I'm furious with Ohio, furious the way you are with a child who's left the freezer open all night or with a politician who's turned some incalculably magical and vital and bunny-populated forest into a Giant Eagle or a Ross. I'm livid that every stranger in the grocery store has been transformed into a Diane Arbus photograph subject, everyone just an arrangement of congenital birth defects hauling shopping carts of store-brand mariana; I'm angry, too, at the ghosts of beautiful men on bicycles, these perfect husbands that dog my periphery until their mermaid-tattooed counterparts rear up and replace them. I want to burn down the Church, and That One Bar in Westlake Where I Saw Red Krayola Once, and every other basement where I nodded and heel-stomped my way through my gorgeous, gorgeous youth. It is her fault that I have no syntax diversity, her fault that I romanticize the dismantled roller coasters on 43 and certain unfortunate brands of beer and, you know, that guy and that guy and that other, even more unfortunate guy. And I will keep doing this, keep writing these verby, accusatory sentences and dreading the space between nightmare and waking when I think of her, forever awkward and broke and disappearing her, until I am sure that she was just a trick of the sub-cortex, that she was never that great or never there to start.
painting by alex cherry.
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