1 by Vanessa Willoughby
1988 |
i am an american cocktail
a repeat offender of generational suicidal tendencies. the hips were a gift from my mother the last name an ode to chains shipped across the ocean. i helped you string your skeletons you liked to hear the clanging to remember that you existed. i smoked my way into a glimmering summer sweating metallic fever like an animal determined to gnaw off its own leg. clumsy tongue heavy and lips pillow soft talking trash kissing with a teenager’s faith until we bruised blue and yellow, cheating death with the green-eyed monster. i was brown when you feared the sharpness of modernity i was black when you wanted to play a criminal. i was a trophy fuck top-shelf big game to bring home and splay across your blank walls. hungering for you with the pull of a teenager’s unpractical faith stayed awake while you sliced and diced and performed oral surgery. you and him and they are the same pretty boy Judas no matter the switch in mask or the difference in anxious fingers etching torture up your thigh and sex with the lights on for the first time. |
VANESSA WILLOUGHBY is a graduate of Emerson College and The New School. Her work has been featured on The Huffington Post, The Toast, The Nervous Breakdown, and Thought Catalog. She is the Prose Editor for Winter Tangerine Review and writes at www.my-strangefruit.tumblr.com. Tweet her @book_nerd212.
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