masters in fine almost: poetics of a deranged grad student. by angie t. jeffreys
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8/6/2019 Masters in Fine Almost: poetics of a deranged grad student. by Angie T. Jeffreys
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/masters-in-fine-almost-poetics-of-a-deranged-grad-student-by-angie-t-jeffreys 1/21
some poems written by :Angie T. Jef reys
1. Second Creation
Flaps of mud spray from under dirt-
webbed feet. Drops land on
calves - they congeal, cake and chip flakeunder the sun baking a mud mask all over
my legs. The earth
squishes between my toes,
and your dirty hand is rough and strong - closing
in on and through mine. We don’t know
that the puffs of white across the horizon
are cumulous. I thought they were smoke
signals from a rain god. We don’t
know that
the bodies all burned. The ashes flew through the wind. We don’t know that we’re the only two born or left. We don’t know what the oracle foretells.
2. death by holocaust
Young Phaethon lies here, poor lad, who dreamt
of mastering his father’s sky-borne carriage;
Although he sadly died in the attempt,
Great was his daring, which none may disparage.
I wanted to ask you just how did or does it feel
body entirely metamorphosed
into a holocaust as your limbs
crunched, cracked and rattled against the inside of chariot - with four horses, flaming wings on each of their hooves, galloping dumbly down through air.
your head, collided with bars now molten and motion, ceased
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8/6/2019 Masters in Fine Almost: poetics of a deranged grad student. by Angie T. Jeffreys
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as you, consumed by
fire, were possibly smiling
even just a little bit. Spit sizzles
up off gumless teeth and naked jaws.
your lonely heart, fingered by
you. It was warm and lapped upair with its unquenchable orange tongues
licking at the oxygen behind
your face.
Skin, boiled and popped in fire - it shrivels
into bone dust, pillars of ashes still standing
up in the sky all ablaze. Flames, sizzled
and smoked, slosh in cool tap water: all
the way in we wade with wet cold feet,
shin deep searching for a trace of DNA or
something fossilized despite the sunkissed tear
falling out of the Sun like a speeding bullet.
3. Thisbe to Pyramus
We’ve spent nights with forehead melting our cheeks into wall, dreaming
through the cracks, gaps where fingers cannot reach. Tonight I place one palm
against one stone in prayer before I steal from this cell.
I dream of of licking white berries like honey
from your fingertips, your heavy-sweet shadows and limbs on all of me between skin and moonlight.
Toe into blade
of grass, twigs slit
my soles as my
feet disappear into
frigid soil.
I drop a cloak and then
white fangs drip red: I freeze into walls.
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4. speak, please
“echo thinks”:
I’m thinking of the soft touch of your voice it heavy-hums through the air tickles
me all the way from your lips your words float off your tongue like spit bubblescoming out for air or wetted petals from refrigerated roses that soft to the touch
maybe softer you’ve gathered them with so much care bundled them for me only
you spray sentences into a symphonic bouquet of hot-love and sticky-sex they
wrap around me through me thick on me and sweet memory-sap slammed back
down the hatch and hit me the way it doesn’t when you aren’t around.
5. the ‘other’ arrowhead
Under night sky, you’re haloed in starlight.
You kiss her
cheek, it’s pink sugar
on a hot night.
Did you laugh, blink tears at which parts? ________________
Now, you quiver like a bowstring in flight
from fingers, snapping back into its place
pinched for a second and then forgotten
it already catapulted a whistling arrow, black and heavy
to her heart: she runs and
it drips out a running back.
6. Run to the Quay
and I just told them I
tripped over the safety
cap and yes glass 2 of Our Dog Blue too.
I had a permanent hangover from
that fall, too.
it’s his brother. some time
;him and catching clasps behind necklaces.
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Do you wait the first time before
he switch-swings, flips into your chin?
Do you wait and then not say that I had
a bad experience with that once that left your
skin freckled after a day at the beach
but they were scabs left over from that kiss goodnight.
Do they say they do
see the glaze molding over
your face? For you, I kept dropping
crumpled bars like change in
slots of silent phone booths.
I thought silver white
shined in Irish moon. There
are intersections between us.
I got here
crossing this one street
retraced all my steps in
the air. I always travel
South from right
here.
The rainbow ends
at a big pot of razor blades and guns.
They’d keep you up at night.
7. Kissing Lilies in the Field,
I was pulled down by hand
on my lips sucked down by
wet tongues slurping me until
I melted in to grass then ground
past that the tunnels you
promised a world at my disposal all bodies but none of their blood
I rain my tears on cold rock I watch
you wipe heaven from our
starry starry night with
but the smudge of a finger-tip.
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8. after being awakened yet again
Tetanus burns cold clumpsrolling off my neck:
you’re just carving up the dead.
Oh, okay so this is my awakening. You
say, “It hurts.”
You say, “breathe.” You say it
doesn’t hurt like I make it sound.
I am trying to channel the pressure
of my back in brick wall my knee
in a locked joint, I’m going nowhere fast.
Dainty slits in my cheeks and the skin
on my upper arm cry. You’ve centered
on shredding my blouse, nipple open
ripped fingered teeth squeeze,
“this is orgasmic shock” you tease.
They all sound like me, sunk like a
shopping cart, electric green from
the river.
I don’t ask if they closed their eyes. Flip
the television channel on that bleeds
the darkest Technicolor I can find.
The safety’s in my right hand, with the
pill bottle in my left, we rattle, all us
they sound like they really want to fall
down with a glass of water or smarties
in a tiny plastic candy jar. I can’t
unhinge my fingers from this remote control
I keep disappearing in pockets of wormholes
around these apartment walls.
I chose the second one you gave me: fair trade,
a moment of silence for
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a chance to use it when I woke up.
9. an epistle after the suicide
twins feel each other on the inside
of the other one I don’t really think we think about our siblings in the act of acting hot on skin two wet fingers too much steam in my two eyes to see much less you between two legs there was two of everything
except her and me I guess except maybe you were there too she saw you slammed shut so hard she’ll have two circles
bruises inside her knees and thighs
tomorrow
how could I resist the squirm?I bit throughand she flew open with the switchblade spring
I probably didn’t have to
have shown you how it’s done when I slide through evaporating
red smack ground people pulse by but brother count on we don’t stop every heartbeat
sure they shake in old alleyways but we’d neverget anywhere where we were trying to get so maybe I was thinking of you
a little bit right
before you
bled the
two of us dry
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10. still beside Poseidon
Slick finger slides along my lip black wet like your ocean.
I’m matted waves or floating tangles clogging my liquid lungs.
I’d kill to gnash.
I’m petrified: a statuette, eyes knocking against lids. My
mouth is metal, sloped and cold: ringing arcs open with a
craftsman’s curves and you in motion you
minnow-ed through my bloodstream marked my
heart: thin tin for skin around a blood-soaked
cloud. You win I’m
pinned like a sail to a mast: a yellow candle-flame bounces it
haunts us like a buoy that rocks on its own in the middle of
the night: I wait for the wind or the pierce of your fingers
combing through now fang-tipped curls.
11. Femme Fatale Falls Again
The metal was cold. So were my hands.
you shook violent, your hook hugged
my throat.
You were so nervous. You said it was
your first time. I wanted to comfort
to say something like: it doesn’t have to take long.
but you couldn’t look
me in the eyes: your own a sweated
mess of blushing damp curls. I thought
you really did love me. I’d been killing myself for so long I thought I could teach
you how to sculpt art from pain
or at least let you smash the statues with
axes or send arrows whirling across the
studio. Watch
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out for hearts like mine. I heard
air flap against blade, a metal sail warped
by the wind, the distance between us decreasing
you plunge on and forward. It did happenfaster than I thought it could. I think I thought
I wanted you to hesitate or
fail one attempt before you just sliced on by.
You don’t speak to me in dreams: I was the first
head mounted, and it too was a silver platter.
12. a morning after Perseus
Alone again I peel the scabs from my eyelids
taped shut with mascara and other adhesives
that might seal my eyes and
the salt: I’m learning to not let it fall
from my eyes. No one would know why
I cry when a heart implodes, there’s no debris.
No accident happened if you’re still standing, so
no one asks you to speak your heart until its
warm and dry. I say: You shook her head so
hard at that awful sky - I saw the rage that
creeped so easy from your blade. Up you slammedit through her neck, black spit hocked from
heart. The follicles hanging from manic
fingers looked like strings dripping plaster on
to cast. If I wear another color, will you see
I’m not the image reflecting from your eyes?
That bitch is dead, and you’re a necrophiliac.
Dim her eyes, bioluminescent moons wane into New
back to full again, and you’ve already forgotten
soft skin curves of my cheekbone, my lips dipped
into flesh in the dark. You forget tickling my neck with pilgrim’s fingers and hot breath to
administer touch before you even see it’s my face
you just wet with kisses, or my blood. I feel
detached from you.
Tomorrow that’ll have been the story I read
aloud to you. I’ll say: her heart fractured
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the fractures spread, feather to forked wings. Bruised
with callouses with hooves and horseshoes
it’s now another July 4th. We drink Miller
Lite; we grill out; I fling myself with every
horseshoe into toss. It kept clawing at her ribcage with
teeth that shutter sternum, shatter ribs. Charcoallooks like a head on or just a head of fire
like rotten lettuce or meteors
slung back into the sky: a Phoenix rises
again from firework ashes: burning the American
flag into night sky - it’s the only time you
need to fire up.
13. Ciris
I peer at war: a fight between you and
corpses braiding battlefields through
rosy opera glasses. Arms in hands
hold your swords tight as you pass into
the heart with a sword - punch that
smile sail it through the airway until
it lands in my hands like a boomerang.
I’m a thief waiting in your night: my soul
now looks like strands of your hair that
I snatched with shiny blades, love fingers.
14. So I’m a Ghost
I haven’t smiled in over or almost a year. My eyes hang heavy
upside down dehydrated from the filmy dam of tears
you try to never cry, but you never do. I think you think you
might recall seeing me as though I’d just smiled at you
first. You caught the flash of teeth, just bone: I was
see-through and purple-lipped. Like you I’m a fireworksdisplay of shooting up fire in sky holographically bending
on but it’s my nape. Your eyes hovered silent
paralyzed. Your finger in my mouth like a nipple
on a barren mom.
You’re announcement ripples the wind - rattles bones
I’m a virgin bride left unprotected by even her sacred blood.
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The rusty tips of metal jagged through my throat:
slices my heart into pinafores and finger foods at
the last dinner party. Both vocal cords and screams
are doubled into useless tubes that end sooner now. I
don’t need them for such a little death: I swallow or spit blood from the hole now on top of my throat.
The sobbing you wished to go away now still haunts
you in the night’s middle, and you can’t remember if
that’s my voice it swept back out
side with the trash in the morning.
Deep-fried grease sprays metal so hot it’s cold as the
saw bears down on the cord of spine bones. My heart
isn’t ever anything more than a muscle mostly its
carnage. I bore my breast and neck as one to become
two. This is the only way men like you know how toreproduce, or procreate the integers to calculate
which death I should of picked.
Hot and soft skin rises like bread, falling, floating
up there as I breathe bile out on an altar that only
listens to Achilles’ prayers. After the math, I’m tracked
as footprints on someone else’s floor: they forgot
to wipe me from their boots before treading corridors.
15. Colliding Moons
I shed moons like tears from my eyes
because there’s nothing better to do. They
are moons from other places. They are
concealed within a salty membrane. They
fall like change out of ripped pockets down
clanking against an empty street. They
crash into impact and shatter across
pavement. I’m crying moons like dotted
lines that mark the street out of an open car window. Jupiter and Saturn
are dimming by the minute as I lift the
reflection of light from a rock from the spotty
sky to fall unraveled at my feet
colliding with each other, piled deep.
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they were filled with Thermochromic Spirit.
Bound in spandicized cloth they
collected and soldered the dismembered
limbs of Christie Turlington into another
collage with paste and plastic wand.
Gelled and flattening on a page frayed
from paper tears, Christie’s wounds
were pressed scares that scalding glare
of magazine masked. These are the sources
of spells or prayers the preteens recited,
gazing into mirrors at glassy reflections
to produce thicker eyelashes, more black
and replace with silk thread for hair. Every
time a young girl learned to read
magazine headlines, Cristie resurrected in
spirit. She laid foundation to
set the number to 100 brushes ran through
hair. Exorcizing nightly cakes of product residue
that paralyze fairytale ringlets through time.
The preteen disciples to show faith
disciplined themselves through sit-ups
and ritualized leglifting meditationsslowly savored pre-counted chews
then generated lines, waiting to fan
their hands across cool porcelain rim
of a white toilet seat: purging their souls
along with breakfast in the fasting season.
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18. I could have missed that morning.
I was startled from dream at 5am
to black (eyes) eclipsing face. If I’d looked
a bit different, I could have seen you from a different angle:
your color on my pinhole eyes, but purple/orange
only burns a few
minutes that way after 5. After
that it’s gone again. But I don’t
remember that it was quite that way. My
eyes glazed over drinks we split the night before. I
nearly missed thinking you were beautiful, lying
just that way in bed. I nearly missed me
lying on the other side of you. If it hadn’t
been such a bright morning, I’d have known your
pupils dilate from the suns you see in dreams.
19. Always After the Rain
We wade through underwater rockbeds
after every next hurricane hightide
diminishes, waves collapse back
toward the brownsugar horizon where at
5:41am it was 63 degrees of sun
slips silent silent as the adhesive behind
a bicycle reflector tacked in streaks to the sky.
We don’t wake up
that early on the family annual vacations,
though. Instead we’re twinned insweatsuits and black and white checkered
slip on shoes. Keds riding up with damp rings
around the ankles. We’re twins, squatting
on patches of the moss slick that snap back
and forth under the surf’s topskin. We avoid
the curdled pockets of foam, fuzzing across
the well-oiled surface.
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How didn’t we know we’d end up like this?
that we’d always find us mining the debris -
you were sifting for sand-dollars or sets of
car-keys while I kept a lookout for sharks
teeth and shooting stars. We skipped broken shells, and you taught me to snap
my wrist, but I’d rather just watch
the shells tear up Atlantic’s thick
mud-colored froth.
Fossils and homes, even their teeth drop and pop into more
pieces and bubbles as they fall jagged
to the bottoms found only in deeper tide-pools.
20. the composition was a nightmare
i. the end:
I can’t ever remember if I fell in love with a woman or man that night.
We were all over each other, and we’d been watching ballerinas in the sheer
dark. The sex was memorable, but I think it was his lines
or the porno boiling across the room. I felt a bit too flushed to make
sense of it all. I think I admired the simplicity of his art:
he said it just worked better for both of us with me on top. It was the art
alone working on my heart.
Then it was intermission, or maybe we were just between paintings.
Did we even drink the wine? I have a ripped label from a wine bottle
shredded in the midst of frustration. I do have the red stain bleeding
off my skirt, and it’s a bit purple under my chin, too. It could’ve been
paint. Either way, I saw that fucking ballerina move. There’s blood
on the napkin when I dab my chin. It sure doesn’t taste like paint!
ii. the other end:
We may agree it’s best to disagree, and we say to each other, we’re justmaking an art that’s all each our own. Then he hit me with a flick of paint
on my tongue. Oil rings low around my lips. Okay fine.
I guess it is always going to be just the are that we’re after. I guess someone
just had to remind me it’s a mimic stroking along the canvas. But sometimes,
it just looks so real! Besides we all like to hang things on that empty wall:
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ballerinas lining mine - screwed in like lightning bugs behind their silver
screens. He calls it the wall. I call it a stage.
iii. i can’t find a beginning
I don’t have to see the props listed in that program to believe here when
she does really aim the gun. He screams next to me.
It’s only a pirouette.
Look.
That’s her finger pressing through the air.
That’s you. You scream next to me - it’s not my scream. I am no longer scared.
There, she licks and bites hard down on lip as she finds the hammer. She’ll die
if she doesn’t let go of the trigger. She ricochets out in clouds of bullets.
or balloons of paint splatter the wall.
Happily ever, Degas captures his subject before she collapses. Then heplays with his portrait after she relapses. At the end or in the beginning
he doesn’t know she learned to take that fall.
21. date night
I.
a rush of emerald air glitters with glass
falls - curtained they’re studs: cubes of car window
eyelids up-flap back into the shower down - they’re teethedlashes.
I look down from thigh - a pink triangle installs
from the driver’s side window - the rest is
the other side of the door.
I’m not looking for my head on the flip side of a television
screen - I don’t know any mirror tricks. This is a steering
wheel stamped on my sternum. Unlike you
think, my forehead isn’t purple with colored pens or purple ink. It’s blood underthe skin, bleeding down behind your face, like a water falls in your heart
II.
I lull off into sleep with a pen in hand watching Saturday night
movie specials. The tip drops
on a white cotton t-shirt. I wake up with breasts rouged by an unknown hand.
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III.
In my dreams, he sits down, ends the couch I drape
across, legs nudged delicate apart with rough slick fingers
no gloves shoved
between my thighs. Thumbs ride me hard, fast: I’m a control
tower for you, nippled
with uncountable buttons.
But you memorize
the steps inside
your fingers with speculums, power drills.
He’s wearing photocopies of the same ski mask
all over his now shingled head, memorable evening wear yes, but average eyes,
black or hazel. It’s hard to tell, he says, unless I take these: just
pieces detached with an unsanitary blade. a tiny samples rain from
drill bit. The sparks blind, the teeth deafen. A fetus falls like Adam
down to floor - aimed straight for the grave.
In dirt my breath thins, covers more ground but in tubes and ticking
spoonfuls of morphine to make the medicine go down.
22. mother’s day: a sonnet
I used to be somewhat of a ballerina:
suspended in flight, always adolescent,
I was defying gravity for a couple of seconds.
My mother decided when I was 4 that I needed
grace and discipline in a wooden studio,
the floor was a splintered and waxed trampoline.
By middle school, I’d started to understand my body
to be a winged mirage for the rebel scientists, who were
secretly adding and subtracting integers underground.
I tour jete-ed my body into a midflight twirl,knotting tendon string and cartilage
into a weapon aimed straight at inertia.
Suspended on ankles at 21, I grande battement-ed en cloche.
I echappe saute-ed from a Math student’s embrace.
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23. morning ritual observations
I. The county children started Catholic school this year: they tumble
down in sheets, tugging awkward at the ends of their uniforms.
These are the scavengers, retrieving tokens from between cobblestonesin the street. They even lift up the loose rocks, temporary tombs for lost
change. In anticipation, they reach inside the vaults
of what 53 Euro-cents can buy in candy they’ll suck and smack through class,
until reprimanded by a trash can and a ruler. On this cue, an orb of chorus
begins and ends with multicolors shattering between weak teeth.
II. I do remember spilling, depositing into stony slots that stole my balance
in the street last night. Between the down and black-green pebbles molding
in moist pockets, stitched right into the road. Wet with sweat and
blood, the money from the
places you’ve been, rescued by
kids in the morning hunt.
24. Holographic Porno
“I’m telling you stories. Trust me.” -Henri
That night before Thanksgiving, you transformed the entire
grid of city streets into our own private porn studio. I never pass upthe opportunity to tell people how it was the hottest night of sex I ever had.
Cameras lined every block just to catch your everybest angle. I’ve always
liked it dirty, swimming across those streets that used to be canals before the city bled them dry. Didn’t we make love through asphalt caked by stale beer, urine deposits. Slash my face with bare palm slap me again with
sharp knife edge you know everybody needs a good spanking and spanking just isn’t quite enough. I was a foreigner
on your street, lonely:
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you’d like for me to
never feel like I have to feel that lonely again.
I added fruit, apple cider, salt and mint
to a 1 1/2 quart saucepan this morning,following the recipe my fiance used
he said I added too much salt
but I don’t remember asking him
for his opinion.
I watched his clumsy fingers
loosen turkey breast, gently as
far back as possible, without
tearing skin. I spread fruitmixed over breast
meat he covered it up with skin.
He made sure the meat thermometer
wasn’t touching bone. I wrapped
it sort of tight in aluminum foil.
He baked that Thanksgiving Feast for
1 hour 55 minutes or until
the thermometer read 170, and
the juice isn’t any longer pink
when he cuts down through flesh.
I don’t pretend to know or care
what I’m doing in a kitchen. But I was
still smiling about you last night. I’ll
think of you every year on this day,
and the hottest night of sex I ever had.
25. a cathedral lit with candles
I light prayer candles at ever cathedral in Galway, I snap pictures
to show to my mother, proof that I did set foot inside of a church. I do
say a prayer for my grandmother, but I doubt it counts if you’re not
even Catholic. I’m mostly waiting for wax to dissolve from liquid form
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into the ancient air. I chew on wax and incense in my mouth, it’s hard
to pray when I don’t feel like it right this second. Guinness T-shirts stomping
across the annex floor, on top of the saints’ graves, buried further underground.
I listen to my own steps echo on mausoleum walls, I watch my prayer candle and
think if it’s left on all night, or extinguished by the socially awkward altar boys when they leave to go do their homework. I think of that extra Euro
now donated to a greater cause, and I wonder if lighter fluid would help me
get my money’s worth out of a purchased prayer.
I wonder what happens to the pennies, wished upon, then cast into baptismal
fount, distilled with holy water and copper.
26. The Mona Lisa is Held Up
I went to Paris and I went crazy when I went to
the Louvre. We walked hours and miles
of paintings and statues, and I kinda felt like
an asshole, because they all looked the same
to me. I almost cried, sorta like some Sunday mornings
when you’re at church and Jesus hops skips
and jumps right on in your heart. There were
tears shed that afternoon in the Louvre,
but they were for the sad canvas cornered behind an
ultraviolet shield: it was the Mona Lisa gunned down.
27. for invocations
The evolution of a heart beat inside a cavity of bones
and blood feels like revolutions of motion in which
it all centers around a shared axis: parallel paths that will never depart from two separate suns
as long as the stargazer watches her steps
more closely than the walker gazes at stars. My
thoughts retard into a natural line drawn in and if
at the end I do arrive at the point where I began,
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8/6/2019 Masters in Fine Almost: poetics of a deranged grad student. by Angie T. Jeffreys
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it’s a center like any other
in my heart. It’s only when the only motion in the room is stark silence
lamp-yellowed around the walls, and a heart cracks in two.
It’s to easy to forget that this is not how the muscle falls.
28. a purple heart is made
These aren’t camcorder-ed stories, shelved inside a home entertainment
center, cassette spines pressing each other, secure in their own
storage space. These are not anticipated,
no one points out the red light mounted against the sky.
No one mentions the camera already aimed with a mute dot
at my head. These are almost photographs of an emptied
street: almost snapshots of me, the lucky
one, rescued by a peripheral feed.
The camera continues to capture ghosts rounding identical minutes
like me, so the cycle only looks as though it’s beginning to end
again.
Moments broken down into the first
war, where I’d kill to have shed blood
instead of tears. I wonder
if you can see in those sad sisters’eyes the things that used to cross
their minds. I don’t recall what this artillery was before I welded
hearts into weapons, what I did with my hands before they
fired guns. I don’t remember not winning every war before it’d
started, or, calculating the launch of exploded shrapnel,
steady aimed with a sniper’s eye.
29. blink. Blink, bang!
Matt A. pinned my wrists together on the small of my back with one hand.
Mashed together, the bones grinded against each other, and I could only wince. I
think he might’ve said he’d rip out my arm from its socket if I didn’t shut up.
Chris R. was there, too, so close I could see his freckles swarming all over his
scrunched-up face. Chris circled me slow like a scavenger hawk, I’m gawna
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eeetchoo. Ain’t nuthin you can doooo. Now comes his fatal error: sucking in and
blowing a large, yellow chunk of snot right on to the skirt of my new, sky blue
sundress.
He laughed to hard he couldn’t help but blink. Blink, bang! My foot swung up
like nails to a horseshoe magnet and landed entirely on his crotch. I think that was the first time anybody’d actually called me a bitch, like they meant it at least.
I pitched a handful of gravel into his eyes. He looked like he was thinking about
retaliation, but he’d been operating this whole time under the mistaken
assumption that the only reason people don’t hit girls is because they cannot hit
back. This was just another day on my 3rd grade playground.
30. apocalypse missed
I think she missed an apocalypse she thinks I missed an apocalypse we both think it was there because something did make the bright
sky white she blinked because it was there or there was
a white sky made bright probably by something
I blinked and suddenly it glittered down glittered down and out
she blinked and it glittered down and out I blinked glitter shattered
everywhere she blinked and it shattered I blinked and she glittered
all over me the bright glittered down and out like ashes over the Atlantic
I shattered or blinked and I glittered like a time-bomb white cloud hiding
out blinking behind a bright sky shattered and I blinked out at the flarethat glittered down like ashes out over the Atlantic
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