No, I Do Not Want to Connect with You on LinkedIn

Of all the washed-up terror prodigies in all the Underworld—
I’m gonna need you especially to stay the fuck out of my iPhone.

So you’re still king of that shot-up little roach house on Cat Piss Ave,

still hung up on that time I didn’t let you stay my dearest
threat? Look at you. So mad you’d @ anything.

Wanting me taken down, taken out. Lolol, rage-cake. You tried.

In the years since I was last light-starved, hell-bent on your half-cocked lure
I have kept the moon on all night in my own way,

by listening, by not forgetting it is there. Small witchery.

And by the way, your shit is not a secret. This here is girl country.
Trust me when I say we know all about your kind in our ranks.

All you motherfuckers make it easy—you wear the same shitty face.

Rude to the end, you missed my victory scene. I wore blue lace
& wolf spit, I sang torch songs, I was carried up into the trees by waves.

The moon knew me. It took my side. Duh, I thought, & I gave you the finger.

One day, I woke up such a force, I watched your name fall
right out of the language. Did you feel that?

How you are now girl dust? Shipwreck? Bone muck? Ghost?

It’s only in another life that I could be damned
back to hell for your half-look, that I was

ever your jilted bride, sweating it out

Aqua-netted in a farm field down by the interstate
under a goddamn willow bower, eye-deep

in a rabble of no-account drunks.

You once thought to make me afraid, to consider
what that might do to me. I think now:

how unimaginative. To kill a tree, any asshole

can hammer a ring of nails into the trunk.
Already, you don’t know me, & one day

I will be even stranger, one day I just may fall

to my knees in church to say Reverend, my God, what
were Eve’s other choices & I trust you will not

be there as my witness. I admit I once believed

I could be anything, & didn’t you say to me then “That’s true
for some people”—? When I was seven, a boy slapped me

& I was punished for “inciting violence.”

So it began: when I bled, I thought I deserved it.
I wanted one brightly colored warship; I wanted

a grief with my name printed right there on it.

To have & to hold—there is, after all, a difference.
Before anyone fucked with her, Eurydice was just a woman walking alone

through a field of snakes. It’s late now, much

too late to hold us back—you know that—
pay attention this time when the hiss of our names

ribbons off, white flame against the dark.