by Emily Alexander
I hooked myself back to language
like a good girl. Because you wanted to
we stopped speaking. I peeled three layers
off a stranger and gave him head, thinking:
I do not want to give him head.
If I never had sex again would that mean I've wasted my life?
The buds on the backyard tree unfurl
their snappy green fists. I know
what comes next: summer, sentences. I thought
if I let it go how could the story hold,
but now I know that all true things are formless.
I think I’m too tired to be funny
much less gutsy. I dropped my best pair of black spandex
in the block between here and the laundromat.
I was too embarrassed to go back.
How we would have laughed
which I so often say these days. The East Village
woman following a strictly mauve dress code.
At first I liked when the chef called the chickpeas
harbingers of spring and then it got old.
______
Emily Alexander is from Idaho. Her poetry has been published in Narrative Magazine, Conduit, and the 2023 Best New Poets anthology, and she has written essays and criticism for The Rumpus, Write or Die, and Cleveland Review of Books. She works in restaurants and lives in Brooklyn.
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