Call Me Baby

My mother says

“I was having fun,

I was dating these men and then I’d get bored and yeah

They called me a whore, but I’d drop them”

We are in conversation about my decision to break things off with my boyfriend who is

thirty-seven

And I have never felt so connected with my lineage,

This pilgrimage of lovers,

I was a dating app crusader, playing with fire,

Eating men alive in the pulsating summer,

Trying to forget the seam ripper who shared a name with sorrow and who taught me

how to talk about the things I wanted but only in the harsh afterlife of consequences -

I am a slut in a biblical sense

I refer to him in past tense because he flies like a bug into my contact lens and I have to

kill him off like an opera wench -

The girl always ends up dead

(Haven’t you read “Of Mice and Men”?)

I’m a bitch with no name,

My fame lies in the body that distracts your father in the hallway,

He always wants to hug me,

He’s hungry like he hasn’t ate in seven years and I’m the plate full of his favorite things,

Round like a pearl in a sea full of fishes,

This shit is ungodly like fresh lipstick kisses,

Like hickies you’re forbidden by your fraternity brethren,

Bending to your wishes because the shtick is

It’s still easier to play giver than man eater

It’s still easier to be a settler in a small pond’s dead winter

Making love to a warm sliver of a person,

Like the North side of Hawley mountain, he’s shady

For now, I’m gonna let him call me baby.