My ID is expired but maybe in the next life I’ll give my body to science.
My heart would’ve given a hopeful ballerina another forty years of hating herself
or a greedy politician another thirty years of covering himself up.
I walk down the street in a trench coat and sunglasses.
I scream when I put on the clothes.
I am slimy, raw, and pulsing.
I am a clit with the hood pushed back,
hitting the hot water in the shower.
I am a hangnail all over.
I am trying to act normal.
A child sees me slide my
MetroCard and gasps at my hand,
which is exposed like
a photo of two lovers caught in a seedy hotel room
or an ATM receipt outside the scene of a crime
or a reblogged Tumblr post from 2012 with racist epithets
or an essay found on a desktop about why Girls is actually a really good show.
It hurts to touch anything but maybe in a few days
all I will know is the hurt
and how it defines me.
I’ll crawl into the shape of the pain and
make my home there.
I’ll invite my friends over and they’ll make excuses to leave.
I’ll say, “It’s so good to see you, tell me all about California!”
Then I’ll go to touch them and they’ll flinch,
and they’ll feel ashamed that they flinch,
sad about this instinct to be afraid of me.
They’ll wash the pink goo that came from me off later, in
the bathrooms they keep tidy.
There’s a gust of wind and my hat blows off on the train’s platform.
My glasses, too. My trench coat blows against me, pathetically.
I see people steal glances and then look down in fear.
My lonely and obvious insides screaming.
The world hearing them but refusing to look up.
The playlist,
while well-meaning,
never got to the You
or it did but could only be played
backward with unintentional
shout-outs to Satan.
She knows what she must do.
In many ways, she has been
waiting for this her whole life
and so have we.
She has to go to hell now
and rescue the You from damnation,
and she must kill Selena
for the second time and retrieve
her skin.
But how to do that?
Better to put it off.
Procrastinate and go
to karaoke.