5 by nicole steinberg
Image by Emily Present
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Being Raped in a Bankrupt City |
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I could drop dead waiting for the weather
forecast, in love with listing places I'm unable to go. Ten o'clock and I morph back into the missing rhinestone, the torn control top. The shoe falls apart in my sequined palms. My phone fills with missed calls from someone desperate to speak despite being "unavailable." My mother warned me one day I'd wake up and my back would hurt and my teeth and ass would hurt. She boiled me franks for dinner. I jangled down St. James Street where the girl was assaulted, shielding my eyes from a powdered sugar storm. No one here would know but I have baby names picked out. My suitors shine like magic markers so I intend to use one. |
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eating the ordinary
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my eyes are as
big as my butt so I'm perfection ~ each adorable orifice an entrance to funnels of tight delight nilla wafer nails chic & paralyzed as I run from men ~ from the shuddery apex of a pouty ivory belly I telescope miraculous colonized bodies of women shucked to survive any urban tundra ~ endless harvest spent eating the very ordinary: fear, flaxseed & stoli blood a-swirl with fox fur reduced to idioms & culinary tricks ~ warmed by neon feathers I boil inside the hot tub of the future |
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#blessed
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I want @Drake to murder my vagina.
—@amandabynes |
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An honest yet ill-advised
tweet wakes the princess from her gold filigreed slumber. This universe reeks: hotboxed car parked in an empty strip mall in a simpleton town of crowing clowns drunk driving on fame & aspartame. She is lovely as a pulled pork taco, slipping past inviting hot pink lips smeared with sriracha. Her hell is designed by radio deejays who try to make us think, men & their indignant parade of endless poetry about pussy. This princess knows dick is the equivalent of fruit salad for dessert: sometimes refreshing, often disappointing. Knows that when it's good, it hurts like new hair extensions; sounds like the splendid steady deflation of a tattooed lung. |
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Why I Have to Be so Rude
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Because swagger, because all men
kneel in the church of the cowboy, wannabe woodsmen, even the allergic. My sob story goes something like this: my mother, my father, my mother, my mother, my mother, my mother, my father. My father. I can't write you a poem about barns or cornfields. Because the dirge I sing in the shower is about kickball, exile. Oatmeal gargoyle in size 14 khaki shorts versus Big Red and the school bus monsters, girl guts strung like party streamers from balloon-pink talons. Were the sneering men on the downtown A ever infants, wailing and waiting to be burped? To humanize is human but don’t you dare look up on this picked-clean island of mega rats and rarefied trees. Because boys with sweet curls will toss you into the mikvah. Bulbous teabag steeping in your own dark blood. Never trust a city that laughs at all your jokes. Hey, mister. Leave those clits alone. |
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If I Can't Be Brain Damaged I Don't Want to Read
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today I will buy an $8 smoothie & I will drink an $8 smoothie ~ forget to take my birth control ~ romanticize Italian futurism ~ deconstruct the dream in which dad confessed he kissed an army buddy crying over his eggs ~ ruminate on the fate of the junior high boy who said I’d probably be president & how instead I’m a childless motherless child down to my pink & white shredded wheat underwear ~ who was the most Coachella at Coachella? is a thing I just read ~ I was eleven once grinding to reggaeton at the bayside ymca ~ hella tight grip on thighs I’d been assigned to adore ~ who will protect me from lithium batteries ~ the arctic vortex ~ vocabulary words impossible to unlearn ~ let’s go to McDonald’s & grow back our baby fat ~ I think I do but I don’t understand what my friends are going through |
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NICOLE STEINBERG is the author of Getting Lucky (Spooky Girlfriend Press, 2013) and three chapbooks, most recently Undressing (dancing girl press, 2014) and Clever Little Gang, winner of the Furniture Press 4X4 Chapbook Award. Her work has been featured or reviewed in the New York Times, Newsweek, Bitch, Hyperallergic, and elsewhere. She's the founder of the EARSHOT reading series, based in Brooklyn, and she lives in Philadelphia.
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