Oh my God, Jenny, you're such a mystery
You like money and making out both, which is wild.
Just straight-up nuts. You're asleep, almost as if
you were tired or something. Maybe tired from your lifestyle
of Doing It. Which is your job, Doing It, for money.
I wonder which one you're dreaming about
Look, I have a lot of other stuff on my mind, too, I just –
some nights I can't sleep and yes, one of the thoughts
that enters my head is: What if God were a swan and you had to fuck him?
And I can't apologize for that,
or won't.
Oh My God You Guys, I'm Fucking Thirty-Six Now
Thirty-Six
I Have To Like...Oh My God
I'm officially too old to love, I feel like
No one is even in love with me right now,
which is garbage,
okay some people are obviously but none of them count
SOME GUY, KEATS PROBABLY: my god, sir knight
what has happened to you?
you look like some sort of lake without sedges
a sedgeless lake
if such a thing can even be imagined
no sedges on you
a sedgeless man
NOT ACTUALLY A POEM but some extremely great science writing that the weather service still uses, it gets me so HET UP as I read it because I am like "YEAH those branches are gonna start swaying!!! oh heck oh heck here it comes! MORE WIND!"
Description on Land | Description at Sea
Calm: Smoke rises vertically. | Sea like a mirror.
I imagine Geach and Wallace in the lecture halls, in the libraries – the famous Radcliffe Camera at the Bodleian, maybe, not so different from the room where I read their work. They’re greedily soaking up Western literature. They’re searching for themselves, but they keep finding the same stupid story: a woman experiences a sliver of life, then kills herself because of a man.
Butterfly Pavilion I stand before the cocoons, waiting for a twitch in the shells, a crack revealing a colorful wing. There are none. The cocoons are pinned to cork boards, each dangling from its tip, ordered by species and country of origin. Some look like snails. Some look like tiny black bugs. Some are the green of the first leaves of spring. Nothing today. I turn to the butterflies around me, broken out of their…
Song of Herself 1 Is it cool if I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself, Like, just for a minute? Even though what I assume I would, like, never ask you to assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you, or even probably better because I don’t really know what I’m talking about. I know it’s sort of lazy of me, and I’m super sorry, but If it’s cool with you do you…
Run rabbit run. You. a defiant pulse of color on the whitewashed hallway— I think that I knew that you would leave eventually, and I think that it’s fitting that we would discard you silently and collect your traces like streamers the night after a sweaty school dance. Run rabbit run. in my head. you’re already walking away. Pointed nose, black hoodie you recede into a background of doormen and dog walkers and snow…
“Or when the moon was overhead Came two young lovers lately wed; ‘I am half sick of shadows,' said The Lady of Shalott.” –Alfred, Lord Tennyson
The ocean spills from my conch shell ears. I hear only my own sighing, as though I am still half-submerged—the last of the lily maids, a creature too destitute for a barge…
Please email all questions you would like poetry to answer via advice@the-toast.net, with “Spinster’s Almanac” in the subject line. Dear Spinster, I come from a small place where people grow big ambitions and leave, or furtively guard what they’re passionate about while getting on with the everyday business of work and family. I have ties that keep me here, and I don’t mind it so much. I make art on…