You sit down in a small room around a conference table with sixteen strangers. One of those strangers will decide how your artistic talent translates to a grade point average. You are a Creative Writing major because you didn’t know what else you wanted to do with your life. You’re a graduating senior and you wish you’d picked something that ended in Ology instead. You will spend almost three hours in the late afternoon here once a week until you graduate. You will be tired, hungry, bored, and foxholed.
“Two Cs in a K” April 30, 2009
Two Cs in a K
i burned your
cookies and made
your cake
fall
after I scrubbed
myself with a
Brillo pad and
Comet
i licked your
toilet bowl until
it seemed perfectly
new
on hands and
knees like
a nude maid, i await your
bread
Second Draft, “Butterface-of-the-Month Club” April 7, 2009
“Butterface-of-the-Month Club”
She drove past his driveway four times, slower each time. Finally, with one last glance at her crumpled Mapquest printout, she pulled in and parked rather far away from his expensive car. She wasn’t sure what brand it was because it had a symbol instead of a name tramp-stamped onto its bumper. She wasn’t good with cars. She didn’t know their brands, she didn’t know how to change a tire, and she didn’t think she was a very good driver. But she could still tell that his was nice. Like his house. Not ostentatiously impressive, but obviously expensive and much better than anything she could ever hope to have.
He opened the door as she got out of the car. She didn’t like that. She had imagined walking up, lifting her hand, knocking or ringing a doorbell. She had imagined a pause in between the time that she arrived at the door and the time that she announced her presence, a pause in which she’d have one last chance to reconsider, to drive home and then masturbate and then watch Jay Leno and then go to sleep feeling okay. Not great, but okay.
