Scrub in Training, Fuckboy Wannabe
For Robert J. Smith (Not That Robert Smith )
Was I supposed to surrender my pussy to you
Upon hearing a clever Haiku?
The width of your wit couldn’t fill
The spaces between my teeth
Let alone any void I have
Begging to be crowded by any other
Sad Boy but you
Jealousy only looks good on poets
Who’ve touched me
I can count them on one hand
And fuck myself better than you ever could
With the other
Spreading rumors
Is no way to get me to spread my thighs
I am ruthless with my honesty
Like a jab to your gut
Truth ripples through screenshots
When you’re a millennial
It’s tricky to bend the truth
And trust me
I’m flexible
Ohio, Summer 2016, Sharing a Tent With Beth
Everyone is on acid and jumping off of ledges
I am too scared to do one of those things
I’ll never say which
But I can tell you that the bodies
Bobbing in the quarry make me nauseous
Like the smell of canned Dollar Store chicken
Or the thought of you leaving
Being attached to anything
Makes me want to cut everything into pieces
My lease
The bills
Your tongue
His poetry
Eavesdropping like I had something to learn
I heard
“Hey man, you just gotta treat it like
It’s something you’ve been doing your whole life.”
Avoidance
Pulls me close and tells me I’m pretty
So I fucked him
With Corporate America and the suburban
Baby Boomer’s bumper sticker protest of progress
Anything planted in certainty
Or anything uprooted in the name of
Change
Everyone is on ledges and jumping off of acid
Everyone is bored and eavesdropping
I am just like everyone
Scared
To rip my bones out and rearrange them
To peel back my flesh
And expose the only unsoiled parts of myself
It’s trendy to be dirty these days
Head bowed mumbled vows
Praise be unto Escapism
And the sins that beg me to be their home
America has a thing for zones: Comfort, End, and Kill
My brother used to promise me
if I played ‘Men’ with him
he would play Barbie with me
Playing ‘Men’ meant digging into a pile of plastic muscles
smashing their miniature bodies into each other
until we got bored of emulating WWE Monday Night Raw masculinity
forgot about Barbie
and starting fighting over the last blue sugar water drink
No one wanted the orange sugar water drink
and we liked the way our lips looked blue
We liked the way the sky looked blue
He liked the way cigarettes looked between his blue lips
Now, I don’t feel like a real poet because I don’t smoke cigarettes
He doesn’t feel like a real soldier because he goes to therapy
because he doesn’t like the way blue lips look in the desert
Sometimes he tells me that everything is still covered in sand—
That his daughter is covered in sand
That dinner tonight we are having sand
I asked him if he thought Norman Rockwell
would be proud of Colin Kaepernick
For taking a seat
While men like my brother still dream of the rocket’s red glare and the bombs bursting in air
While men like my brother
are built from steel beams
and have an anger like jet fuel
It’s okay to melt sometimes
It’s okay to sit sometimes
It’s okay to not believe in White Boy Democracy
Our Independence is written in blood
Our Rights are written blood
but not Black blood or Gay blood
Or period blood
White Boy blood
America’s homeboys sliced their hands open
with Tomahawks
and shook over Philadelphia
Shook over NYC
Shook their dicks after they took a piss on the graves
of participation trophies buried by bailouts
We are raising productive members of society here —
We are raising products here
Kids who won’t drink orange sugar water drinks
because orange doesn’t look enough like death
but orange methadone looks enough like living to their parents
The New York Times once had a story
about the way people in New York City die alone
Their bodies decompose before they are found and
Their belongings end up being auctioned off
I wonder if their apartments look like art galleries
If their sinks full of dishes look like masterpieces
I wonder if I can move America into a nice little loft
in one of the boroughs where we can all decay alone
together and our dirty laundry can be auctioned off
Again
Jennifer Skelton is a poet from Buffalo, NY. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in English from SUNY Buffalo State. The themes in her poetry include the comedies and tragedies of personal relationships – from Mother to Lover, from America to Japan and back again. Jennifer is a member of the Cringe Worthy Poets Collective. She has been a featured reader at Innisfree Poetry, Buffalo State College’s Rooftop Poetry Series, Queen City Gallery and Words on the Rocks. In her free time, you can find Jennifer hugging furry critters, trees and the occasional person.