glitterature for the mobs
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5 by nicole steinberg

Picture
Image by Emily Present

Being Raped in a Bankrupt City
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.

eating the ordinary
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
#blessed
I want @Drake to murder my vagina.
—@amandabynes


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.


Why I Have to Be so Rude

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.


If I Can't Be Brain Damaged I Don't Want to Read

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


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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