Tonight it’s somebody’s birthday
or it’s nobody’s birthday or it’s the anniversary
of the third or fourth time we heard this song.
Some of us sit all night flipping through the binder
either because we don’t want to embarrass
ourselves tonight or because we are trying
to find The Song, one that we can sing well
but one that everyone
will join in on, too.
Someone sings a song we don’t know and we turn away
and talk shit but still feel happy for them.
For a moment we can become someone else.
What’s the difference between anyone
and an Elvis impersonator?
Us and acned tweens dancing in front of the TV,
Us and bloated men with toothpicks on the long truck ride home,
Us and manic single moms slicing carrots by the sink,
Us and horny middle schoolers sweating to “Stacy’s Mom.”
Maria’s singing “Gasolina” by Daddy Yankee
because it’s the only song they have in Spanish,
and also, weirdly, she likes it.
Hannah’s singing The Calling because finally, they’re in love.
Don got here early and has been practicing “Strange” by Patsy Cline all week.
Monica, who leads Drag Trivia, is drunk again and yelling at everybody.
Puloma knows all the words to “Careless Whisper” and doesn’t need to look at the screen.
No one likes Courtney but when she sings “Tears Dry on Their Own”
her hair flies behind her, her pink Doc Martens shine.
When Linda goes up everybody goes quiet
because she can actually sing.
For now, we are Jenny, Patsy, Daddy, Florence, Carly, Robyn, Mariah.
I do not sing Selena because she’s too on the nose.
It will always be now
and we can’t do anything about it.
It is now until it is another now,
shaking its head at now,
making deals with now,
turning past now because
it doesn’t recognize Now, anymore.
And we are always trying to find the right song.
What is the word for getting
someone to fall in love with us during karaoke?
We know that if somebody loves us,
if they really really love us,
they’re watching us and every bad thing that ever happened to us sing.
Everything is a regurgitation of something that once lived better.
We practice into our phones all week
and play back our own tiny little voices.
We channel the past through us and throw it at the Present,
which boogies, whether we want it to or not, into the future.
All of us are standing on the Present’s stage
as it hurtles upward,
how we stop feeling the jolt after a while, the rise,
how it slows down the more we sing,
how we keep looking down
as the words scroll up
because they won’t let us forget them.
Melissa thinks wanting
to be loved
is just wanting
to be watched
all the time.
She moves as if
she is always
on his
TV screen.
When he looks at her,
the beginning
of a song starts
to play. Somewhere,
a finger pushes a
tape in and a screen
starts to buzz.
This is a feeling
somebody has felt
before but she still
thinks it belongs to her.
She listens to the last
concert again, dances
to it alone in her room.