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——megan jeanne gette

It’s a heatwave in Hollywood
In a 2br 2ba duplex in a cul-de-sac merry-go-rounding
She is squalene in the infinite city, plumping her skin
Watching a dog lick and lick
It causes a vibrational shift in her sternum, like when she is purred at or
when an ear rubs itself on the back of her hand, and so she likes life a little
bit, even in the cul-de-sac there are animals
One that licks contentedly
Or bangs itself against the doorsill: a grasshopper with turquoise wings:
a lubber, which she felt pity for, as it could not tell that the door was also turquoise
She is proportional to these gentrification initiatives, lasting a minute only,
barking at nothing, with turquoise doors that confuse the wildlife



She knows a plant has no wings
She knows you get to be in the world if you have one
A face, that is, a face that disappears in an aquarium or a cloud, or the
microwave of someone too lazy to hang their clothes to dry, a face that
launched a thousand Starlink satellites into the sky and then had triplets
through IVF, it’s all hamburger now bub, it’s all cheese, the face, I mean,
improperly heated
The story is far less interesting than the language that changes in its wake,
when the city reclaims itself as desirable with juvederm
This is just how I talk
I can’t not talk like this, is what I mean



I say she when I mean I, because I is something like dust, an extension or
residue of a thing that breathes
Without dread attached to the dust, how it’s sticky now
Often out there like a bus stop at the mall, and can you believe these places
haven’t changed a bit in 20 years? They don’t look a day over 2005,
a Claire’s is there with many choices of earring that look like soda cans or
mimosas
I am pretending to be stupid, with turquoise wings and a deadline to live
That’s how I get out of doing chores



There’s nothing outside but the ways things happen
And I don’t have my own television show
There are dishes to be done and fruit flies collecting on the windowsill
At the monastery, he tells me, the monks get up at 3:30am to sit in the dark,
sometimes for twelve hours, waiting for a gate to open
You stand out there for a year and when they let you in you eat oatmeal for
the rest of your life
Somehow this is desirable, a life free of choices, a goal in mind with no
greater skill than waking up and sitting in the dark where you were just
asleep
Lasting a minute only
But there are no dogs in the monastery, so what really is the point?
What goal exists in the diminishment of lubbers from the gas that situates
itself in the sky?
I don’t care, actually
She doesn’t either
But it was offered to me in a conversation
It was not like being purred at



An afternoon is a year
The sentence tends to match my yellow blanket
An animal licks and licks
All my desire in the dark
There is nothing I want to write these days
A poem is like one of Claire Bishops’s artificial hells
You make them bend to its rules
It’s hell because everyone knows it is art and no one is moved
But they sit politely and clap at the end
Later they complain about the baby you are holding  (Oh my god her lips
are so distracting )
Nothing makes sense to hold
Not even the voice I think is mine
It sounds strange to listen to it playback anyway
That should tell you it’s not quite yours
There is the body without its “I,” when everyone’s funny now, and
orgeous, standing in front of fluorescent circles making TikToks to
respond to the prehistoric moments of last week
Tingles happen with sounds and a “blah blah blah”



Agony reroutes itself on Google Maps
The cul-de-sac isn’t that funny
In fact it feels like an artifact of American heroism, a kind of meaning in a
circle, or fear of it
My friends are excited about collective dreaming, but isn’t that already it?
I have a condo and FisherPrice car for my kid, a goldfish in the house
My wife, my wife
Do they even make FisherPrice anymore?
One day there is a gate and it is plastic
I’m sorry my story doesn’t have a plot
I’m sorry it’s just a middle without end
I’m sorry it’s a fiction, I had to say something
It’s the stakes, for me
A life of reproductions
A plant can grow and also it can not grow
The decision is only ever sometimes yours
The rest of the time you are buying the wrong size and trying to decide if
it’s worth it to take it back



Ferdinand would be a good name for a character in the novel I’m writing
but I don’t know how to make her exist
She would not be in a city
She would be the one to get run out of town for pulling a fake gun on
someone as a joke
Or she would be sweeping outside her Airbnb
She would avoid talking to others she felt might be smarter than her
She doesn’t feel like explaining herself
Or replying to any text messages
If only she could paint the walls outside of barber shops at the speed she
replies to his DMs
Then she could say she had done something
Even if she spent the rest of the afternoon napping, or drinking White Claw
Even if on TV reruns of Melrose Place and Fear Factor compete for the
hour and her dream
Ferdinand is bored as a dog or as lonely
Her hair is getting wispy and she has gingivitis or maybe an STD
She is content with a DiGiorno pizza as long as no one is making her
behave
There are a ton of ways to misbehave!
There are a ton of people who are grocery shopping right now, or thinking
about it
There are a ton of people Ferdinand wishes she could be, but I’ve already
used the name
She behaves like a planet in transit, appearing to the human eye
periodically, as an event
People need special glasses to see her, and calculations
And her trash is growing
That is one thing that will never not grow
If she laid out the trash alongside a human intestine, she guesses it would
stretch 3 miles
She’s accumulating trash as an identity
And she dreams of doing musical theater
The part she would play is Ensign Nellie Forbush in South Pacific
She can’t explain why, just feels an affinity with the character
She’s seen the musical 40 times
She cannot go back in time, to the rerun before it was a rerun
She can only be herself, eating oatmeal
In an infinite city
Some yellowing curtain
It’s time now for that jerk to get her dues
It’s curtains for her
Sayonara Ferdinand!
We zoom out, wishing her luck on Broadway, while the dog is patrolling
outside making rounds in case of ferals
You see he’s tame now, and fed, and that means someone else is not, and
there’s a need for him to make sure they know that
Now he is lost in the cul-de-sac
There’s no rogue bone here, don’t bother looking
In the aftermath of a wedding someone is shedding a tear
So sodden with it