ADDERALL
I would do addy over cocaine any day
Let’s take a long ride on the A train snorting
orange crushed time release beads
This older man I dated
called it his performance-enhancer
When he went to lecture at a Rabbinical school in LA
he let me stay in his Park Slope brownstone
Thank G_d he approved of abortions
I felt bad for blowing a guy on his futon
during the carnival scene of The Third Man
I’m too young to manage a full-time sugar daddy
I never saw an amphetamine I didn’t like
Why should I be stuck with this
gentile mental process
I weighed this powder on a balance
Already I feel it tipping in my favor
There’s never been a worse poor person
I didn’t avoid pregnancy and county jail
to sound like George W. Bush
I reject a language manipulated by folklore
and middle class people watching ESPN
I want to live in a kingdom of style and camp
I want to relate this smut to Vienna after the war
When finally those who really got glamour
despite their abject poverty
with just a little industriousness could live
like movie stars in the bombed out rubble
Jean Rhys up to her dimples
in black market velvet, meringue, and chartreuse
clouds hanging in the death sky
It’ll never be this good for her again
There’s a child who needs money in the orphanage
LUXE INTERIORITY
I was starved for love
Now I’ve just had an abortion
It is Mercedes Benz Fashion Week
but I don’t want to go to the shows
The social worker who performed
my intake consultation looked like
she lined her eyes with Kohl’s
I think I would like to be a part of culture
While remaining without
Michel Foucault says
There is no such thing as outside
But that’s exactly
Where I need this thing to be
Lack, you are my lackey bitch
I refuse to be stuffed full of myth
I can live like a blade on surfaces
W Magazine
I study the wedding photos
of Margaux Hemmingway and Bernard Fauchier
On a poor girl her brows would look unkempt
I see only what I know to be baroque
the white patio furniture hot from the sun
“I’m a crazy witch!” screams the receptionist
and I’m so startled I throw up my Vallium
Why should “I” be in Massachusetts
scared shitless by the symbols of other people
their paranoid existences
when I could be getting photographed
wearing a nude bodysuit in a white room
If that’s what she wants to put out there, whatever
DEAD SOULS
Religious men will try to tell you
that every abortion is special
and to an extent I agree
I was inconsolable when I missed prom
I had to pay a woman to pretend
to be my mother so I could
obtain parental consent
Every citizen of this world is on trial
I’m learning to speak legalese
I stroll through civil law like a sample sale
Kendra said she knew a doctor
who would do abortions for minors
as long as you didn’t cry
during the ultrasound
I looked all over Houston for him
getting fatter and richer as I went
This all could have been avoided if I’d
convinced an over 18
to sell me her birth control
If my mother wasn’t a Christian
If the nurse hadn’t insisted that Kendra
swallow the morning after pill
in front of her as I waited
in the parking lot of TJ Max
It wasn’t my prom exactly
I was a freshman invited by
my upperclass boyfriend
Gulp your items down
the nurse had said
Now that I’m free I can go
to the DVF party
in droll East Hampton
sponsored by Veuve Cliquot
I’m not a wise man
I’m too fertile for that
But I can tell you that some abortions
are more convenient than others
and I’ve taken notes on how not to be poor in soul
–––––––
Monica McClure’s poems have appeared in the Los Angeles Review, The Lit Review, Lambda Literary Review’s Spotlight Series, Paperbag and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Mood Swing, is forthcoming from Snacks Press, Inc. She curates the Atlas Reading Series and teaches at Bloomfield College. She lives in New York City.