Millennials of a Certain Age
for Nat Mesnard
I meant to wake up and I never woke.
I'm eating on your couch and I hope that's okay with you.
I made myself a fruit salad that was only one apple
and I drank all your coffee besides.
Look, I love you. I sleep in your bed smiling at the evidence:
your mugs and books, your few, colorful things.
Love is easy for me, the easiest. I know the feeling
though it only goes so far.
That's not a threat. Do you think about the road much?
The one in the story where the wind is in your hair and
you feel free? You think they would have built a road that goes
to freedom? Not them. And then paved it? No.
I look at all the billboards when I drive even though they're
almost all for other people. But the burgers, as you know,
are all for me. Might die of love. The road goes back. It turns
imperceptibly until you roll up again and parallel park
in front of the house of shame and are ashamed there.
If you'd always stay
you would get used to this, probably, like a smell that’s yours.
But everything moves. Almost
everything. Either the targeted ads on the internet misunderstand
my intestines, or the majority of Americans can't shit which
is more probable. All the poets are living with the language of
one weird trick in their guts, which they cannot put down
anywhere. It is all that's left of the national community. The implication
of this man in his scrubs, that you could shit if only.
That this man knows and doctors hate him because
he is only a digital image. Because he never did the sleepless nights,
never wore scrubs at all. It's only AI and
somewhere in America the man who wears that face is straining
as hard as the rest of you. Eats only wild wings,
lives on the fantasy of wildness. Of an engineered bird
with all the extra big appendages. Like you I believed
in her when I was young but it was just the dream of plenty.
Wings and legs, to-go enough to go with forever. Nobody
wants the breasts now. The menu calls
them "bone-less wings." Tarry here a while, buddy.
It was nice when I thought everything was me. It was terribly
lonely. No I was alone but I was everyone, remember?
I held my mother holding me like an egg.
It goes back forever for everyone.
We’re targeted. We drive. By the time you arrive home
it is not the same house that you left. I have been here.
I am wrong though I believe I've left no sign.
Nino McQuown is a trans and transdisciplinary artist from Baltimore, Maryland, where they put on puppet shows, teach gardening, and raise their kid. They are the host of the podcast Queers at the End of the World. They’ve published poems, essays, and comics with outlets such as Foglifter, Feminist Press, Edge Effects, Epiphany, Kenyon Review Online, Electric Literature, Sand, Barrelhouse, Cimarron Review, and Hotel Amerika, among others.
