The Bloodletting

        Historically, marketing emphasized the material qualities of a product—its specifications, functions, and practical benefits. Over time, however, advertising evolved toward the production of symbolic value, positioning commodities not merely as useful objects but as vehicles through which consumers might perform identity, autonomy, status, and self-actualization. The emergence of targeted advertising represents a further epistemological shift in the relationship between commerce and subjectivity. Rather than simply responding to preexisting desires, algorithmic advertising increasingly identifies, cultivates, and monetizes latent insecurities, rendering the individual both consumer and product within an ever-expanding digital marketplace of self-optimization. This essay seeks to interrogate the implications of this paradigm while situating the contemporary body as a contested site of neoliberal commodification.

Just kidding. 

I have been getting a lot of ads targeting my breast shape lately, and I'm unsure how "they" even know this information about me.

"They."

Who are they?

Big shrug.

Big money.

The Man.

They know far more about me than I know about them.

I have big ol' floppy tits. As my mother had before me, and her mother before her. And probably all the way back to my ancestors in Germany, hauling kegs of beer around a tavern—or so I imagine them.

Yet the internet knows this about me.

I looked at my photos on Instagram. They couldn't possibly have figured this out from my pictures. I generally point the camera at my face. I have never Googled my breast shape.

Why there are loads of breasts in this world. There are flatty-flats and roundy-rounds and perky-perks and lopsy-sides. A million kinds of tits for a million kinds of women, and they are all pretty. 

Including mine. 

And apparently the internet knows exactly what they look like.

Well, thanks to targeted ads, I have been informed that I have "teardrop boobs."

Until last week, I had never heard of this. But now, thank you, marketing executives, I know that "teardrop boobs" are not only what these—imagine I'm motioning to my chest—are called, but that they are apparently a terrible condition which can and should be addressed.

What I find most troubling about this recent influx of "fix your shit tits" ads is that last month, I took a few minutes each day to rub lotion lovingly onto my chest and, in my head, tell my breasts that they are beautiful and wonderful and that I love them.

Do you think my phone was listening to all that?

Listening to my daily tit affirmations?

Did they think I was like a little kid whispering to myself, "It's okay," because she felt ashamed—and not because I actually like the big ol' floppy flops of my matriarchal lineage?

Because now it is shoveling five kinds of bras, a chest binder, breast reduction surgery, breast lift surgery, a supplement to "drain toxins from the lymph nodes in breast tissue" made from some sort of deep-sea algae, and a dress that lifts the tits.

Oh, free consultation!

Fifteen percent off when you sign up for the newsletter!

Decreased sagging in just two weeks!

Never feel ashamed of your sad, sad teardrop boobs again!

So sad they're even called teardrops.

Aren't you crying yet, girlie?

Not yet, bruh.

The other day, I was in the bath, my floppies just floating and flopping, as they do, in the water. Swaying sweetly with the motion of the warm water. And they weren't teardrops at all. They were round little buoys, bouncing and playing like dolphins in the ocean. It was delightful. Press them down and they'd bob back up to the surface.

Hello! 

Hello!

Ahoy, matey!

Then I dried myself off and saw droplets of blood all over the tile floor. Then streaks of blood on my feet and calves. I leaned down to clean it up, and there was blood smeared all over my left breast—the slightly smaller one. I tried to clean it up and find the source, but as I did, it only seemed to get worse.

Finally, I found the tiny, minuscule nick on my thigh, just above my knee, from shaving.

How so much poured out of my body through such a small hole, I don't know.

But I dabbed a little toilet paper on it.

Stopped it up.

And as I cleaned the mess, I thought about how much of my DNA—those same little nucleotides that made my tits, and my mother's, and her mother's before her—was now still on the floor. 

Just traces, of course. 

Like a crime scene after the cleanup.

Just enough left behind to tell someone exactly who had been there.

Enough to break the whole case wide open.

Funny, isn't it?

How a detective can reconstruct a life from a drop of blood, while an algorithm seems determined to reconstruct an insecurity from a body.

I'm sure this week I'll get a billion ads for safety razors and creams and lotions and products to prevent nicks and get a closer, smoother shave. Maybe wax. Maybe Nair. Maybe some other product to address the terrible condition of growing hair like the ape I am instead of the mannequin I could become with enough money and enough time.

And you know what?

It didn't need fixing.

It never needed fixing.

A body with some miles on it.

 "The old pleasures were gone. They were but memories. Never could we recapture the great moments of the past. There was an insistent yearning to enjoy life as we once did and a heartbreaking obsession that some new miracle of control would enable us to do it. There was always one more attempt—and one more failure."

—Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous

I haven’t been inspired to write as of late. I wanted to, but nothing comes out. And there are these things that seem like they could weave into something coherent.

Like, for six days I’ve felt on the edge of my period: breasts ache, body bloated, acne, moody-bitchy-no-good-foul-mood, yet... nothing.

And I am flipping through my notes. Yes, because if I don’t write it down, I might forget it. Yes, I can live it, feel it in my body, it can hijack my life for almost half a month, but as the moon spins, I am stupid again. So, to the notes!

Maybe it’s diet, medication, stress. Or even just an off month, schedules off, summer heat. God knows it might even be my brain. You know what I’m talking about, like when your brain makes you sick by thinking about being sick.

But it could be menopause.

And I really need to take a step back and tell you vital context. I have never really feared growing old or “the change,” as women older and obviously less progressive than I called it when I was young.

At most, there was a brief time when I felt the need to decide if I was or was not going to have kids.

And in 2016, when I was 28, I went almost mad and actually was thinking I might. It lasted two months.

But I had so many other things to take care of and do, and it was on the back burner until finally I didn’t. I probably did not want kids.

After all, I put everything else in front of it.

A decade later, I decided I had feelings about it, complex feelings, but ultimately love my life as is.

So the idea of menopause and aging and not having kids doesn’t scare me.

I’m not even sure if scared is the right word. When I was 10, I used to put socks balled up under my shirt and pretend they were boobs. By 12, I had some and was excited, but then at 14, they were too big, too floppy, too cumbersome, and the outfits I could comfortably wear in public dwindled.

Repeat this with everything puberty. Period, excited, then it’s too much. Armpit hair, excited, then it is too much.

Till it more or less evened out and my body morphed slowly. Like erosion, like hair growing, so stealth and soft and quiet in the background, like gaining five pounds. It just happens.

It’s been gradual. I am a fish still in the bag, my temperature adjusting.

And now, what if it’s all wonky again? I will have to learn how to live and feel best in a new body again. Like an alien, I wake up—yet again in my short life—to find all the physical rules of my existence different. We were playing Uno, but now it’s poker—go fish!

And a woman I’ve never met in my life and probably won’t commented five years ago about over-the-counter progesterone cream, and now, six days into the sneaky little menses-who-cried-wolf no-show, I’m rubbing this hormone cream on my tits.

I guess this is what happens to women when all the crones are just shit-posting AI fake news on Facebook. If I had a daughter, I hope I would let her into everything I’m feeling and thinking right now.

She shouldn’t be flying into it blind.

Yes, all those women in my life, older women, elderly women, all those women, and I heard plenty of fear about menopause and so little of what it was actually like.

P.S. Tonight I microwaved nacho cheese in a “29 and holding” mug I thought was so funny and ironic when Mom gave it to me when I was 25.

Summer Solstice 2026

Awaken, child, for I know thee. I know your heart and the fears it harbors and the hopes it dares not name.

Summer Solstice was yesterday, and with so little night, so little dark, my subconscious wreaked havoc. Dreams on dreams, layers of dreams. Not fun dreams, surreal and whimsical adventures in which the boundaries and physics of life are drawn out to their elastic limit. Not even nightmares. It was as if my mind handed me all my fears on a silver platter. One night only. Tonight's chef's special.

While, now, hours after waking, I cannot recall every little bit, I will disclose the few I do remember, for they weigh heavy on me, like a recovered repressed memory that really would have been better to stay put in the trenches.

Like I am in the audience of a comedy show with some guy. Who is he? Random dream guy. As often is the case, a placeholder for any guy. For whatever reason, I am lying on my belly, and someone points out that I am bleeding through my pants. There is blood on my ass. So, of course, I go to the bathroom, which has a steeply sloped floor and weird automatic soap dispensers that are broken. Of course they are broken, and plastic tubes, like life support, are spurting slick soap onto the floor—heavily fragranced, chemical-sludged, colored goo. And I struggle to get to the bottom of the slope where the toilet resides. I struggle to get back to the top of the sloped floor, back to the door.

Sweet child, you have hidden from your own blood as though I had not woven it into you.

I return to my seat, which has now appeared (good and gracious Lord, thank you. I no longer lie on the floor on my belly; I sit in a chair!). But every male in the audience is in some state of undress. Some fully naked, tiny little micro dicks, shaved and on display, big fat guts hanging over swollen, red, angry testicles. Some are in boxers or briefs or undershirts. My male companion—the Any Guy U.S.A.—is in a wife-beater and boxers, just like my husband wears to bed.

I ask him what is up. And the only response was that the comedian on stage said it would be funny for all the guys to get naked, and it wouldn't be weird if they all did.

Beloved, how strange that you should stand clothed among the naked and still believe yourself exposed.

Next dream: I am standing in a pool that only comes to my waist, yet everyone else is under the water, swimming beneath the surface, close to me. Close to my legs, as if they are sneaking a peek. I think they are all men, but I'm unsure. At least all the bodies I can see swimming under the water are male and buff. Like bodybuilder buff, swimming so close to me. And all I can think about is my pubic hair probably peeking out the edge of my swimsuit, and that they are probably only under the water to gawk at the shame of what had naturally grown out of my body. The cursedness of womanhood that sprouted when I quit being just a little girl.

Daughter, you have mistaken becoming visible for becoming unsafe.

For some reason, my husband (not indescript Any Guy, my actual current husband) and I are staying with my friend Kim. And for some reason, he needs to get up before me, so he has requested that Kim wake him up, even though I am sleeping next to him. So she tiptoes into the room and wakes him up, and I just lie there, silent and still, but also awake and aware. And jealous and outraged and hurt. He has picked her over me. They tiptoe out of the room, and I spend much of the dream searching for them. I find her, and she says it's nothing, he just needed to be woken up. But I could have done it! Why, oh why, did he ask her?

Precious, every door you feared would close behind you has always opened toward me.

Naturally, with dream logic, we leap to the next scene, in which I am moving in for a year with a couple because this has led to my husband and me taking a year-long break from living together (this is what happens when you have someone other than your wife or your alarm clock wake you up). Naturally, my husband is helping me move in. Did I mention the woman of the couple is pregnant? Not a little pregnant—hugely pregnant, might pop out a kid any moment.

My husband and her husband are trying to unpack my stuff, but she and I are trying to stop them. You can't just throw my stuff in with theirs! We need a system. We need organization. She and I plead with the men. Get some decorum! For we both know I will move out in a year, so even as we are moving in, we are planning the moving out. We need to have a system in place to distinguish whose stuff is whose, to make it easier when, in 365 days, everything we are doing right now falls apart.

Rest now, little soul. I have watched you bleed, hide, compare, divide your home, and prepare your leaving before your arriving. Sleep.
 Even morning arrives without rehearsing itself.

banana bread

hovering close

world of consequences

for serious peril

The Architect of My Own Cross

I was today years old when I learned SSRIs can make your period super heavy and painfully biblical.

Perhaps you’re wondering how.

Well—after almost two years completely antidepressant-free, I started to suspect I might be a little down. Cue evidence that now feels underwhelming: I was bored at my new job (too much free time is its own kind of problem), frustrated that the economy and Trump have more say in our ability to move than our effort or finances, and we were crawling out of a long, dark winter.

In hindsight, maybe that wasn’t chemical. Maybe that was just… life.

Addendum: at one point, I also worried I was masturbating too much—which, historically, antidepressants solve by turning me into an asexual eunuch in a chastity belt.

So I started 12.5 mg of Zoloft. A quick Google will tell you that’s barely a dose. My body will tell you it’s still plenty.

I used to take 50 mg daily for years—seven, to be exact—then 100 for a year, then 150 for a few months before I finally tapered off two years ago. Every increase made me feel worse, not better. And every time I said that, the solution was the same: more, or different, or both.

Adjust. Increase. Repeat.

Anyway. It turns out there are things worse than being bored with your life, listless at work, and vaguely sad when it’s pitch black at 4 p.m.

For example: feeling like someone is repeatedly driving a knife straight into your gut until all you can do is cry and—literally, yes literally—throw up from the pain.

Did you know orgasms can lessen menstrual cramps? That regular orgasms can make periods lighter, easier, more manageable?

Three months ago, I was writing about how light mine had gotten. Maybe it was the masturbation, I thought.

Then my brain, in all its wisdom, decided: no, actually, you’re unwell. You just have too much time on your hands to fuck off. Literally. 

So I took a pill that killed the desire to do the one thing that helped—

and replaced it with something that makes it worse.

I am the architect of my own stupid cross to bear.

I went into the woods, picked the tree, hacked it down myself. Dragged it home. Carved the cross. Hammered in the nails.

And now here I am, two oxycodone and a swig of Pepto-Bismol deep, while my husband paces and asks if we should go to the ER, and I’m like, “It’s natural—what the fuck are they going to do?”

Watch me, the martyr, refusing even a sip of water like it means something.

But here’s the thing—

I haven’t cried at a single commercial for kids with AIDS.

So.

You know the SSRI is working.

Puerarchy

I turn to my blog because I know better than to turn to you with my unfiltered, raw thoughts—thoughts I probably won’t even believe or agree with tomorrow.

One day.

At 74, you get one day to throw a pity party, watch Charlton Heston movies back to back, and wander around the house quiet, sullen, and not eating. I concede that. But the pity party has to end tomorrow.

You know, if I tried to throw a tantrum all day, you’d read me the riot act. You’d tell me to act like an adult. Bitch, I’m half your age—take your own advice. I’m too nice.

Everyone who has ever said they were in love with me eventually treated me as a burden. I’m so sick of it, because you are actually getting the best version of me anyone has ever seen. I hold down a job. I don’t fight you. I don’t demean you. I do laundry and change the sheets every week. I make dinner almost every night. I clean. Yet it is still not enough. It has never been enough. It wasn’t enough for my first husband, who I did even less for, and it isn’t enough for you.

I’m so sick of the double standard—how the men in my life get to be ~ depressed ~ get to wallow in their own shit for a day or two or a week or a month, but me? Oh, jeez, if I shed one tear over something hurtful said to me, it must be my time of the month, because God forbid I have a stupid, measly, fucking human emotion like hurt.

You don’t love me like you used to. Then again, I don’t love you like I used to. I don’t know which is worse: people who give up, or people who won’t.

Oh, by tomorrow, after I’ve written it all out, taken a shower, slept, and started a new day, I’ll be all sympathetic. We all get down. We all are flawed. We are all human. We are all trying our best.

I probably will apologize again, even though I apologized multiple times today, and for what exactly, I couldn’t say.

Tomorrow morning, you’ll feel foolish. You’ll see how you went to bed at 4:30 p.m. and threw away a whole day we could have had together. You’ll see how I made dog food, did laundry, changed the sheets, cleaned the kitchen floor, and watered the garden while you were feeling sorry for yourself—for what?

And I’ll be grateful you made me mad enough to get that much done in one day.

It will continue—some grand pattern, some horrific tango—in which you feel more inferior and, each time you show it, I prove it.

Tomorrow, I will see you pilling the cat and crooning sweet things to her, and I’ll remember why I stay. I will think one bad day is nothing against months of good ones. I will realize that, deep down inside, I wanted to be a little shit all day too—I just channeled it into a shitty blog and stupid chores. I’ll see you sleeping with the innocent face of a baby. I’ll recall that you were not even eighteen when they handed you a gun and made you kill someone. I’ll catch the flicker of a boyish grin as you describe a motorcycle you once owned. Use the garage door I broke and you fixed.

I’ll somehow find a way. And so will you.

It’s okay to wake up angry and hate what you loved just yesterday. Write about it and then move on.

She has accepted that she probably needs to be on an antidepressant—at least for a little while. Not because there’s some chemical imbalance in her body, but because her life, as it stands, is depressing.

She doesn’t know what’s sadder: that her life is so painfully lonely, or that she knows it could be better and is unwilling to change. There’s a mountain on the other side. It isn’t insurmountable—it’s just not worth it. Would be at least a year till the dust settled. Maybe longer. Not worth the price. The effort. The time. The destruction. Not for her, when she made all the choices to be here and everyone else would pay for her to get out.

She has grown to hate marriage more than anything else in this world. She’s been married fifteen years to two men, so at this point she knows a little something about marriage—at least about hers. It is the closest thing she knows to a vampire draining the blood from your body until you die, then letting you come to. What’s worse is that you welcome it. You still worry if he’s happy, if he has enough, if dinner is right. Whatever you want, dear. Even as it drains you of your life force, exploiting every drop of love and compassion you carry, you only think of ways to give more.

Everything marriage claims to provide, it failed to provide for her. She was lonelier in marriage. She had less help and less support. Less touch, less compassion, less love. Even boyfriends—much as she loathed them—were willing to hold her, pat her head, hug her, kiss her… even if it was just in hopes of nutting. It was a means to an end for them, but the end was a worthwhile price for her to get the means.

Making out for an hour could do more for her than 6 months of therapy and 50 mg of whatever the doctor would prescribe. But it was a moot point when it wouldn't happen. Couldn't happen even if she begged.

Something about being legally and financially bound to her makes her repulsive. Why did they even propose to begin with? She fucking hates them for ever asking. She hates herself more for saying yes, for believing they would make good on the bullshit promises that babbled out of their lying mouths. That she had ever hoped she would somehow make this work.

It feels like divorce should be the answer, but then it feels like admitting she wasted a decade in this marriage. And she put in those ten years because she knew he was old and would die. He is still old. He will still die. And, selfishly, she wants to be legally bound to him when it happens, because she doesn’t want to struggle financially ever again. Not like before him. Surely she could pack her stupid need and want for passion and romance into a steel, soundproof box for a few more years—if only to be financially stable enough not to worry about money.

It’s Maslow’s hierarchy of needs twisted through a funhouse mirror. You have to fulfill the base needs first: the security of food, water, shelter, warmth—not just yesterday and today, but for a lifetime. Never holding your breath with worry as you swipe a debit card. Buying the five-dollar bread you like. Never waiting for payday. Never living in constant struggle. Not like her mother.

Yes, even Maslow says to take care of physiological needs before stupid fucking love-and-belonging needs. She tells herself she’s making the right choice.

It just hurts like a motherfucker right now.

Perhaps she just needs to take a warm bath.

Take a pill—something to smooth the edges, to correct what life itself won’t.

Drink a tea.

Read her horoscope.

It’s just the planets aligning weirdly, amplifying the depression today. Next week will be better. It’s written in the stars.

It's just one bad day.

It’s okay to wake up angry and hate what you loved just yesterday. Write about it and then move on.

Good Faith, Good Wife

“We can simplify life from this moment forth. There is only one path to walk, one decision to make in every instance, and all our burdens will be lifted, all our anxieties released. We can decide to act in good faith. We can be silent for a moment with ourselves and let our inner guide direct our behavior, our words, our thoughts.” 

    I am exactly one day older than Hilary Duff, whose new album came out today. It’s a little easier to be successful when your parents start your career before you even hit puberty. She has also been married twice. We are both remarried divorcees. Celebrities—they’re just like us! I suppose we can’t be successful at everything, even with a team of publicists and a stylist whose job is to make everything you do look intentional.

    Yesterday at work, during a phone call, I apologized for how long a task was taking. It wasn’t my delay. It was approvals. Endless, ceremonial approvals. I’ve worked for over a decade in universities—a Kafkaesque hellscape—and I have never seen more bureaucratic red tape, slower queues, or more ornamental back-and-forth than here.

    The accented woman’s voice on the line said, calmly, “I’m not surprised. You’ll have to manage your expectations. It’s very slow here. It won’t be like any other place you’ve worked before.”

    She said it the way my doctor suggests watching what I eat. Ma’am, I assure you, I see everything I eat. I have working eyes.

    Manage my expectations. I’ve heard that before—usually right before something deeply disappointing happens. I’m not sure how to manage my expectations any more than I already do. I expect nothing. I expect never to get what I want. I expect just barely enough to survive. I expect the future to be no better than today, but with more emails.

    I hold on to facts like there are women out there being beaten to death and at least that’s not me. Small facts. Administrative facts. Proof of life in the absence of hope. I cling to them like a string tied to a helium balloon.  I cling to them with the belief that if I grip tightly enough, double knot, they won’t slip away. I am white-knuckled.

    But maybe they’re right. Maybe I expect too much out of life. Maybe my expectations are wildly unrealistic—like hoping a committee will reach a decision before my uterus shrivels up and I am too old to achieve an orgasm.

    Apparently, I thrive in this environment. I spent years constructing routines, structure, guidelines, boundaries. I don’t regret it. I needed the bumpers. Without them, I bowled gutter ball after gutter ball. Chaos makes me dizzy and sick. When my grip loosens even a little, I spiral.

    But now my comfort zone has tightened into a straitjacket. There is no room to move forward, backward, left, or right. Fill out a form about it. Don’t worry—you’ll receive an automated email once it finishes review:

“Someday, you could be loved in a way you’ve never been loved before. But it’s a process. Please manage your expectations and have good faith it might happen before you die."

    You can’t remove it all in one night, tempting as that may be. There is no dramatic escape montage. No backpack, no train hopping, no jaunty folk song. Change happens centimeter by centimeter, hour by hour. The next right thing is baby steps—each one documented and filed.

    Running away with a little hobo sack tied to the end of a pole is a child’s dream. A cartoon solution. There’s no running away from yourself. Anywhere I’d go, I’d already be there—building another prison I’d learn to hate in a few years, complete with color-coded calendars, strong opinions about fonts, and aggressively important Post-it notes.

    Ultimately, it’s not my expectations that betray me, but the patterns I’ve repeated my whole life: the hope that some singular, external thing might arrive and fix everything at once. When really, it’s a slow, internal, multi-step process. Like waiting on twenty approvers so one small task can move forward. I apologize for the delay. Please bear with me another moment.

    Even Hilary Duff sings sad fucking songs and gets divorced.

    There’s no easy way out. No escaping humanity. Just micro-adjustments. Acting in good faith toward something better—whatever better turns out to be. Probably managed expectations. Possibly even less. Ideally, silence.

Be buried with an epitaph like, Beloved Wife.

Though Hilary Duff and I both know that would only apply to the second marriage.

Some Women are from Mars

If our president were a mother, would we still send our sons to war?

Can a father know the same kind of loss—

having never carried a child inside his body,

never birthed another human into being?

Then again, I may be naïve.

A woman who has borne a child is as likely to be bought as a man who has not.

Perhaps she is even more susceptible—

compelled to prove she is harder than a man,

that she has earned this seat.

Teary Eyed.

A list of things that made me tear up while I was on my period:

* The Salvation Army bell ringer saying “God bless you!” after my husband put $20 in the red can outside Walmart.

* How the Rockefeller Plaza tree was donated by a widow in memory of her husband, who always said the big tree in their front yard would be perfect in NYC. Now, not only does she no longer have her husband, she no longer has the big pine tree he loved either.

* The prospect of getting all the feral cats outside fixed before the end of the year.

* The fact that when I'm done with this Hunger Games book, I won't be able to read another till the author writes a new one....if she even does.

* My husband inventing the "Super" Peanut Butter cookie which is peanut butter cookie dough with peanut butter chips and ground peanuts. It's just so sweet how proud he was of it.

* Acne on my face at 38.

* A video of a little girl getting her face painted.

* When the Sheriff of Nottingham takes the single coin that was the bunny's birthday present in Disney's Robin Hood.

Forgive me, husband; I feel particularly sensitive and insecure tonight.

I’ve been bleeding Christ’s blood—
bright, red, healthy—
for a couple of days now.
Then why do I feel so bad?

A priest sprinkles my tears,
fresh, onto a baby’s head.
You’re forgiven now, son.
Go ahead—move on.

A fish tank full of zebrafish
gurgles as a little girl dreams
of becoming a marine biologist.
She’ll be landlocked for life.

I’m thirsty—been suckling dry
digital teats, scrolling through women
like a Rolodex. Too polished,
too shiny to be real.

I’m hungry for that emptiness—
a space, a foxhole, a womb.
Curl up and rest awhile;
sleep inside me.

Sometimes I’d like to try
to burn down this house,
but I wouldn’t be successful
at doing it or getting away with it.

So I stay here another night.

unfriendly.

[A man sits down next to a woman and points to the tattoo on her arm.]

Man: What’s that say?

[She looks down at her arm.]

Woman: It says, “It was a boundless place to me and silenced as the awful sea.”

It’s matching—with a friend. I testified in her father’s trial. Prison. He’s out now.

It’s from a poem by Emily Dickinson. It’s called “He Touched Me, So I Live to Know.”

Actually, like—none of Emily Dickinson’s poems have real titles. They’re just known by their first lines because she never named them.

Imagine that—so many creations unnamed. People just calling them by the first thing they ever said.

What if I were called by my first line?

Like, the first sentence that would tell the whole story of me.

What would that sentence be?"

[Pause. She looks back at him]

Maybe something like… I do not want to talk to you. Yes. You.

I do not want to talk about what’s on my body with you.

I wanted one evening without a single hint of you—and the likes of you.

I wanted a night to just exist, without bother.

Man: God, you’re such an unfriendly bitch.

Woman (yelling as he scampers off): AND THE IMAGE IS A LITTLE BOY FISHING—HUCKLEBERRY FINN STYLE!

[Another man enters, sits down next to her, and points to the tattoo on her arm.]

Man: What’s that say?

Wires Crossed

She confuses pity for love,
attention for affection,
intrigue for interest.
Approval feels like appreciation—
wires crossed,
a mouse in a maze for cheese.
Each turn a shock
until he learns to turn away.
Choice was an illusion;
escape, never real.

For her, touch feels like intimacy,
sadness looks like trust,
oversharing passes for care.
Bent past the bend,
she sees the world inverted.
She thought she was an anchor—
steady on the ocean floor—
but she’s a buoy instead,
tethered by the very weight
she mistook for grounding,
bobbing in violet calm,
back and forth
to the rhythm of waves
that command her.

None of this is news,
not to her.
She’s felt it daily,
for years.
The only surprise might be:
girl, I fucking know.

turn turn turn

Neither of Us Will Die of Thirst

She says,
“I’m heartbroken, but I understand. I support you.”

I tell her,
“I’m not dying—just leaving for a new job,
moving out of state.”
But we both know it is a kind of death.

For a while we’ll trade memes,
send a message here and there.
Then the conversations will thin,
shriveling into a quick heart
on a post,
a comment when we happen to have time—
between jobs and children,
husbands and doctor’s appointments.

I never meant to break her heart.
But then,
harm is rarely deliberate.

My husband never meant to kill the rabbit.
He only closed the shed door without thinking.
There was straw enough for a couple of days.
We know because of the mess we cleaned.
Thirst finished what thoughtlessness began.

I know so little about my own future,
but dying of dehydration
in a locked shed
seems unlikely.
Perhaps the years ahead
are not so terrifying after all.

Let us double-check the sheds,
leave no doors closed without care.
No more small creatures
will perish at our hands.

I remind myself:
it is only a job.
In a month,
someone she likes even better
will be sitting in my chair.
In two,
I’ll have a new work-friend,
an inside joke she won’t know.

Neither of us will die of thirst.

We’ll be okay, love.
We are not small rabbits
forgotten in the dark.
We are grown women meant to survive.

can i be like Sunday?

do you think God tires?
sighs—wants a last drag of a cigarette—
as requests pile in:

protect me, help me, watch over me;
take care of this, take care of that.
even “where are my keys?”—
people pray for their car keys.

imagine billions of wants landing daily—
she must be exhausted. why do i feel
dried, cakey, used, with only a handful of tasks?
unlike God, i’ll die and never again
hear an ask.

i don’t so much fear dying
as i fear living on.
even God took Sunday—
one day off from the mess she made.

no flinch

plant her in the shale mountain,
drown her in the black river.
a purebred is prized,
but a beaten mutt obeys—

till marrow runs dry,
till acid hollows the gut.
she would obey too.