Clean: An Anthology

Sugar Crash

The thing I remember most is how your lips tasted like hard candy left in the sun-- sickening pure sugar, beautiful in its original form but starting to break down. I've pieced together the memory of your sticky, sharp hands, attaching me to your brand new loft bed and forcing me to gag on your lips but I never bit down because I was always overly concerned with shattering you. I thought you were like spun sugar, a brittle masterpiece, but in that moment I was the fragile one and somehow I know that my body disintegrating felt sweet on your tongue.

They told me that girls were sugar and spice and everything nice and maybe, once upon a time, you were. You called it a game, your hands crawling lower and lower trapped in your brand new loft bed, you called it playing supermodel, and I never thought about it until now, but who the hell taught you to play the sick game, anyways? Game, I hate that fucking word. It conjures up images of arcades and carnivals and funnel cakes not gagging on Starburst lips, the black licorice knot in my stomach refusing to untie as I am led into your bedroom with pink painted walls and lost innocence. I still see you around and I remember that pit, it felt the same way it does when you gorge yourself on too much candy and all you want to do is vomit up rainbows into bowl until there's nothing left except honey-colored bile and a taste you don't think you'll ever wash out. My teachers told me that I shouldn't take candy from strangers, but nobody ever says anything about your best friend.

When I was in eighth grade for Banned Books Week, I read Lolita. The copy I borrowed had the picture from the '62 Kubrick film adaptation on the cover, a girl of sixteen that looked like a grown up version of you with heart-shaped sunglasses sucking sensually on a lollipop. When I finally finished the book I realized that Nabokov would be rolling in his grave at the symbol of precocious flirtation and fifties charm his book became. I know now that Lolita is a story of a girl ruined because nobody learns how to suck on a lollipop in that erotic and provoking way without sucking on something else first. I thought of your father and your older brother and in that moment it felt like you and I were the only one who understood what Nabokov meant. You were the girl on the movie poster, warped beyond your years into a caricature of youth and sexuality and instead of a lollipop you projected it all onto me, and now I realize that darling, these are the things girls so young should never know. I saw you around the other day in the bathroom before school. You had a skirt that went three inches above your jawbreaker fingertips, a smorgasbord of eyeshadow, slathered on cotton candy lip gloss, and it pained me to find out that about how even now, eight years later, you are still as rancid as ever.

They say that the more sugar you consume, the higher your risk of an early death. and I know that's not true because every time you came over you drowned me in strange toxic sweetness and yet, I am still here. I am still here even though I never got the closure I always wanted from you, I am still here even though my parents think I don't remember, I am alive like citrus punch candies tinged with hope and spiked with survival and I hope that one day when you tell your own story you at least acknowledge the people you rotted along the way.

A/N: Okay, so this was originally done as a spoken word, and I'm aware it probably works eight thousand times better in that form. I originally wasn't going to post it at all, but my friends in poetry club said it was, and I quote, "holy shit amazing" and that I just had to share it with you guys, so yeah. Here's a really fucked up poem with incredibly strange imagery. This anthology is getting long as hell, so I'm only going to post one more spoken word transcript (thankfully, that one will be a fair bit less creepy and disturbing) then mark this book complete. I might start a new poetry book after I finish my current fiction project, Born As Ghosts. Thanks for reading!