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Polaroid of How to be a Radical When Your Parents Pay For Everything
There is a shore/here are our bodies/what more to say than that
We are an inlet lake, boat launch, trails that lead to nowhere
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How to be a Radical when
money comes and goes and comes and mostly comes
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Do you remember the last night we had together
17th floor hotel room, so exhausting
we watched the fog lift off the city/here comes the wave,
the big one, can you see it
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Our crossroads space—
do you run to shore (a figment) (a figment)
or do you stay where you are—either way
it’s over. (It’s over)
Either way, it’s over, isn’t it?
*
I am driving the vehicle of you
from here to there/across the city/
back again/what words do I have/
when you say
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You say that I am
suddenly a very different person
than who you knew
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We are on a rooftop, in a city overlooking Lake Michigan,
and you say that the love in your dreams is not the love
you can ever pursue in real life
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(It’s over) isn’t it
do you run to shore or do you stay with me
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How to be a Radical when you take a life so precious
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The first night I did not put my mouth
on your genitals
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Here is a California king size bed that you refused to get comfortable in
as if we would ever have another night together
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as if this is it, I am sorry but I am human
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and if you are reading this
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If you are reading this know that I loved you more than
any human has ever loved another human before
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but I am also a monster
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resigned to live like other monsters for eternity.
Katie Jean Shinkle is the author of one novel, Our Prayers After the Fire, forthcoming from Blue Square Press, and several chapbooks. Other work can be found in or is forthcoming from New Orleans Review, Barrow Street, Third Coast, FLAUNT Magazine, and elsewhere. She is a doctoral candidate in creative writing at the University of Denver.