Dear Jo&mdash;


Good morning, I&rsquo;m shallow, sleepless, irrepressible. Does that endear me to you? 5 AM in March, wind smacks the skylight and hustles refuse over Flatbush like somebody&#39;s idea of a Zeitgeist. Hi it says time to nap but instead I&#39;m writing testaments of what and who I love&mdash;Mike is sleeping in my bed warm and furred like a cat with a beard and a tattoo sleeve, maybe he would resent that description, I can do no other, I&rsquo;m awake in another room achieving nothing in the second person singular, hello.


I do it for God and the television, with a promiscuous heart. I do it with prosthetics but &agrave; propos of anybody with an opinion about them: you are forbidden I want to say from evaluating my component parts, I&rsquo;m an atom, fuck a metonymy, fuck a catalogue. First I composed that sentence, then I felt myself get eyebanged by every guy with a beard on the subway platform, don&rsquo;t think, Jo, I didn&#39;t sometimes return the favour. Mike&rsquo;s gone now, who brought me Oreos and spooned while I dreamt my nipples turned into mice and died, it&rsquo;s spring and I&#39;ve been eyeing every aging wonder boy in the park plus his leanly pumping quads, their sprigs of magnificent hair, there&#39;s even crocuses, furious purple delicate violet contemptuous yellow, now I&rsquo;m on a train, hello.


My imaginative lusts riddle bullet holes in the side of the achievable. Have you ever wanted to get fucked by an abdomen, an armpit, a couple of peddling legs? My preferred position with Cam for instance letting him piledrive my face from above, I lie down on my bed like a failed porn actor, I can imagine the camera fixed on my dewy lined eyes the bottom half of my face obscured under a cock and a tremendous cupid&#39;s bow my cheeks sharp enough to be an architectural instrument as both of us try to remember our lines&mdash;but from this POV it&#39;s more like sex with a wiry frame and faded punk tattoos. Halfway into Jersey anyways and I&rsquo;m thinking about your letter, poem, whatever, &ldquo;All I Want by Joni Mitchell,&rdquo; where every paragraph begins I want. I is the letter&#39;s only person, want its only verb. It&#39;s Monday morning, what do I want? The flourishing of bees and grasses, never for anyone to pay rent, for the landlord to stop, for fuck&#39;s sake, spying on us, also a backyard, &ldquo;it all ... the whole world,&rdquo; to speak veritably about no appetite, never again authenticated, no more bad-faith prurience, my done taxes, a living wage for CUNY adjuncts, no moving apartments no falling to pieces, various men, if only they could finger, only some items impossible some are consequential, I fill up the tank and say goodnight and go, I could go on.


Patty Schemel writes in her memoir she joined Hole after &ldquo;Doll Parts&rdquo; was already cut but wrote a new drum line for the end and can still hear the more ambitious resonance of her snare in the final 16 bars or so sounding a hollow trench for Courtney&#39;s appetite I fake it so real I regularly dream I&#39;m in a band but of course can play no instrument instead I writhe on stage exacerbating attention my face flushing well really my ears and my own desperate hot need to be seen, dear Jo, you get me.


So what if I want to be embarrassed? Usually I feel like telling anybody your dreams feels like showing your ass to strangers, well, so what if they look at what&#39;s good for them. Last night dreamt of being flat, ran all night to the top of my own dimension, night before the dream about the mice, then I came into possession of an immense stash, pursued by dream police I hid my ketamine in the pastel candy shop of other pharmaceuticals&mdash;even in dreams I can purloin a letter!&mdash;but the cops in my head got wise to the trick, even to a daring cinematic escape down a garbage chute where a &ldquo;man with facial hair tries to recall my identity.&rdquo; By train through Jersey no spring here yet everything brown enclosed backyarded, and what have they done with my full stops, the Wawa in reach, I&#39;m Dunkin, I&#39;m somebody&#39;s sugary kid.


Call embarrassment less a discomfiting bug and more an intransigent object of megafixation, a hot flash an indisputable even if unconfirmed certainty of occupying somebody&#39;s attention despite themselves whether in vexation mockery or aimless arousal though maybe now my sense of shame a fruit rotted on the vine like for instance to trick myself back to sleep watch videos of anybody else eating things I can&#39;t or won&rsquo;t like soups and noodles, foods on a stick, McDonalds breakfasts, lunch meats, eggs fried into toast oh hell as in a letter from or season in a staycation in hell Good hell morning I haven&#39;t slept again I think I&#39;m amorous infrastructure Jo I think you&rsquo;re a lyricist of infatuation and I&rsquo;m a geographer of arousal. What, if any, is the relevant difference, how will we be graded, I&rsquo;m a

I Could Go On

Dear Connie&mdash;


The leisure you need to have sex, well, the leisure you need to write. It&#39;s leisure and everyone should have it; when everybody does, it won&#39;t be leisure anymore, but something else, like and also totally unlike a bed to sleep in.


Which is what think I mean when we say writing should be for everyone&mdash;but I don&rsquo;t speak for anybody, I&rsquo;m not the first to ask this question, neither the most nor the least leisured. It&rsquo;s not a game and nobody racks up points, though I&rsquo;ve got a bag of someone else&rsquo;s stars. Time passes, not metaphysically; I&rsquo;m clocking in and out, I sleep on the ride home, I do my best to cheat.


Skipping work is a tonic until you get busted for &ldquo;time theft&rdquo; by those who stole it from you first. I steal from train conglomerates, but who&#39;d convict me? A conductor? One walks by with tattoos, surely a friend in the wrong uniform. But actually he busts me over the clipped ticket, he doesn&rsquo;t buy the Bambi act. You can&rsquo;t trust a guy for his ink&mdash;a fantasy, Romantic as they go. Someday the pussy brigands will board the train and shake down the guards for ticket stubs and petty cash. They&rsquo;ll ride each other through the cars, rip every velcro strap, snap every button on every coat and liberate yuppies of their iPhones.


I&rsquo;ve never fucked in the bathrooms of regional rail. I&rsquo;ve never come hands-free. I&rsquo;m in love with the future tense only, and keep it on a high shelf or hanging from my rearview mirror. I swear it&rsquo;ll take down the highway too, and whatever&rsquo;s left will be for the rest of us.


Connie if it gets any colder my nipples&rsquo;ll get hard enough to slash through the front of my shirt. Men stare and run back to their wives. Maybe I&rsquo;ll write a novel and call it The Daddies, though this isn&rsquo;t strictly my type, whose appetites range too widely. For a while I borrowed my everything from Jacqueline Susann&rsquo;s Valley of the Dolls, milking its sometime mass appeal and limited imagination for a millennium of camp&mdash;back when I took benzos to fall asleep every night and watered down the burbs in a teacup of rye, a combo deal to stop your heart. When I go I&#39;ll go in the bath, I&rsquo;ll flood infrastructure with gorey suds.


In Susann&#39;s masterpiece of entertainment industry blues Anne Wells skids into the city out of a New England blizzard, her features ripe to score a millionnaire, and then she does. A wife&#39;s wife with barbituates on tap, she doesn&#39;t want them much till they skid back out of her Romantic grasp. Can I wrestle something more than Deco interiors out of this document? Sexually conservative, it&rsquo;s obsessed with fags and dykes, Radcliffe girls ripping up their flowerbeds by the root, the life and death of Vaudeville, getting your man to propose and lick you clean. As talentless stunner Jennifer North, Sharon Tate in the movie lilts all I know how to do is take off my clothes, and that feels about as right as pressure on the velveteen rope of a prostate.


Jennifer&rsquo;s the hapless con with good cheekbones who lies about her schoolgirl lesbian past and can&rsquo;t get a man to see past her top shelf. She goes out in a pop of melodrama, so I can&rsquo;t help feeling identified. Who&rsquo;s the Neely among us&mdash;the plain, dynamic self-saboteur with the good voice? Who&rsquo;s Anne? One of us who&rsquo;ll spill from grace onto an investment trampoline. I&rsquo;ll call that girl Money; I&rsquo;ll whisper her surly name over the phone.


Back to Sharon and what she knows how to do. The dads take them off for me, I think in profile I&rsquo;m probably pretty cute though I don&rsquo;t know what they see when they look at me&mdash;someone slight and accommodating. Men buy me things. In a parallel life it&rsquo;s chasers, and in both the casting director picks out an antagonist of wives, a wife herself. Do I mind it? I think I mind it.


That&#39;s not quite right, I want to interrupt myself. Have you ever hosted a jock? He purrs like it&rsquo;s his first time, though there he&#39; been on the apps and has the nudes to prove it. He&rsquo;s had a beer and then another, and then he offers you a bump, and by the time the drip hits&mdash;singeing, crappy and free&mdash;he&#39;s doing laps around you like about to score the latest in a line of trophies. I picked up one like that from the neighborhood, actually it wasn&rsquo;t such a bad time. Knotted somehow between a high and a comedown I looked out my window at the illuminated fronts of loan shops and fast food joints while he stretched my hole loose and swept past my dick like it wasn&#39;t there. Stuck on the soundstage for Little Shop of Horrors, a Lower East Side with a low and busted ceiling for a sky, did I match him grunt for plaintive grunt? Sure, but he smelt like every good thing.


He&#39;s a snowdrop in winter, liable to tear. Rip him up by

I Do My Best to Cheat

Dear Kay&mdash;


Men buy me things: uppers, cocktails, cab rides, or something more impressive. Who do I impress? A cheat, a villain and amateur coquette, I&rsquo;m writing in the shadow of a Wawa, a pair of withering cities, their gutted suburban corridor. It isn&rsquo;t nice and there&rsquo;s nothing coy about it&mdash;except me, your mercenary of the &rsquo;burbs, your sip hole, your nipple afficionado.


Have I made you blush? I&rsquo;m writing you perpetually in transit, shuffling somewhere, en plein air, a lollipop on SEPTA. I know what I look like, and what I&rsquo;d like to: a pantsed River Phoenix? Enough to tease in good lighting, but just at present my audience is the bridge signing TRENTON MAKES&mdash;THE WORLD TAKES into a sullen Jersey. Presenting here my reeking autobiography, nobody around to take a bite. Would you?


Well, what do men buy you? I want one of these extravagant types to pay my rent. I want another to show up regularly with a carful of groceries, right at the end of the month when it really matters. I want a third to nurse my immaculate asshole with the kind of attention you lavish on a gift.


Dear Kay. These letters will be famous after history has gone to sleep. Till then I&rsquo;ll dazzle with my nipples on the inside of a shirt, fulfilling to the genre what Liza and the Pet Shop Boys did to Losing My Mind&mdash;elaborate, sustain, convoke a synthed-up neurosis ballad, not going left, not going right. Now home, to push into a vacant 5 AM, and ruin every bit,


Turner


Sip Hole

Dear Kay&mdash;

&nbsp;


A letter in seven arguments.

&nbsp;


1. On Lies

&nbsp;


&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;In another poem a man compares me to pussy, and then it

&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;happens again. Rosario says straight men don&rsquo;t even like&nbsp;pussy,

&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;an attack so devastating I took it vicariously. Cause of death:

&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;personal correspondence. Do I care about straight men?

&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;The question is maybe misplaced.

&nbsp;


&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;Anyways they care about me. That coy interval between gays and

&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;trans women is good for a couple things, one of which is giving

&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;the lie to hetero protestations about themselves. I don&rsquo;t even

&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;believe them, culprits of their own desire, though as Cam says I

&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;think they believe themselves.

&nbsp;


&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;This thing is multiform, contingent, ambivalent and I call her my

&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;sex. Even if I make choices I still like everything. I like myself and

&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;you, but the hole we share accuses us both. I&rsquo;ll call it autofiction;

&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;on its head it accuses the world.

&nbsp;


2. On High School

&nbsp;


&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;VISITING HOURS ARE OVER FOR THE BLOODBATH, PLEASE

&nbsp;


3. On Being a Wife

&nbsp;


&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Q: Are you polymorphously perverse?

&nbsp;


&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; A: No, I am betrothed to the present.

&nbsp;


&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Consider the wife. Desperately Seeking Susan: Rosanna Arquette,

&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; wed to a jacuzzi and skimming the personals, rearranges the

&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; opposite side of the bridge. Anybody can be Madonna, so

&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; everybody&rsquo;s a wife in Fort Lee. Even the tubs dull the senses into a

&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; staycation. Arquette wants to be a club kid too, and briefly

&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; succeeds&mdash;at the precinct, in a gutted loft. Get into the groove and

&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; rot there, oh comely boh&egrave;mes! You&rsquo;ll even like it.

&nbsp;


&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; You say wife like style or you say wife like rifled through someone

&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; someone else&rsquo;s stocks or you say wife like wages. Wearing only

&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; animal&nbsp;print and plump in the right places. Dear Kay. Suspicious,

&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; you delayed wifery. Now you wear it like a polymer mink. Anybody

&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; can be a wife in the country like everybody&rsquo;s a piece in town.

&nbsp;


&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Q: Does everybody feel this way?

&nbsp;


&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; A: I suspect they do, the fuckers

&nbsp;


4. On Joie de Vivre



&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;It comes out of me like ohhhhhhhh

&nbsp;


5. On Beauty

&nbsp;


&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&ldquo;By origin or not I am &lsquo;of&rsquo; the city until I can&rsquo;t be&mdash;a choice, as

&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;choices&nbsp;go, made within constraints, one of which is surely

&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;beauty.&rdquo; I&rsquo;m saying beauty like a person, not aesthetics like a

&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;grad student, though for my sins I&rsquo;m the persona of a grad

&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;student and I&rsquo;ve been one for long enough&nbsp;it feels like a condition.

&nbsp;


&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;You say aesthetics like style or you say aesthetics like a pretty face

&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;or you say aesthetics like a brand. Brecht says you can&rsquo;t write

&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;poems about trees when the woods are full of cops. An aesthete

&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;says you can&rsquo;t write poems about sex if the city&rsquo;s full of brands. Or:

&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;art has no vocation after 1991. Or:&nbsp;beauty is a fixing for the wealthy,

&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;a commons in a

Kay Gabriel

I Could Go On

I Do My Best to Cheat

Sip Hole

You Say Wife

Kay Gabriel

These Are a Few of My Favorite Jews

Beyond the Rented World

A Queen in Bucks County

I Could Go On

I Do My Best to Cheat

Sip Hole

You Say Wife