I’ve tired of them.
Those dishes I learned to cook for love.
Dishes that were not in my nature
but I suppressed my nature.
For love, for love.
What ridiculous things I’ve done.
I’ve said big dick when I meant small dick.
And you know? I’ve tired of
the French New Wave.
Did I ever love Jean-Paul Belmondo?
Now he seems like some trifling prick
I’d have to call into my office
for disrespecting teacher. I’m teacher. I
had no God-given authority.
I had to self-generate it, like God.
At some point, God had to take the leap to
become God.
Those dishes. I carried them in Tupperware
knockoff storage containers. Drove them miles,
through blizzards, for love.
Love, that little wood tick. That tick-in-the-ass.
Say the word enough times inside your head,
it will fall out of its meaning
like a stillborn, plop, into the toilet.
Even Jean Seberg, so intent on her prettiness.
Rocking the short hair.
Trifling waist. Trifling striped dress.
She died of miscarriage-trauma.
Miscarriage-trauma caused by the FBI.
It is better to get over things.
To forget the stupid recipe for fetus-in-a-jar. So
much of cinema, so much of it,
seemed like something I was supposed to like. I
oohed and aahed in all the right places.
A pretense of breathlessness.
But I sat there squirming. Embarrassed by the jump
cuts. The film where the heroine
cuts off her lover’s dick and carries it
around with her in a knockoff
Tupperware storage container. God,
I tried to write papers about these things,
but I found no meaning in the meaning.
I’d focus on the little spaces between
the actor’s teeth, or that the actress looked like
the empty-faced Jesus-seeking girls back home.
In the end, as he’s dying, he tells her she
makes him want to puke.
Yes, sister, many-a-night has ended thusly.
—Diane Seuss (Under a Warm Green Linden)