January. Last night I had a dream that life is as meaningful as Monopoly money. I cried in olive oil and ate my body for breakfast. My mom was built out of glue, and my dad out of sandpaper. I chewed a hairbrush like corn on the cob. Then I ate my stomach but it all fell out. Gravity smelled like peach juice and my teacher floated away. I wrote all my poems on the toilet but I had nothing to say. And I hated rhyming. My best friend was allergic to crocodiles so I fed her to an alligator. She told me she wanted me gone and I said I was never there. One June I went away to study pelicans and I never came home. I woke up and to my morning reflection I said: “Hello!
Silk Worm Waltz
Irene Gay — 2020
A promenade of tiny taffeta dancers across a silver screen. White wine drunk, a clogged shower drain, a heaving sob. The folded dry skin on my palm and the mewing of a tabby cat. The stars start to dance the Charleston. Good omens blink when a sun yawns and night creeps up on empty cities.
Poetry does not make you popular. Trust me, I tried. Before I knew what it meant to be a writer, I thought that poems were just birthed into the world by something bigger than me. I thought writing just happened and existed and breathed like you and me. Maybe it does.
The first book of poetry I ever read was A Pizza the Size of the Sun, written by Jack Prelutsky. I love poetry and I’ve loved it for a long time. But kids don’t like poetry. Not many people do. That’s the issue. I don’t know if you know this, but it’s really embarrassing to read Emily Dickinson when everyone else is reading J.K. Rowling. And that is why I have decided to start my own movement: normalize poetry. There should be more childhood poetry. No more war poems and love poems and intellectual poems. In my classroom, we will read no Shakespeare, only Shel Silverstein. Burn all the sonnets! I want to read about pizzas and monkeys and beetles and pirates. The world would be a better place if poetry was about pirates. The world would be a better place if poetry wasn’t so damn snobby. That’s why people hate poetry. They think people who write it are smarter than them. Well, I hate to break it to you: poets are as dumb as they come.
It’s true. I am spectacularly stupid. I have a talent for writing absolute crap. I could teach a masterclass about how to write bad poetry. I could fill a book with bad poems with shit titles and cliché language. I love clichés. I should write an ode to them. But anyway, my earliest recorded poem is called Routine. It is a clever play on the commodification of women’s bodies and the sexualization of young girls through the ingenious use of syntax, repetition, and juxtaposition of — no. I’m kidding — it’s shit. It’s stored in a Pages document in the back of my folders and folders of unfinished writing. It is in all lowercase, as all young Tumblr teen poets have it, and is modeled (although “copied” is perhaps a better word) off of everything Rupi Kaur. Let me repeat: it is shit. But Routine, although undeniably awful, is not my worst work. No, there is one more piece hidden in my iCloud storage that is so awful that it demands to be included. Entitled (Bad)boy, this piece might make you think that I am joking. Unfortunately, I am not. Before you read it, I warn you: you may never look at me the same way again.
(Bad)boy
Irene Gay — 2014
If I’m in love with a bad boy, call me a liar.
Tell me the truth that you know
Who I
Love
Because he’s not a bad boy
Just a sad boy with a leather jacket and a scowl.
See? I am the king of bad poems. It’s okay to laugh. That really is shit! It is both short and way too long, it is angsty, and it sounds like a 2012 pop song. They probably sing this poem in hell. Sometimes, as it turns out, we need this crap. We need bad poems. I love bad poems! I strongly believe in their power: without them, we never learn what we’re actually good at. (Because 2014 Irene needed to learn a lot).
For example, I suck at writing sonnets. My first sonnet is called Picking Yellowed Creeping Charlies and Other Weeds. Honestly, I hate writing sonnets, and sonnets hate being written by me. I don’t understand iambic pentameter and poems that rhyme make me sick to my stomach. But still, good practice. Writing a sonnet taught me that I hate form. I fit best into language where the only rule is to keep writing (and even then I break it). Anyways, I suck at sonnets. They are for people with better self-control than me. I have very bad self-control.
Picking Yellowed Creeping Charlies and Other Weeds
Irene Gay — 2020
So the sun sets on cold Winter’s bosom.
Ivy sage and pear in sunlight blossom,
Now icy frost creeps asunder; wallows
In roots of oak and pine; shimmers, shivers.
In morning sweet I look upon them, dew
Dripped in hopeless beauty longing, silvered
Kindly youth born out of gloried daybreak.
Begging to bloom; study in reddish hue.
But you: never sweet or golden dusted —
No poem to name, no green love once given.
Flower grown thorn, picked leaves ever hated.
Mother’s scorn so strong to pick you gone.
And yet, night comes, my moonlight lover —
Always I know blue frost will love you well.
I encourage you to let the crap flow. Let yourself write poetry that in several years you can mock. That’s what writing is like for me. It’s a crapshoot, and most of the time you’re not going to get anything. It’s like fishing. 99.9% of the time you’re going to get seaweed and little bloody minnows and dirt and ropes. Sometimes you pull something and you think it’s good. Just like I thought (Bad)boy was a life-changing piece of work, and I convinced myself that I was the next big Instagram poet. So really, 99.95% of the time you suck. But .05% of the time? You pull something really, really good out. And the first thing I pulled was a poem about words.
But my word poem was birthed from the corpse of another bad poem, only pieced together by awkward fragments in my journal. The idea was to pick beautiful words and imagine their life as humans. I tried to make Macho and Erratic and Macabre and Peevish come to life. But they remained on paper, and I failed, as marked by the bold “I Hate This!” at the bottom of the page. Sometimes you just can’t do it. And so I took one line from that stupid word poem and it made the first poem I’ve ever been truly proud of. And from “I hold a little fish in my hand,” I found my .05%.
A Word Called Fish
Irene Gay — 2020
I hold a little fish in my hand,
Copper tinted fins clasped between
The sanguine pink of my muddied digits.
I hold a little fish in my hand until
All the shimmering blue scales are picked off
Like shattered stained-glass and I
Clasp a beast stripped of her eerie beauty.
I hold a little fish in my hand until she is
Heaving for a breath
That I so happily deny,
Until her tiny maw draws blood from my pinky finger,
And I smile down at her as
Salty wind fills tiny lungs like glue.
I hold a little fish in my hand
And I wonder how she’d look on my kitchen table
As I pick her insignificant organs
And cobweb bones apart.
I hold a little fish in my hand
And kiss her good luck
As I throw her back into the bay.
You might not know this about me, but I love to sleep. It’s probably my favorite hobby. I am an expert sleeper. I can sleep on buses, at the dinner table, in the car, standing up, in math class, and even upside down. Before I go to sleep I take two tablets of cherry melatonin and I turn my fan up to the highest possible speed — enough that it’s too loud to think, but not to sleep. Sleeping is the purest form of thought. And as such, one of my absolute least favorite things in the entire world is the act of waking up. But I hate a lot of things. I’m decidedly good at hating things. It’s so much fun to hate things. But not people, or political parties, or current events. That’s very pedestrian, isn’t it? It’s always better to hate the little things, menial, commonplace, humble things. It’s snobbier to hate the little things, but it’s so much more fun. For example, I only drink juice with ice in it. When my mom brings me orange juice in the morning, sometimes I just have to send it back. I also hate green eyes. People with green eyes always rub them in your face. Look: I get it, you’re special. See? I hate a lot of things. And because of this, I decided to compile a list.
Things That Are Decidedly Bad
Irene Gay — 2020
Tuesdays in general, but mostly in April when rain falls like lightning from cotton candy clouds. Apples that are too small and sour, picked from the low hanging branches of my backyard tree, not good enough for mangy alley squirrels. 4:16 PM anger, the kind that makes your bag hook against the doorknob and feels like rubbing against rusted metal. Disappointing car washes, when the soap doesn’t smell like CVS candy, and the water is too harsh on my window-eyes. Favorite pens that are almost out — shaking them until one last inky drop and staining your fingers sticky black. Crooked ties in English class, but more so the boys who wear them, when hot eyes shrivel cold confidence like tissue paper. The color purple, in general, not as horrible as pink. The curls in my hair and the fleshy curves of my hips. Knitting needles and driving a car, a twitch of the hands, the trigger of a gun. Renaissance art and homoerotic Jesus paintings, Devil’s Advocate in blonde Republican teenagers with a middle part. Red roses and old tea sets at Grandma’s dusted by time. Hot chocolate when it’s too hot or too cold. Poems with bad titles, metaphors meant to be beautiful. Breathy voices and overdramatics, flowers and blooms, and the sun. People who only tell the truth and Christmas decorations and broken candy canes. There is Help! ads and Oprah. Bath-tubs and cherry-flavored melatonin. Garages. Wet shower drains and realizations. Sepia-tinted screaming. But especially, big decisions at Thanksgiving time, and when your personality evaporates and no one seems to care.
Everything and nothing at all.
You might have noticed that throughout my portfolio I have attached several of my own photographs. To tell you the truth, my guilty pleasure is photography. I love color, which should be no surprise if you’ve seen what I wear to school on a normal day. And I love to travel, especially to dirty and dingy places. I could never go to a resort: I would be so bored.
I’m very inspired by places: take, for example, Mount Baldy, Chinatown, and Nebraska. Places are easier to write about than people because despite intricate details, smells, and sounds, they’re predictable. The snowfall on the peak of Mount Baldy is predictable, and tourists in Chinatown are a fact, and corn in Nebraska is like water in the sea. Places are so much better than people.
The Oldest Living Thing in L.A.
Larry Levis — 1997
At Wilshire & Santa Monica I saw an opossum
Trying to cross the street. It was late, the street
Was brightly lit, the opossum would take
A few steps forward, then back away from the breath
Of moving traffic. People coming out of the bars
Would approach, as if to help it somehow.
It would lift its black lips & show them
The reddened gums, the long rows of incisors,
Teeth that went all the way back beyond
The flames of Troy & Carthage, beyond sheep
Grazing rock-strewn hills, fragments of ruins
In the grass at San Vitale. It would back away
Delicately & smoothly, stepping carefully
As it always had. It could mangle someone’s hand
In twenty seconds. Mangle it for good. It could
Sever it completely from the wrist in forty.
There was nothing to be done for it. Someone
Or other probably called the LAPD, who then
Called Animal Control, who woke a driver, who
Then dressed in mailed gloves, the kind of thing
Small knights once wore into battle, who gathered
Together his pole with a noose on the end,
A light steel net to snare it with, someone who hoped
The thing would have vanished by the time he got there.
Casualties of the Urban Sprawl
Irene Gay — 2020
Late July, the sun beating down on the skinnied ribs and tourist mobs of San Francisco Chinatown. The kind of heat that pounds right behind your squinting eyes. The hustle of the city and the thudding of hundreds of feet on dirtied rough pavement. Hands tumbling over poster after poster stacked outside Genuine Shanghai Novelties, and the kind of mice that don’t even fear a hound dog scurrying across sandaled feet. Inside a dusty supermarket, cabbages and pears and ginger tossed into the same linoleum trough. Cracked cakes of blackened imported tea, lips wrinkled like dates whistling that one song, the one you can never quite put your finger on. The pulsing chorus of streetcars and trains slamming against the crescendos of California hills, the wind whistling through ivory white townhouses and organic cafés stacked on the sagging back of a naked landscape. Shouts from above as Nainai and Baba argue across balconies over nothing and the sun, the shuffling of suntanned children as they tussle for a woven blue ball. Sweat dripping down Aunty’s jeweled neck as she paints her nails with snow-white french tips, a tabby cat curled up in the cool damp shadows of a broken radiator. A blind man emerging from behind a great green wall, great golden characters chipping into piles at his feet. No one yells for a misinformed first step and a tap-tap-tapping, a sewer grate left open by a yellow vest fanning hot sewer sigh, and a figure falling out of the burning breath of July and into the Below.
By early August, cardstock SFPD posters are already covered by tangerine ads for Broadway Street Dim Sum and the dust and dusk of the unforgiving beast.
I’m not a huge fan of that piece: it doesn’t offer much in the way of plot or language: most readers don’t even realize what happens (the old man falls down into the sewer) but notice more so the description of Chinatown and the city of San Fransisco. But the truth is, I didn’t like San Francisco that much. Mostly because it was July and still cold (which should be against the law in California), but also because drivers were always so mean. It was the first place I had ever visited that people didn’t seem to mind if they hit you. You know what? It seemed that some drivers wanted to, very badly. But San Francisco is undeniably beautiful and so is being there with your mom. Plus, our hotel was only a couple of blocks away from the gates to Chinatown. I loved Chinatown: it’s always busy there. It feels like the last place on earth where people are still awake, despite the hundreds of zombie tourists (including me and my mom!) meandering through every day.
During our visit, we saw these beautiful jade rings hanging from white ribbons in the window of a jewelry shop, kind of like rain. We were too busy in the morning, but we came back after dinner on our last night in California, so that we might look through the collection. We walked into the only open jewelry shop on the street at ten to eight, when they said they would close. Under the florescent lights and watchful gaze of the shopkeeper, we gently slid hundreds of shiny rings on and off of our fingers. I always hate ring shopping, because my fingers are fat and short, but these were so wonderfully bright.
The first ring we bought was a skinny turquoise band that wraps around my wedding finger perfectly — the biggest size available at the shop —with edges that crack into little coppery specks and a tiny flake of yellow. The second picked out of the bottom of the bin was a homely red-brown and robins-egg blue flat ring I could push down fit my pointer finger. Unassuming, but pretty. And finally, a green ring that could barely fit my pinky. It was the kind of green that pools near the bottom of pea soup. Although it was the smallest, and it pinched my skin when I wrote — my mom and I loved that little ring for everything we saw in it and around us.
A couple of months ago, I dropped the creamy green ring on the tiled floor of the gym locker room and it shattered. When my mom asked about it that night, I told her that I had lost it at practice.
One of my least favorite places in the world is Nebraska. My dad’s family lives out there, and that’s where my only pleasant grandparent is buried. Anyways, the Alfs-Gay family in Nebraska is the top well drilling dynasty in the central United States. They also each individually consume more pulled pork every year than the entirety of New England. One time the youngest Alfs, Adam, posted to his Instagram a picture of coin titled, “Real European money!” It was a Canadian dollar. My cousins live in Shickley, Nebraska, but just across the highway sit Ong and Strang, a ghost town and a town of about sixty. Ong has this one creepy wooden building with a willow tree growing through the window and an old sign that says “Welcome to Ong!”. My dad’s cousin Brian says it’s haunted. I tried to capture that emptiness in my piece, Appetite. Before you read this next piece, know that I do love my family in Nebraska, just as much as my cousins in Minneapolis or Racine or D.C. or Toronto or Singapore. Nebraska makes me face my shame. It makes me look at my own self. When I mock Nebraska, I have to remember that I’m mocking myself.
Appetite
Irene Gay — 2020
If you’ve never seen a fat girl eat the biggest burger in Nebraska, you’re really missing out. You have never seen the trials and tribulations of meat as it devours meat.
Growing up, I never looked like other girls around me. I never sat on laps and I never got piggyback rides at recess. In health class, we watched movies about obesity and I felt like everyone was looking at me. I ate salads at lunch even though I hated them, and I promised myself to never be hungry at a birthday party: at least not until I got home. I was grade-A fat. Plus-sized. Curvy. Whatever you want to call it. Anyways, the worst part is that you always tell yourself that one day you’ll be pretty if you fit into a number. One day, you’ll lose all your weight and one day, boys will like you. One day you won’t hate having your picture taken and one day it’ll be cool when you eat fast food. The worst part about growing up fat is that everyone — even you — thinks you’re an almost. You’re almost pretty! Almost athletic! Almost appealing! But you’re not any of those things because guess what, you’re fucking fat.
That’s why I love Nebraska. Everyone is fat there. It’s like a fat affinity group, and you meet every week at your favorite fast-food chain and you sit there and you just engorge. It’s not disgusting, it’s culture. Okay, so, I have to tell you a secret: I am that fat hamburger-eating little (well, hardly) girl. And in the sweat-drenched summer of 2013, I took on my greatest work yet: Omaha’s “Double Kong” King Kong burger.
The Double Kong, never before eaten in full by another family member, is a five-inch high, greasy, glorious, sticky beast. People who finish it are either dead or a legend. And I am a legend. If McDonald’s burgers are highschool state championships, King Kong is the Olympics. It’s Jessica Rabbit and the Joker of burgers, beautiful and magnificent and terrifying. It’s the Mount Everest of burgers. Anything I had ever done or eaten before was child play. Because there are few foods that truly match the human depravity and wickedness of what I saw.
Lettuce that curls at the end, so stale that a papery crunch folds under teeth and gets stuck under your molars. A soggy bun flattened by dead weight so that it sags like a tired back and rips under the pressure of slippery fingers. Three moss-green pickles placed in a lopsided triangle. A tomato picked off with surgeon-like efficiency and precision, greenish seeds drying against the gingham wax wrap. The patty, hinder under blankets of the add-on, pink flesh naked under black scars and one unsmiling chef’s nude press-on nail. Fries meticulously placed by the sausage fingers of Nebraska’s finest, dripping wet in grease, salt pressed into the wrinkled starch skin. A second patty, prominently placed and perfectly symmetrical, still cold at the frozen middle and pimpled by pretty purpling warts, hidden throughout the glorious hills and valleys, battlefields and graveyards, comedies and tragedies of a Double Kong.
I only remember two things about eating that burger. First, I remember the taste: King Kong burgers demands that you taste them and their countless textures. They demand that you feel them with your pinkened rough tongue as each bite smashes against your gums and melds into a foul paste. They demand that you touch them and pull them apart and your dignity starts to unravel like string.
And so, nowadays, when I pull on black skinny jeans and my belly doesn’t bulge, when I can tug a shirt a size smaller over myself, when I can look at a picture without looking away, and when I bite into a spinach salad, dignity tight, knotted and hidden away in the depths of my stomach, sometimes I wish I was under the florescent lighting of Nebraska, almost — just almost — proud.
To Dream
Irene Gay — 2020
I retire to a cabin on top of Mount Baldy with a bad book and banana ice. I’ve been eaten alive by a squid; so I grow my beard long, first I am platinum blonde. You tie Mama’s silk handkerchief around the world inside your head. Today the wind was yelling at me. My mind wanders on a pilgrimage to the desert but doesn’t come back — hallucinating? Have we reached the precipice of the apocalypse of peoplehood? Did you know that I have perfected the art of nothingness? Sometimes it feels like life is pointing you in a certain direction. But right now you just want banana ice and two white boots tipped in frost grey lace. We’re drowning in dish-soap nothingness, snowshoeing across a snow-dripped prairie. I reach for the better you, the freer you. The youest that I can be. So feed each maggot-like word to the beast inside. Can life really be folded into the 2D? I’m too sensitive: trees twist me like string. I like to walk a tightrope over the valley because I am worth nothing. Snobby women killed gender reveal parties and guns and fun in general.
Pasty men sing! Today my dog will start to die; so I retire to my cabin on top of Mount Baldy.
Early May. The sky is dripping a blue-black sludge and the sun has decided it is tired and would like a nap. Maybe I am the sun. Above us, slate grey storms bunch up and below us, the grass peeks out from ashen mud. In a neat and heavy lead font, I write in my journal: I don’t want to write about hair. I want to write about the little orange snail in the garden. I want to put my reader on a leaf in a garden and watch a little violet flower growing up. I want to write about a violinist who’s addicted to coffee, but more so about his lips when they pinch together. I want to write about the little wrinkles in my journal. I want to write about the blueberry skin in my fingernails. I want to write about loving a bag so much you never use it. I want to write about loving nothing. I want to write about watching someone from the bay-window. I want to write about dirty cars and sludge collecting on the corner of Brady Street. I want to move upwards and sing badly. The next story I write will be about a boy in the English midlands who buys a stripper pole and finds himself. It’s raining in the garden. It never rains in the garden. Leaves are dripping cold drops onto my forehead. My forehead is covered by hair. People move faster than I can think. People are too loud. I wish they’d quiet down. It would be so much less of a racket. I wish life would be quiet. That’s what I hate most. There’s always more. There’s always more. There’s always more. There’s always more dishes and laundry and everything else. There’s always more. There’s always more than you think, even if you know, just like me, that life is infinite.
Good Night!
