(march 13th)

i’m pretty sure this is the same seat i sat in at the last reading. i am surrounded by friends and sitting directly in front the man i’ve been lusting after ever since i started writing here. on the floor near my feet is another graduate student, i’ve been crushing on her also--on her dapper, dainty ensembles, on her Tinkerbelle face. they’ve asked a bearded member of the mfa program to introduce the first poet. he breathes Appalachia into the room and is handsome, in a mining dwarf sort of way. a black beard softly peppered, face stoic and as charming as firewood. he has a small frame and compact ears. i feel ugly, exposed--i’m wearing far too much pink. my entire body is a blush.

 your name betrays you. you look like ‘the social network,’ a tiny, frat boy yuppie, ray-bans signaling the advent of academia. why do most white boy poets speak the same way? a little too stiff, swallowing rhythms whole, a little too loud--a little too patriarchal. your book is about the death of your mother. it doesn’t bother you that much anymore.

you just stopped caring.

but back to the man behind me. i hear him chuckling. i can feel his masculinity rumbling through my body in waves. i can feel him exhale out and right through me.

i cannot connect to your lily white tones; your colonizing decibels don’t register to my ears. occasionally, i look at the words as you speak them from the book in my friend’s hands. your voice tramples rhyme and consumes softness like a flame. you recite part of a piece from someone else as an epithet and i don’t think i care. you begin a piece with anaphora and AAVE. this entire poem has been done before. immediately you feel like you must get even louder, channeling Ginsberg, appropriating the night as you feel compelled to ‘howl.’

your father was a preacher and you read a piece about clumsily fingering a girl in the back pews. you taint sensuality with chapped lips. i’m a virgin, yet i’m sure i can speak sex more fluent than you.

didn’t your mother ever teach you to feel? try to vary your tones as you vary your diction. not all language deserves to feel the hammer of the patriarchy. some words crave to be suckled in the honey of your throat, some only want for release.

has no one ever taught you to be soft? you read as if it were a speech or a presentation for class. i know the routine well--glance down long enough to swallow your words, speak, but to all four corners. a real human could not have been able to handle making eye contact with everyone as you seemed to manage. i’m beginning to doubt your validity. we catch eyes a couple of times; i hope i am conveying my doubts through my eyes.