Museum Piece
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Now that your ship is ready, Susan, that hoop skirt sailing
down the aisle, a milk-white frigate of bound tits,

I must say congrats, you’re “of age,” he’s nice and all that,
but I in my blue satin sausage skin want to stand

up and rage because there’s been an end to courting
psychos by hitchhiking on Aurora, an end to splitting

one filched beer on the overpass in the dead of night.
Then, you smelled like a hundred hours of babysitting:

Pabulum and cannabis. You’d steal my homework in a snap.
You were unwholesome, Susan. When I throw rice today,

I want to throw firecrackers and globs of canned frosting.
I want to throw COREY’S SLUG AND SNAIL DEATH in honor

of the toxic lawns in our parents’ suburb. I want to jump up
during the ceremony, grab you and drag you back to our moral

vacuum, to watch your hair over and over like a blue
video: the way its long straight darkness swallows light.

But I shut up and grip my carnations. So this is how jinxed
card decks, blood feud bullets and lava-soaked cats end

up at the museum under glass. So we didn’t O.D. or get slashed,
and now it’s safe as school, it’s folded up like a gossip note,

pale, pocket-sized, nothing that’d blow you away, this past.