Net Worth, Sore Tits, Toilet Water
NET WORTH
Everything I make is technically
A gross domestic product
Limp amends
Future offspring
Spittling and shitting
In swaddling clothes
I dream and the earth trembles
I don’t recall falling asleep
I snooze through sequenced alarms
Their mounting urgency
And my tepid response
Moving in apposition
I form a committee about
My lack of control
Once a week
We meet in the produce aisle
Of the free market
Where freedom is not
Salivating over citrus
We register competition
And if I am turned on
By someone’s invisible hand
Each climax adds a minute to my life
Another minute to be occupied
As I always ought to appear
SORE TITS
What makes me touch
Each fabric in a row of dresses
As I grasp the concept of an enemy
How it is like nursing an asp
With its little circular mouth
Ringing around the threat
You give what you get
It’s a pose I’ll entertain
A mediocre indulgence
Like supermarket sushi
As you digitize altars
Devoted to your symmetry
The televisual drama
Veers gothic and off-format
Peeling foil off a stale fact
Klieg lights of recognition
Skate across the substance
Of my boutique concerns
And sympathetic notions
Which mattressed me too long
TOILET WATER
I want to say something about
The obdurate slowness of a day
With nothing at stake
When time slips into something more comfortable
When I weigh the austerity of a bank
Against the unknowable capacity of the future
The circumstances that can land a person
In a shallow grave on the Jersey Shore
Beyond the pale but above the fold
A moment of silence
For a craving for justice
There’s nothing I can do besides
Put my cat on a diet
Prepare the trophy cabinet for its strange signifiers
Plot against the advances of a preordained wrinkle
I’ve made zero effort to monetize my wellness
However temporary
Preferring instead to challenge my organs
A kind of jeopardy played to a lullaby
Lottery numbers drawn from fortune cookies
Being alive is a biohazard
Still I nurture an impulse to nurture
It’s more autobiography than analysis
But I accept the moon’s critique of the sun
And I’m a quick study
I can resemble a mirror in the dark
It’s midnight in America
There’s nothing that can’t be bottled and sold
A fragrance line aiming to capture
The scent of a coupon stuffed mailbox
The fate of the African elephant
Humanity’s long trick candle wick
Toiling to stay lit
Sarah Jean Grimm is the author Soft Focus (Metatron, 2017). Recent writing has appeared in New York Tyrant, Electric Literature, BOMB Magazine, and elsewhere. She lives in New York City.
