Lucy the Fuckdoll

There is a box on my porch / too wide to get my arms
around. / I shove it / upstairs. This box slaps / a reminder
of how fucking stupid / you are. I assume you forgot /
to cancel my birthday / present, so now I’ll have to thank
you / for mailing your heartbreak / straight to my front
door. Knife cuts / tape — reveals box within box — / reveals white box and
disembodied / torso. In hot pink / letters: Fuck Me Silly. / I panic / re-wrap t
he boxes / knowing you won’t notice, / your idiocy a blessing / for once. She
is entombed / on my table and I can’t / resist. I Google the torso:

She comes in two flavors. She is easy​
​to clean when you’re done fucking her
​NEVER say no holes. She won’t talk
​back like your last woman. You can
​hide her under your bed or in your
​closet. She is always down. Pleasure
​in her authentic feel, better than real
​pussy. You can flip her on her back
​& fuck her with no condom, no
​commitment, & no bullshit.

My brain spins red flags. / You live with your parents /
and which closet will you lock her in? / You made a separate Amazon
account / just for this purchase. / Tonight, Ruth Bader Ginsberg Guy will
moan, / his mouth between my legs, counting how many / times I cum. You /
spent $300 on a fuck toy / when you don’t have a job.

My phone buzzes. Your text:
I have a very important package
arriving today. Can you please
leave the box on the porch?

My Ex-Husband Ponders How He Can Live Without Me During Season 10, Episode 24 of Grey’s Anatomy

He posits this just as Cristina prepares to leave.
When she reminds Meredith that she —
not her dreamy, neurosurgeonwiththegoodhair husband —
is the sun, the nucleus of potential,
the brightest star, the possibility
of destruction. I had always seen myself
as Cristina, but in this metaphor, he has cast us
both as Meredith, blind to our own solar energy.

If he is the sun, then I am bioluminescent
plankton, aroused primarily by my own hand.
Then I am mold & fermenting yeast & mushrooms
sporing in a gloomy basement & a bat
colony — possibly vampiric — & anthrax
& crocodiles & voles & the entire plot of Blindness,
which he think was written by Julianne Moore.

If I am the sun, then he is deserts
and, suffocating in its own inferno.
Then he is my great-great-great Aunt Flora’s
thermostat, always set to 80. Then he is
the dust bowl & broccoli someone planted
next to concrete & newborn skin & all the times the moon
forgot it was August & a bloated lizard drowned in a resort pool.

            ​If we are both the sun, then we are imminent
​             drought. Dust devils masquerading as oases.

Meditations on the Lines “She Listens Like Spring, But She Talks Like June” from Drops of Jupiter by Train

Even a well-executed escape must end eventually
.​Red giants with painted lips orbit
solitude’s last chill: space between her ribs growing
​more luminous, more electric.

Who could have known that loss was a palpable thing: a cosmic scream​
or a shuttle that orbits an inhabited planet,
sends love notes to land, cutting-edge engine trembling. At the planet’s response,
​it sputters, becomes space dust.

Wonder: that sensation she’d almost forgotten,​
like how to curl your body into another body like a ringed
moon. When she looked at herself in the mirror, she heard​
agonizing silence, but saw star clusters. Said,

There is somewhere a firework pushing through
​black holes.
There is somewhere the galaxy
is not fractal. There is somewhere a nova​
discovering fire.

John Doe
Poet, Independent Writer
IN CONVERSATION WITH
Hillary Smith-Maddern