poem: shinji kinnie

i have not yet managed to get up at 5 a.m., do a gratitude journal smoothie
bowl lift in matching sets with nike vans whatever cute shoes then listen to cupid’s
chokehold / breakfast in america then yoga podcast bitcoin. yes that’s right i’m
a finance bro, also a birthing person (that’s a fucking slur, i’m
a woman). yes that’s right i eat internet discourse for breakfast. i wake up hungover
in the same anime sex dreams, oh wait i’m writing poetry and am supposed
to be on the side of truth and beauty. hey keats get over here with you fucking
nightingale. i’m kidding i’m kidding they are in history i am on an internet blog this
is just my personal holdover from seventeen, the teenage liveblog rebellion i will eventually
(maybe?) delete for the sake of propriety. we all have to grow up. across the dinner table, he
says stop bringing your trauma into everything. and blaming people for it. and i have to say
i agree. stop with the normalization of daddy issues, it’s a fucking pandemic of the normalization
of poor father figures or no father figures or narcissistic sociopathic father figures
(that was mine he was in that last category). you wanna hear about the way my stepbrother’s face looked, the night the police came to pick us up from my father’s house? i still remember it. and the strange grey shadow on the stairs, the stairs looming up and slurping up my feet so that
by the time my mother retrieved us there was only two bloody stubs. hard to get up for the 5 a.m.
tiktok run with bloody stubs but you know *shrugs* i manage. wait ignore all that. ignore my
twitter handle. five a.m. and the screen has crawled into my eyelids and nested and is birthing
insomnia and self-diagnosed depression and ‘identities.’ my sheets always feel blue. there is
not enough figurative language in my poems my professor told me i need
a better sense of place. what about the streets at five in the morning that i never
see but i imagine the sunrise is like a cavetown song maybe talk to me or lemon boy.
the sunrise is like japan five-thousand telephone wires crossing a raw pink and there is that hum of possibility. the grass is wet and fresh and desperate the world is so open and wet i could fall into it, i could die and forgive myself — this time. he sits across from me at the dining room table and says, don’t normalize it. get a load of this trainwreck. the sun comes through the slanted window and hits him straight-on, he is being very masculine. i am running across the pavement with the fresh sun wet and dragging across my back. he is just my twitter mutual and i
am insane. shut your eyes and the world drops dead / i think i made you up in my head
(sylvia plath) i’ve had that poem memorized since highschool along with “daddy” make of that what
you will. he says stop with the discourse and go outside and touch grass, touch the fucking
grass. in my head we are copulating on the table but it is romantic, we are married, he touches
my cheek with his hand and brushes my hair back and kisses my forehead. the plates and knives crushed under my back. and that fucking sun is still going. and he wants me —
he wants me!