By Heather McNaugher

Featured Art: Sweet Tooth by Dylan Petrea

I decide this will be it, my last pop-tart, cherry,
as I stand at the circ desk of the college library
and tear up your number
which I had written on a Post-it®, Hello Kitty®,
and then stuck to my ID.
The computer says I love you I owe 29 dollars
for Frank O’Hara and that thesaurus
I borrowed when I taught the class
how to find a synonym. I’m sorry. Hello Kitty’s ears
are burning—so tiny, so pink,
and so I pulverize them.
My students are 20; when I say Roget’s
they look at me like I’m not here; they don’t know yet
the way to say nothing articulately
is backwards. You called it—said if we . . . then we
have something that has to end
immediately. There is nowhere,
no receptacle bottomless enough in which to heave
the irreversible doll-petals, and so I stand here, a giant cramping thumb
and forefinger, handing over all my money.
I would very much like to leave you
here in the library with my fine, but am forced
to take you with me for, so help me God,
the last time. A single urgent dollar is all I’ve got;
I walk into the snack-bar like I need a shot
and a beer, “Cherry pop-tart please.” The bartender
reads a thick thriller with a weary spine,
doesn’t look up till she’s finished her last line—
says, “Looks like you got the last one”—keeps reading.
Into the crematorium toaster I drop them,
the pop-tarts too, and stand at the condiment bar
with its inconvenience and awkward intimacy
and everyone’s so fucking insipid
no one good-looking ever sidles up
for half-and-half and says, “Marry me.”
In the stillness of waiting
for my pop-tart to pop, a state of emergency, I have three minutes
to add to the list of things I’ll stop
doing tomorrow: Pop-tarts, calling Megan C.,
returning my books late, setting small fires indoors—
incidentally the last four acts I’ve performed.
Always it starts with pastry—21 years of I’ll stop
tomorrow, augmented by, at 14,
some uncommitted vomiting.
I met you 21 years ago. I was 14—a bad look for anyone,
much less a four-eyed half-assed-bulimic lesbian.
No wonder you wrote me that letter
flashing the knife friends, under which heading
our options are: acquaintance, chum, intimate (a noun)
and, my favorite—other self,
with its codependent grandiosity. Fuck you.
I keep meaning to stop substituting
cherry pop-tarts for shots and beers. But first, before things
get out of hand, I yell over to the girl at the counter, “Good for you.”
She’s 20. She looks at me. Through the smoke, I’m not here—louder,
“Good for you for reading a book,” for finding the thing
that won’t catch on fire, then disappear.

---

Heather McNaugher is the author of System of Hideouts and Second-order Desire, and two poetry chapbooks, Panic & Joy and Double Life. She teaches at Chatham University, where she is nonfiction editor for The Fourth River.

Originally published in NOR 6