
My friends are my employees and that feels weird, but is also fun.
It is complicated.
I am so hungry for their tan-faced questions to be genuine—
for eye contact on a red carpet instead of glancing at the evening sheen of other more important people
Mary! How different is the world now that you’re a star,
not just a bartender anymore!
right, sweetheart?
does the sun
glitter when you shit now,
cupcake?
During the week I performed at the 2014 Grammys, I was promoting my single. An interviewer asked me on live television, without warning or relevance, to talk about my rape and how I overcame it. I will not tell you what I said. I will tell you what I should have said.
II.
Billy, do you have a daughter
Does she smell like christmas morning
Do you laugh at the way she dances in her socks in the kitchen
Do you sometimes cry knowing that her coming of age is equal parts grieving and pride
When she gets excited, does she cyclone out of herself like balloons in the wind
Is it beautiful
Are you proud like a gold bird
If someone hurt her, would you wish to decapitate them slowly with hawklike precision and burn their eyeballs out with acid
good
because that is what love is
In a parallel world, I am your daughter
Maybe at the kitchen table crying, you ask me
about the night I was raped
You hold honest eye contact,
not two strangers; vacant cells, oblivious
you take my hands like churches,
praying for another reality,
you let me tell you about the teeth
of the wolves at my thighs
You want to kill them with your bare hands
without a thought
you let me ruin your crisp TV shirt
with my sobbing
I want to rewrite everything bad
that ever happened to me
Billy, I don’t know how this works
I’ve never had a dad
The Taking
Let this be called the Taking
Let it be called Gorgeous Art
Let it be called Bad Contract
Oh, friends, how bountiful your cups
are from all of the gifts you took
I watched you adorn your thievery
in articulated eloquence,
meticulously package it, calculated—
And then call it business
I say it again with hot tears on my cheeks—
Business.
Let this be called
Rich curtains that hang in a home
so extravagant I cannot even fathom
Forget all I said before—
Every Man For Himself
Every Man For Himself
Every Man
Every Man that ever Took from me
Could have called it business
Park Avenue
There is music sweating in the heels of Manhattan today
I mean to say Everything is sticking to Everything
Above ground, the clothes are clinging
to a woman holding her child’s puckered hand
Frank Sinatra echoes from a storefront that sells
half-priced boots
When I take the train from New York,
the landscape undresses for us
We are voyeurs to her dance
See the neighborhoods that have swept
their ugly secrets
underneath the chevron rugs of new american restaurants
and cupcake shops
The high-rises on the east side don’t know how
to hide the kids who cling to the gates further down
Park Avenue covering their ears when the train passes
It isn’t always pretty, the train says, but at least it’s honest
the train is telling a story about power and money
who gets a piece of the pie
and who owns the pie factory
I don’t even like pie,
but I keep buying pastries in heaps
because I can
I Wish Powerful Men Would Stop Being Fucking Terrible
I listen to Debussy because he moves me
the harmonic intricacies swell around mangled trees
thirsting for Spring
I wonder if Debussy was an asshole
or if he cried a lot
and what would his favorite cupcake be
and which BuzzFeed quiz would he take
and I wonder if he ever bought flowers for a lady
Or what he would choose for his cover photo
If he would have a hard time unfriending old university colleagues who post annoying stuff like
“I ate a sandwich today. Pastrami! #blessed”
I wonder if Debussy would hate me because I like women
&nb
sp; Do we love Picasso and Renoir and Schumann
the same way we loved Bill Cosby?
Would you love Starry Night
or Mozart’s Requiem just the same
if you knew the artists beat their children or raped their neighbor’s daughter?
Can we separate art from the artist?
Is television an art form?
I don’t know—
The internet has emptied a lot of secrets
of people who did not want them known, people
who were banking on the silence that shame makes
I wonder if my children will watch The Cosby Show
A Poem to Cheer You Up
When you think about it, there are a lot
of people that haven’t died yet!
Think about it! How many dead people
have you met today?
You used to be one tiny microscopic insignificant thing,
swimming aimlessly in a nutsack
and out of all the other spermies,
you made it to that egg first!
Then, you survived childbirth! Can you imagine? Wow!
Then, you survived middle school!
A locker room! Somehow!
and now, you vibrant, stunning, living thing:
you get to love other people
and that love doesn’t ever expire!
it is endlessly perfect!
Whenever I think that there might not be a god,
I think about that
Uber Driver #237
I came home crying to my girlfriend
she says who did this to you, and I say
My love, that man was a small gun
I say that you are a 27-year-old who never kissed anyone
I say you are a shard of glass I clutch tightly on purpose
A world I don’t know
A suit of silence
I say you are sorry and that you didn’t mean it
That you are a crocheted knife
Now tucked in the folds of my memory as a list of men
who took without asking
I say honestly
You are a driver I had at 2 a.m.
after I drank tequila with drag queens in
Colorado
And I wanted to be your friend
So when you forced my head to your mouth with greedy hands
All I could think of was how quickly I will forget this
Because a man violating a woman is a boring story A dumb horror film
how I recoiled and shook and lost speech
That I said loudly you don’t mean to do this
you can’t do this
I am not for you
instead at the shower tiles
Sometimes when I turn the stove on for tea
I don’t remember even doing it
Of course, ten minutes later,
the shrill whistling startles me like a horror movie
And I am reminded of what actually is.
Glamorous Dressing Rooms Are Just Locker Rooms with Fake Plants
Over cocktails in the Fanciest Place I Have Ever Been,
he tells me sometimes he wishes the plane would crash
That the world does not look like what he thought it would
I say, me too.
I say, humans were not meant to live this way
I say, fame is a terrifying sword,
and I know how the luxury gleams in the light
and yes, you can sing with a blade in your side
Hit all of the right notes
and never let them know
Their eyes will marvel at your composure
But at some point,
the tide rises
you are snapping
And not in the teen angsty way of snapping
but in the way the slightest thing can undo you.
like how the weight of a feather is not much,
but it is everything when you are an insect
We spend our days in this macabre waltz
That because millions of people would break their legs to
stand on a stage like this
That it is somehow not okay to cry
Or say “I miss my family”
Or “today I hate my body”
Or to question “why me?”
You are the real Truman Show, friend
And everyone is watching tonight
I know all too well how to paint your face after crying
and the recitation of
“I’m so humbled” and “everything is surreal”
become part of a language that begins to feel disingenuous
Are you not the same boy
that cried in your room wanting friends?
Is this not what you wished for?
Are you not the same boy unfolding in front of millions?
Isn’t that the crux of it all—
To be loved by all, and yet not believe it.
Dear friend,
May you walk out of a dark dressing room of fake plants,
May you never forget how the light looks at sunrise
How every day it is new
and how it wants nothing from you
Think of the birds on the tarmac
They congregate obliviously
like they might not ever die
May you claim your own path to what
makes you feel the most alive
The greatest thing about your life,
is that you’re in it and you are awake
And you can do whatever you damn well please
I Don’t Think It Was Milli Vanilli’s Fault
1.
I am in a conference room
with nothing in it besides some money eyes,
an absurdly long conference table,
and swivel chairs that recline
My eyes glaze over the panorama of Los Angeles.
I am a product. I am not really here.
The next day, I am in “cool executive dude” room #3
Platinum albums hung up around the room, a low
brown leather couch, more sparkling plaques sit lazily on the floor (Perhaps he is too busy to hang those ones up. Maybe he has been installing solar panels in his silver lake dude palace)
I am trying to remember the youtube video I saw about power stances and awkwardly place my hands behind my head and recline slowly, nearly
Falling backward. This does not feel
like a feminist move, it feels like a skit about what not to do in a job interview put on by angsty high school kids.
I leave the meeting. I return a year later a different person
Maybe worse, I don’t know.
I have more shoes than I did before.
I remember the feeling of all the snakes
fighting for the mouse
I remember all the nights I whispered to the moon on all the red eye flights, asked her to pull me to space, end this obnoxious ladder climbing, this not-good-enough, this rocket to hell
I wish the car would crash
The year is a garbled phone call and it sounds like guilt
2.
don’t squander this don’t
you want success you really should
be so lucky to
cut off your arms no one cares
if you a c t u a l l y play piano we’ve got
twenty pianists focus on
you, the star, you’ve really
got something special can I just sink my teeth into
your
musicblood I hate to say this, but Target
(We) won’t care/won’t carry your album if
you talk about rape
in the meantime Here’s a song by Sia
a song by Pink
a song by Colbie Caillat’s guitarist Can’t you
just sing it If you
do this ridiculous thing now Jesus don’t
be difficult You can do what you love after
the after the af
ter the after the after the after
the a f te r t h e
after the after
after the afte r th e a f te r th e af t
er th e afte r t h e af t e r t h e
af t e r t h e
a f t e r t h e afte r t h e aft e r t h e
after after after after after after
after afrerafer t affert affret after afret a
fffffter t h e
radio hit.
don’t be ungrateful.
anyone would kill for this.
Blockbuster Hit! A Girl Cries in Her Hotel Room!
[LOS ANGELES. IT IS MORNING. CHARACTER IS NOT BRAVE]
VOICE 1
[calls from SL, crying to no one, is cyclone of herself]
VOICE 2
nothing nothing nothing
VOICE 3
the perpetual shame of every kiss, every cauterized song
ENSEMBLE
your love does not exist
VOICE 4
[over the shoulder] “not good” a dress climbs out of her mouth
VOICE 5
slut, [windowless room, curtains grating on themselves]
VOICE 6
every pair of eyes, a dagger
VOICE 7
every pair of eyes, a bathtub
VOICE 8
[exit laughing, twirling in a gown]
ENSEMBLE
how will you love like this
[CHARACTER DOES NOT SLEEP, MELTS INTO THE CARPET, OFFERS EMERALDS TO NO ONE]
VOICE 9
They’re watching you [shaking, head tics up, head backward, alien self]
VOICE 10
They’re watching you as a black hole, hiding a dead girl
VOICE 11
[to self] bury her on hyperion or in a park or in a dream
VOICE 12
“thirty-one stories up”
[CHARACTER’S ARM DETACHES, PLACES IT GENTLY ON THE STATIONERY]