Uh. I am not a poet. I did, however, enroll in a poetry class at my local community college to keep myself from stagnating. The prof hated my guts until I turned in a sexually explicit poem about threesomes last week. She REALLY likes writing about sex. I know this because she often reads us her weird sex poems. Now we’re cool.

Here’s the poem that saved me from gaining a 50-year-old archenemy. You should not be reading it if you are related to me. TURN BACK RIGHT NOW, MOM. I’M SERIOUS.

We Three Kings

I showed her how to scratch him

while he lay face down in bed.

“Dig deep like this,” I said.

My nails waterfalled down his back,

leaving marks like

hot brands.

 

She tried,

squealed,

asked him if it hurt,

and then tried on the man waiting for her on the floor.

He didn’t like it.

He was basically a virgin,

unaware that words like

“ouch” and

“ew”

were turn-offs —

almost as ineffective as him sucking hard at her tits

like an infant with his dick out,

giving her watermelon bruises

that suggested domestic violence.

 

Five days later, I was in her bed,

my legs spread,

witnessing an optical illusion born of oral sex.

She looked headless.

I came in the cavity.

I had hoped it would feel anonymous,

like an experiment performed on two mannequins,

but we showered to John Mayer

and she washed my hair

and

 

she drove us to the city on Friday.

I crawled to the backseat

where he sat alone

on the ride home.

She said it was okay

so I unzipped him

and bobbed my head in his lap.

A man at the stoplight saw us,

opened his mouth,

and rolled his window down.

 

He addressed her:

“Are you the limo driver

or a friend?”

 

The light changed before she could say

“I’m one of three kings,

you perverted piece of shit.”

 

She gave him the finger

and turned onto I-90,

where he fucked me from behind,

30 sets of headlights in his eyes.

He came on my ass as she

lit another cigarette,

turned the music up,

and kept the windows down.

I was naked and cold.

When I told her so, she said,

“Too bad. My car reeks of jizz.”

 

That night, I fell asleep

with my head on her chest,

holding his hand

and

floating on frankincense.

 

Empath

The empath took me on a vision quest in her Evanston living room,

a printed yin-yang hanging above her head.

See yourself in a garden

with plants in full bloom.

There’s a woman in a white dress sitting on a bench.

Pose a question.

This woman is you.

I asked nothing,

but the woman who was me in the white then orange then blue then green

told me to stay away from the 40-year-old

man with fraternal twins

who appeared in my imagined sky

with darts in his eyes.

There’s time for one more question.

I asked nothing,

but my garden self held out a sheet of folded notebook paper

and I reached for it.

 

Glitch.

 

She was stiches, gauze, and missing teeth,

tentacles and blistered feet,

blacked out eyes,

orchids and geraniums,

bleeding lips and yellow skies,

rose petal rains

and pus and tendons and shattered legs.

She was paper and ink,

mute and screeching.

 

She was threatening me with visibility.

 

The clouds were collapsing and

my garden self was quivering,

she was choking.

Black eyes, vomit eyes, TV screen poltergeist.

I was afraid of her,

of myself,

of the garden,

and I ran from it,

leaving the flowers and the folded note and myself behind.

 

Start to bring your attention back to the room.

The empath smelled like lavender,

rose quartz,

and yin.

I told her my garden self glitched

and I ran.

 

I had seen my shadow.

 

The empath said I should have sat back on the bench,

untangled the vines,

and let myself bleed and choke and quiver and purge.

It’s time to stop living as a half-human

grasping a sheet of notebook paper,

still folded.

 

Midnight Morning Glory

Luke didn’t mean to

drop it.

He was tiny,

a toddler,

so it didn’t fall far.

Zach and me giggled,

picked it up,

tried to make it hop,

our fingers forcing fluff across the grass.

 

It was new, having recently bloomed

alongside black-eyed susans and

honeysuckle stolen from the garden

and chewed.

New things didn’t die.

Death was a fate saved for grandparents,

for annuals,

for broken pencils,

and the day after Christmas.

 

“I guess it fell asleep.”

 

Mom saw us standing over it

from the sunroom window,

ran outside,

looked down.

Fingers forcing fluff across

“oh my god.”

 

Zach and me sat at the piano,

banging on the keys.

We said it was a funeral song

and pretended to be sad,

but the tears we forced like fluff were forged.

Luke may have dropped it on its head

and broke its neck,

but we knew it wasn’t dead.

It had folded,

stiff paws over limp head,

like morning glory petals past midnight.