Self-portrait as a Karen
Or, you know. In my Sybil Vane.
I made great plans to be bratty all week
but at least a divorcée in a whatever
apartment where I have already let
the coffee burn for myself to clean
after a change of mask and costume,
a salon confessional, a CfP. There’d have been
gloves and buttons involved
piles of shirts to come on
spontaneous or world-historical underboob
no teaching and minimal committee work
I mean it like a flood alert.
A paragon, like
I’d fuck me.
wide from this ledge
I’ve read all the wrong guys
my prose isn’t muscular even in
the flat or angled places where
you’d build a shelf which you say
is the nearest practice for writing you know next to
looking at Rothko
some months before you
jerked off in the bathroom of
the Acropolis Museum thinking about
I guess a Caryatid
or the burly kid pouring coffee, like
crying when you see a good
Rothko or dodging the right kind of traffic on a fifth date
say I know my Tom of Finland
too and that wasn’t even the first bathroom
well salut to your gay connecticut cabin though
maybe when you’re done up there we
can watch mascs with pillowy thighs do all
kinds of droll unshorn play and I’ll tenderly
finish off your taxes
Kay Gabriel is the author of Elegy Department Spring (BOAAT Press, 2017) and, with David W. Pritchard, Impropria Persona (Damask Press, 2017). She co-edits Vetch (vetchpoetry.org). Find her provocations on twitter at @unit01barbie.