1 by kayla wheeler

Image by Emily Present

You Can't Sit with Us

When my sister waved her iPhone in the air to show me
your new profile picture, I considered unblocking you
so I could send a message asking if your eyebrows
are just kidding. Maybe leave a postscript saying
your boyfriend doesn’t really fit, but I could afford him
so I brought him home, left the receipt crumpled at the bottom
of my Fendi purse in case I needed to return or exchange him
for a better size. PSS, you’re a less hot version of me,
which isn’t to say you aren’t attractive, just less.
Clearance wine at Walmart or some other superstore
where people with elastic waist pants go to stock up
on frozen dinners & thirty racks of Budweiser.
You are your past better accessorized: artifacts of a fallen
empire, ashes of acid wash and velvet, a flag you had
the audacity to wrap yourself in a week after I did and
call it vintage. Bitch. I tried to think of something more
unforgivable, but had better things to do. Buff my nails.
Get a blow-out. I won’t tell you this, but when I was counting
all the ways you could get hit by a bus while crossing the street
in your dumb knock-off Prada boots, I thought of that one year
when winter came early, how your spine curled in my bed
as if to confess its breakability (a secret girls like us
could never keep), how the champagne became a door
you tried to open as I slammed it shut, how the invitation-only
party we were both trying to crash wasn’t on either side.

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KAYLA WHEELER is a New England based writer and performer. Her work has table danced at Electric Cereal, Potluck, The Bohemyth, and is forthcoming inWe Will Be Shelter, a poetry anthology from Write Bloody Publishing. She represented New Hampshire at the 2013 National Poetry Slam. Follow her @KaylaSlashHope or on Tumblr.