THREADCOUNT

Safety Dreams

1
In this dream I have a full chest of hair: dark, greying tufts like my father’s, and nothing touches me. I look down at the thick mat over my breasts, gentle cups, more womanly than my mother’s small chest, and sigh relieved to be done being pretty. I am old enough to know pretty is a dressed up way of saying prey. I consider waxing but don’t. I put on a sundress and feel disgusting and powerful. And nobody smacks his lips at me as I walk to the grocery store. And nobody buys me a gin and tonic and touches my hand. Nobody looks.                                                                                      Nobody touches.

2
In this dream Mom is a big woman and holds me. I know it is a dream because she feels soft. Because I am crying and she says soft things. She says it’s okay that I can’t find a job, that I’ve done all the right things for this task, that it’s not my fault, this time, that there’s a bedroom waiting with clean sheets and a cup of juice, dinner at 6:30 PM, chicken and dumplings but no dumplings for Dad, too many carbs. And Dad’s watching the Lions’ Honolulu blue, and they aren’t lying down in defeat like all the seasons of my youth. And we don’t have to speak; it’s okay if I don’t know half the rules. The game keeps happening.

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Shitty Human Seeking Shittier Human

It’s all true. I am every witch you’ve drawn. I am witches you don’t know the smell of. My life is a spell for slaughtered hope. Come drink from my sweet stinky goblet. Come play in this kinky junkyard. No dog guards the burning mounds of cast off lives: here’s a festering of ex-boyfriends, all of them defective and underemployed but devoted to the cause of worshiping my career and legs. You could join them. My career is in the pile over there, the northwest pile. No, it’s got nothing to do with Kimye. It’s just the last real estate left for piling my bullshit. I hope you’ve enjoyed the tour. Please make yourself at home until I leave you shouting my name in a hellscape all your own.