I like the campus where young women wear new shades of green and white.

I don’t dress like that—instead I observe the girls inhabit clichés.

I feel clichés surge through me in the form of bad sentences: You don’t love me.

Hey, I just wanted to check in. How do I look. I think I like you more than you like me.

A kind of desperation inhabits fucking when mutual love has been foreclosed.

This is a poem: a collection of sentiments attributed to no one.

Spring is a great time for profound thoughts about non-specific experience.

I have to write about what it means to teach a class on poetry for six semesters.

If you don’t love me and the recognition of this makes the sex hotter, I welcome it.

You think I’m singular, off-the-charts, but you don’t love me, and will never love me.

I make you feel like a man, I think, and that’s great— I like to work with concepts.

Women have issues with sex but it doesn’t really matter because women love issues.

This guy I like deeply told me I looked pretty when I cried and I gloated over it.

Now I know that my tears make him want to burrow into my cunt.

You think you know that I’m more than that, that this is all hardness like a cock.

That I’m “essentially girlish” doesn’t look right on the page, but it’s true.

I know I’m not that when I see her short hair; I like to hold mine in bunches.

I like how it becomes elastic, stretched, pulled. And how annoying—

how fun it is to be annoying. And for a few reasons, cared for.

I had these pressing issues once: am I pretty, am I desired, am I loved?

The curve of a hair has something to do with the answers to all these questions.

The deep questions in life are delicious and matterless; I chew on them, I don’t chew hair.

I race to the finish, but I cannot be ahead, slow as I am with the thighs that loosen.

I cannot run—I cannot move with the neutered strength of the days when I did research.

I did not write this, as I am stuck in the ventriloquist’s house, where he makes me ink.

I’m a bit lost: eye is swollen, face seems lost.

If I don’t look fertile, pretty, or cute, how can I write?

Books around me suggest I have learned a lot.

It’d be a bad poem if I continued,

But he makes me feel fuzzy, wet, or soft, like a leaf.

It’s always a “he” making me feel fuzzy, wet, soft.

I had sex with my father in the dream, it was normal.

I felt successful, I felt I had reached the pinnacle of dreams.

I had had an orgasm before the dream, and before the walk.

And the traffic lights were beautiful, everything seemed nice.

I told him that if I came every time I had sex every time I’d happily go home.

But my right eye is swollen and for this reason alone I cannot wake or sleep.

My eyes look more battered than swollen: I’ve worked hard, I’m infertile.

It’s true: I came for the fourth time with a man and now I’m ruined.

“She” either refers to myself, my mother, or a substitute.

The higher substitutes for “she”: older female writers.

Re-reading Sheila Heti’s Motherhood: her boyfriend sucks!

Still looking at my eyes. Maybe I look vulnerable, now?

Is this an essay in understanding why I can’t wake up?

Is this an essay in understanding why I dreamt the dream?

I feel ugly, so I can’t write (but I write while I feel ugly).

Something’s dissolving—I bought a carbonated drink.

Let’s come to the end of sex. Do you remember what it was like for me to come?

I race to the finish, but I cannot be ahead, slow as I am with the thighs that loosen.

The bloom of the tunnel, the bloom of the darkness, I want to end in the trash.

Who I am has started to matter. No more difference, I want to be one. One.

Did you know that sex is where I end? Where shall we begin again?