^{Answers crowdsourced from the author’s Instagram. Italics denote direct quotes.}

Absent parent(s) 

and the man who made me 

mistrust every man after. 

I haven’t earned it yet—

what is love if not a salary? 

The sweet treat we get 

for being demure.

It feels too selfish,

too vulgar, unladylike 

to gorge myself

on the moist cake of it. 

I’ve got bad credit, 

a prettier sibling, a rank 

history of mistakes,

each one more foul 

than the last. The timing

was all wrong. 

The timing was right 

but I was afraid 

of losing it.

I am disorganized.

My brain is broken, 

and it was stuck on something 

I thought was love.

I’ve spit out it before

just to prove that I can.

I believe I am ugly.

and in the end, 

it’s just easier this way,

familiar as a callous, 

tongued over like 

a cracked tooth:

suffering feels cleaner, 

because if I start to believe

I actually deserve love,

I’d have to find 

unacceptable all 

those incapable of 

giving it.

I now replace desire 

with meaning. 

Instead of saying, I want you, I say, 

there is meaning between us.

Meaning can swim, has taken lessons from the river 

of itself. Desire is air. One puncture 

above a black lake and she lies flat.

I now replace intensity with meaning.

One is a black hole of boundless appetite, a false womb,

another is a sentence.

My therapist says children need a “father” for language 

and a “mother” for everything else.

She doesn’t get that it’s all language. There is no else. 

Else is a fiction of life, and a fact of death.

That night, we don’t touch. 

We ruin nothing. 

We get bagels in the morning before you leave on a train, 

and I smoke a skinny cigarette and think 

I look glam, like an Italian diva.

You make a joke at my expense, which is not a joke, really, 

but a way to say I know you. 

I don’t feed on you. Instead, I watch you 

like a faraway tree. 

Desire loves the what if, the if only, the maybe in another lifetime. 

She loves a parallel universe. Or seven. 

Meaning knows its minerals,

knows which volcanic magma belongs 

to which volcanic fleet.

Knows the earth has parents. That a person is raised. 

It’s the real flirtation, to say, you are not a meal. 

To say, I want you 

to last.