Caroline Keir

In Virginia

I pick up hitchhiking houseware and sleep till noon,

exist on sriracha and raw fish,

bourbon peach smashes,

Mucinex and Aztec clay.

Exchanging lectures for leans,

I loiter in overpriced coffee shops,

carrying books I never open,

scheduling scoffs for splotchy spray tans,

mullets that lack irony.

I walk without a purpose,

feigning convenient cramps and aloofness.

I don’t recognize former relay teammates or middle school jazz aficionados.

At night, the news feels heavier, Lester Holt harsher,

stories more embellished, embellishments more storied.

Ambivalence is punctuated,

exclamatory and hard stopped.

Hanging on to every syllable,

I console myself with mummified consumption of teen dystopia,

thinned cardigans that are fifty percent off on Wednesdays

or forty percent off on Mondays

if they’re marked with an orange or blue tag.

McDonald’s Sprite will do the trick sometimes,

but only if I forget the big glass of water with my morning toast and vitamins.

My mom tells me to go to bed earlier,

I sit in the refrigerator overnight.

City of Lite

The space between gleam and grimace is wrought with rubber gloves, chive.

Stale smells slant.                                                        

Here, I am eating things to eat them.

I am drinking things to drink them.

You are saying things to say them,

hoping they make you good

and fair.

I hate, I think. The way your laugh carbonates.

I watch it take up, expand until it’s greased all my mirrors.

Yellow film contorts my lower back into a crystal punch bowl, cheap,

     but storied.

Quartered, halved, contractions have always left me ragged.

I like this like, at least.

I think I like.

I know I like.

I think I know I like                                                                           

the way your stray fingertips digest themselves in empty pockets.

Seeking raw weight unharvested, something to chew on:

receiving amber notes that waft towards the wall.                                                                                    

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Caroline Keir is a sometimes writer, always writing appreciator based in Brooklyn. In her spare time, she primarily thinks about ways she can most effectively incorporate jewel tones into her wardrobe.