LIKE, COMMA, LIKE

I am the only Kay, there hasn't been another
I never ugly-cried
can't remember even feeling
at war with this bag of shit "hot" body
don't have problems eating crapping going
outside or stealing food or snacks
never wore eighty-two pounds of makeup
probably never wore a single
pound of makeup at any o'clock
I teach two or three quiescent
classes and I love Candy
Darling measurably in the P.M.
never ate somebody's dinner
never burnt the toast

 
 


 

LIKE, COMMA, LIKE

I am the only Kay, today I care about:
the processing of malt and sugar
soybeans in Indiana, propane
heating, mold tests sent by mail
the nutritional content of human hair and nails
the compulsion to repeat one
decade or another, against
my better judgment
I care about cellulite, nasolabial
depressions, dissolvable
and non-dissolvable sutures and losing
friends and housing, I care about Candy
Darling and the Svendborg
poems and I care about dirt, of course I do

Kay Gabriel is a poet and essayist. She's the author of Elegy Department Spring / Candy Sonnets 1, the recipient of fellowships from the Poetry Project and Lambda Literary, and recently completed her PhD at Princeton. She's part of the editorial collective for the Poetry Project Newsletter. With Andrea Abi-Karam she's editing an anthology of radical trans poetics, forthcoming from Nightboat in fall 2020.