mosquitoes

golden rule

I believe in the Golden Rule,
but only if you go first—
treat me the way you want
to be treated before
I do a damn thing.

Burn Out

Can drinking a gallon of sweet tea be self-care? The answer might surprise you.

Actually, a lot of things can be good for you, on the right day, if you don’t look at them too closely.

Like screaming motherfucker in your car over and over.

Killing a housefly with your bare hand.

Reading a letter from a friend.

Deleting a distracting app from your phone.

Telling a coworker, for the second time this week, that the meetings are killing you.

Cutting the sleeves off a T-shirt from a place you haven’t worked at in four years.

Because maybe you’re a cutoff-sleeve tank gal now, but there’s only one way to know, and that’s to try.

Or deciding tonight is a hot-dog night and your husband can adjust.

Or not starting a fight by saying, “Just a reminder: you can cook too.”

Sometimes self-care is swallowing the mean little sentence whole.

Because he can,

and he could,

and he sometimes does.

Letting inside thoughts stay inside. Not airing every feeling the second it arrives. Trying anger or disgust on in different sizes before committing to one, if at all.

There are a million ways to keep yourself from catching fire and not burning out.

Might as well try them all.

Mistaken for Play

A reminder: we can chase dragons

without needles; disappear

into holes once mistaken for play.

’Twas neither fun nor game today.

That version of me still lives

behind the Ethan Allen sofa

without a cushion cover,

twelve years old and capable, briefly,

of empathy, sympathy, kinship—

god-awful hours in digital depths

we are warned of yet never heed.

God damn how that spirit gripped my wrist,

wrestled me to the dirty floor, dog hair

matted into the shag, and as an adult

I can still be there

when everyone else is dead.

Totally Cooked.

Do you think in 1797, when early feminist icon Mary Wollstonecraft and journalist William Godwin welcomed their child into the world, they thought, yeah, look at this ultimate nepo baby?

Then, when their beautiful child Mary married Percy Bysshe Shelley, major English Romantic poet, were they pleased because their grandchildren would be the ultimate, ultimate, major, major nepo babies?

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, essentially inventing science fiction after Lord Byron—another giant of the Romantic movement—dared a group of friends to each write a ghost story.

But Google’s AI summary of other people’s questions says this is all just nepo baby shit.

I suppose no matter what you do, who you know, or how you live, you’ll never control how people interpret it. 

Eventually every complicated life gets flattened into discourse.

You might as well like yourself; just consider all the time you are going to spend with you.

flexi-sexual

Want to be high all the time,

Cherry sucker in my mouth,

Poppin’ out with that wet, loud

Smack, like swatting the nose

Of a bad dog. A downward dog,

Ass up in the air, invitation to make

A happy baby, legs up, misbehavin’,

Breathing that fire breath,

Kiss lips stained red, sticky-sweet with cherry flavor,

a 99-cent cherry sucker

I was sucking and sucking, my cheeks hollow,

Hallowed as the Lord’s name, which I have said

More than once.