Snip Hansons from Teen Beat while debating
Taylor versus Zac so passionately a curl escapes
its barrette and your best friend tucks it behind
an ear before it catches on lip-gloss. Start a fight
so she’ll get picked up early, forgetting a lanyard
on the den’s yellow shag. Wander past beehives,
quiet for winter, into the pasture where a hayloft
gasps open. Bite nails bloody telling yourself how
stupid she is, the fence posts kicked for emphasis.
Eat slices of bread from the bag. Then, diary
on knee, scribble page after page of not a lesbian
before securing the lock, removing its toy key.
Luiza Flynn-Goodlett is the author of the forthcoming collection Look Alive, winner of the 2019 Cowles Poetry Book Prize from Southeast Missouri State University Press, along with six chapbooks, most recently Tender Age, winner of the 2019 Headmistress Press Charlotte Mew chapbook contest, and Shadow Box, winner of the 2019 Madhouse Press Editor’s Prize. Her poetry can be found in Third Coast, Pleiades, The Journal, Barrow Street and elsewhere. She serves as editor-in-chief of Foglifter and lives in sunny Oakland, California.
