BY LAUREN BRAZEAL
TRANSMITTED VIA FACSIMILE
RE: Los Angeles County case #24789. Letter was balled up and tied to a padlock, found thrown through the southern-most window at Love-Hewitt estate. Status: Unsolved
Dear Jenny,
If I had real access
to the internet I'd follow and unfollow and refollow you
on twitter, proving how relentless I can be; and
I'd unfriend you every night
on facebook
so you'd wake up
every corresponding morning
to my sweet smile
broadening your friend requests.
I'd celebrate each homecoming as though it was my first.
Oh Jen, you'd ache
and love and keep
my slender hands wrist-deep inside you, cradling
your weaker structures. Forget forever
how us girls evolved to cake
foundation on unsightly ruptures. Never beg
for mercy from a man again;
curl your toes for my forgiving tongue instead and crack
a little extra space
between those legs.
I'd rip you
from that pretty red Moschino dress,
and hook your thorax on a pin to keep you
splayed, and still, and posed for action;
like a vulva-colored lady praying
mantis— I'llshow you other flower-mimic
predators we mutually
relate to if you let me in
to this big terra-cotta
house of yours. What did it cost you?
I bet, combined,
our scars would trace God's very spine.
It makes me sick how pitch
perfectly alike we are: both of us women
—teenyboppers really—
making origami of our sex
to serve a world drunk,
guzzling fragility.
Though you're the one they think about
when they're settling for me.
You stuck-up bitch I'd love
to show you how it feels
to withstand hypodermic teeth;
be overlooked, replaceable,
dangling just inside the serpent's reach. Jenny,
stay the hell away from Fendi.
Avoid the bench I've claimed
as my new country. Don't play with me
down in the dirt or you'll find shovelfuls
of pinworms up your skirt.
We're not lover/twins, Love-Hewett,
not even friends.
But I could be the orphan that you chose.
We'd laugh and eat together, like on the show.
—On set you'll share vacation pics of us
together on your phone.
I want to hear you say it:
without her I'd just be alone.
In her past, Lauren Brazeal has been a homeless gutter-punk, a resident of Ecuador's Amazon jungle, a maid, a surfer chick, and a custom aquarium designer. A graduate of Bennington's MFA program in writing and literature, her work has appeared widely online and in print in such journals as DIAGRAM, tNY's Electric Encyclopedia of Experimental Literature, Heavy Feather Review and on Verse Daily. Her debut chapbook of poems, Zoo for Well-Groomed Eaters, is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press in the spring of 2016. Her second chapbook, Exuviae, a collection of sonnets dressed in prose, will also appear April 2016 from Horse Less Press.