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Life is funny it’s never close
to what you think it’s going to be
—C, from the bookshop
I’ve got bad habits to kick,
like laughing,
and it’s another sad week to live
in the U fucking S where they’re fucking us over
again and my seventy-year-old coworker
is right, life is funny.
I chuckled when she lectured me out of the blue
about my reproductive rights. Sure thing, I said, ablaze
in an East Coast city. We were standing
near the history shelf where one in five book
spines were bright red.
Now I wear black
on the Fourth of July like Dad always did
to remind himself he wasn’t born in this country.
I spend the day thinking about gender trouble
and orcas and my fellow losers on bikes. Yikes, but I
likes it that way,
like it hot and like it hungry and
like it grammatically questionable. I like
saying stuff out loud just to hear the way it sounds
like a firework if I am loud enough.
I like it
simple braless ambiguous
and it’s still strange that people like me okay.
Like me better than when I acted straighter,
more like an
American because maybe
we’re sick of
red and sick of
white and scared of this kind of
loud