Status Updates From [Milk and Filth (Camino del...

My parents can’t describe me. All they ever see is assimilation and coco-
nut. All they say is, “Why can’t you just build yourself a Trojan horse into
the big league?”

My first marriage killed itself, but it was my fault. We were playing house
and then I took the bag off my face, revealing Mina Loy in housewife-
drag.

Before I write poems, the laptop takes a pain killer.

The writing is not the catharsis. The decision to excavate is the
catharsis. The transformation from dreadfulness to art is the catharsis, but
the art is the art.

An agitator holds her sign up asking do you feel equal,
so you and your sisters deride her
because she’s so public about injustice, so
second-wave. Your sisters gather around
her with scorn and sully her earnest nature. It’s
thanks but no thanks. I can vote,
walk into the pharmacy for my Plan B, and wear
a chain wallet. One sister throws an apple
into the melee and the unfazed agitator bites it.

The Pope invents nihilism, and then Juliette is born.
She gets wrapped in gossamer, sent away,
then liberated through submission,
then cut, then spit, then subjected.
Bound to her excess by history,
we acquire the blood lease of her body
through her deference to utopian carnival
(our libido is constructed this way).

She tells them she plans to inter our dialect
into theirs, our divinity. She wants mongrel dictions
to add to her arsenal. She wants to be lord.

"I’ll be the one that teaches my children about
complicated people."

"I’m with you on dystopia, but not martyrdom."

"We can be so insensitive
with others’ losses when
they aren’t our losses."

"In this other one, I don’t ever
discover the compulsion
of verbal cunning."