Grafting

I loved a pianist once.
I loved his fingers.
I loved a poet in his monochromatic corner of the universe.
I loved a street sweeper and dined on vegetable soup from a can
and day-old biscotti while he had a cigarette,
and I played with the lighter and burned myself twice by accident and once on purpose.
I loved a banker, even when he bored me.
I loved a tour guide named Simon on the Amalfi Coast.
I loved a wizard, and he turned me into a fawn without a mouth,
decided he did not like me being so quiet, and turned me into a sperm whale;
My calls
and calls
and calls
were amplified by the barnacles and ulcers that littered the cannon of my mouth.
I fucked a man whose face I continue to hate.

The worst mistake I ever made was
taking an actor for a lover,
he showed me all that I could not have
and left me with nothing but a dime, half of a kiss, and a CD.
I still haven’t listened to it.

Did you know that on wool farms,
if a Mother’s lamb dies, they take the skin of the child,
and drape it over an orphaned lamb,
so the mother will take them in?
I hear that boys do this to themselves every day.

Eloise Langan (she/her) is a writer, artist, and student of theatre and film at Dartmouth College hoping to pursue a career in comedy writing. When she is not writing poetry, plays, or sketches, she passes the time obsessively annotating Joan Didion essays, looking up cool facts about whales, and sending recordings of her subpar guitar covers of Bob Dylan songs to her father.