My session at noon

        I've been happy for the past two weeks, so I tell my therapist and we celebrate: "Hooray for the moment of peace and relative clarity that we have found!"

        The other day, I spent some unpleasant time in the bathroom with my face pressed against the cool tiles of the floor which are just so dirty and gross because I live with three other girls and we live in a shitty house that we won't clean. I later crawled to my bed and, holding a pillow to my stomach, I tried talking to my roommate.

        "Isn't it dispiriting to know that you will get food poisoning again in the future? Most likely."

        "Dis-whatening?" She's eating a bowl of cucumbers and vinegar. She's a model by the way.

        "Like...who needs that?"

        "I've never thought about it," she shrugs. With her half-shaven head. Perfect lips... damn her and her thigh gap.

        I tell this to my therapist, and she asks me what's really on my mind.

        "Nothing, really. It's weird and fantastic and suspicious that things aren't perfect and I can feel so good anyway. But it can't last." It can't last.

        "No, it can't," she agrees.

        "Thanks."

        "The sun is out," she mentions, perhaps returning to a possible diagnosis of seasonal depression. Not to discredit the seasonally depressed, but imagine if that were my problem! Please, let me have seasonal depression--I'll move to Phoenix or something.

        "Yeah, that can't last either. It's January."

        "...how does that make you feel?"

        It's the next day, and I still feel really good, but of course the sky is filling with the promise of a very grey storm, as we both knew.




        It won't last.

-rae

bored at the café on a slow monday night

It felt like somewhere else

for a moment,

glancing out the front door to see the

police sirens

            flashing

reminded me of neon lights and advertisements

flashing across a

massive wall of billboards—

New York City was good to me:

with the attractive and superior students

on campus at Columbia…

with the hipsters in Brooklyn,

hustling along and

dodging

each other

             as if they were

raindrops

across the window of a

   moving car…

as if none of these people were

in love with their own neighborhood

like I was.

And I was in love.

Even with the cool kids walking in front of me

puffing from their cigarettes

and blowing into my face,

coating my clothes and hair with

a layer of stink,

I was still in love.

            The next moment,

I turned the corner and was blinded by

Times Square.

My eyes already exhausted

and stinging

from the second-hand smoke,

it was too much for them to take in all the

the neon lights and advertisements

flashing across a

massive wall of billboards,

telling me what I need

and what I want.

And how could they know—?

            I recall all of this,

sitting outside the restaurant

on the curb,

the cold throbbing in my fingers

and my ears,

relieved to find that the

            flashing

police sirens were fading away.

I guess the lights hurt my eyes.

But maybe Manhattan’s billboards

have a better idea of what I need

and what I want

than I do myself.

-rae

New AMS {vs} 40 Creek

On her 5th drink,
And all she can think
is,
"Pour me another--"
Keep it together.

Make this one stiff,
She'll knock it back quick,
saying,
"Pour me another--"
Keep it together.

Keep it together...
If only it'd let her.

-rae