I don’t aim to be a person of note.

I aim to be a person of whole journals

filled with stories about hitchhiking

the Atlantic coast.

Being born took courage, sir.

I’m not gonna waste the daylight

trying to darken seven-hundred tiny

circles on a test just right. How on earth

is that anything close to an answer?

Everybody wants straight A’s.

Give me some gay A’s to work for.*

You’re talking to someone

whose imaginary friends were bullies.

You’re talking to someone who drank

from the fountain after Connie McGary

drank from the fountain and thought

it might be my only real kiss.

You’re talking to someone

who wore a lifejacket to the baptism

because I knew—I knew

what they were trying to do.

_________________________________

* My girlfriend tried to get me to edit this line out of the poem.

Should I have listened to her?

O yes

O no

I’m not looking for a degree.

I’m looking for eighty-six degrees

in June and whatever will keep

my snowboard humming through December.

I come from a long line of people

who never heard of cutting edge.

They’re mending-edge. My grandma Izzy,

a nurse. My grandma Faye, a seamstress,

and you think I’m gonna show up

to this life believing it’s someone else’s job

to do the fixing? If living gets lonely,

I’ll get a job as a toll booth worker

and make thirty new friends

a minute. You got something better

than that to offer me? You got something

sweeter than the honey I shimmied

from the hive myself? You got a plan

for my life richer than the one where I pick

a lucky penny up and ask some song

of a woman to marry me for my money?

I don’t think so, sir.

I really really really don’t think so.

WHAT SUCKS ABOUT THE AFTERLIFE

On Earth, everyone loved butterflies,

but I trusted the caterpillars more.

I trusted the ones who knew

they were not done growing.

On Earth, I was a work in progress,

was comforted in the knowing

that I had a million mistakes still in me

to learn from. I changed my mind

more often than I changed my socks,

and whenever I was criticized

for mismatched thoughts, I’d say,

Who wants to be today

who they were yesterday?

Becoming was how I prayed.

But here—I am past the finish line:

I have a heart of gold,

and I never have to dig for it.

I couldn’t do anything wrong if I tried,

and trust me, I try, but

I get hot-headed, and my rage

toasts the marshmallow on an angel’s

celestial s’mores. I lose my temper and find it

in the halo lost-and-found box.

Lies won’t let me tell them.

They handed me a sticker

that said My Name Is and I wrote

Everyone by accident. I can’t remember

what selfishness is. Yesterday I said

something angry about an ex, and a quarter

of my tastebuds jumped off my tongue.

I’ve known nothing