1 by kayla wheeler
You Can't Sit with Us |
When my sister waved her iPhone in the air to show me
your new profile picture, I considered unblocking you so I could send a message asking if your eyebrows are just kidding. Maybe leave a postscript saying your boyfriend doesn’t really fit, but I could afford him so I brought him home, left the receipt crumpled at the bottom of my Fendi purse in case I needed to return or exchange him for a better size. PSS, you’re a less hot version of me, which isn’t to say you aren’t attractive, just less. Clearance wine at Walmart or some other superstore where people with elastic waist pants go to stock up on frozen dinners & thirty racks of Budweiser. You are your past better accessorized: artifacts of a fallen empire, ashes of acid wash and velvet, a flag you had the audacity to wrap yourself in a week after I did and call it vintage. Bitch. I tried to think of something more unforgivable, but had better things to do. Buff my nails. Get a blow-out. I won’t tell you this, but when I was counting all the ways you could get hit by a bus while crossing the street in your dumb knock-off Prada boots, I thought of that one year when winter came early, how your spine curled in my bed as if to confess its breakability (a secret girls like us could never keep), how the champagne became a door you tried to open as I slammed it shut, how the invitation-only party we were both trying to crash wasn’t on either side. |
KAYLA WHEELER is a New England based writer and performer. Her work has table danced at Electric Cereal, Potluck, The Bohemyth, and is forthcoming inWe Will Be Shelter, a poetry anthology from Write Bloody Publishing. She represented New Hampshire at the 2013 National Poetry Slam. Follow her @KaylaSlashHope or on Tumblr.
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