No One Wants To Fall In Love At Chipotle
can i just be not good enough and still get fed
a “story” that almost rights and we who are
enamored of violence, how do you wake up
in the morning not adrift in despair; perhaps
it’s just time to forget about being loveable.
we’re starving and want everything, America
fast and casual, i’m owed it & i was a victim
of expectations like i always think if i customize
right ingredients maybe i won’t erase to hungry ghosts
of my country tis of thee: intimacy, a constant queue
a crisis of contact absurd: imagine the point
of ever eating with another person again.
in this assembly of half to extra to let me build
some small slip of survive, like i can admit to being
desperate. i can admit to the shame of arriving
and needing someone to tell me how to make
it to the end of the line
but to ask me to feel disposable. plastic chairs
and tables. my heart, exhausted. what if i was going
through the motions too; the problem of consumption
is a lack of boundaries. we want most to ask, who
is safe but the only person asking what we want
is a stranger. when there’s no risk we don’t dodge
their questions. we feel satisfied that the answer
to the hardness of this life must be a combination
of pick and choose until we have made
the last of anyone we will ever need.
Megan Burns is the publisher at Trembling Pillow Press (tremblingpillowpress.com). She is the co-director of the New Orleans Poetry Festival (nolapoetry.com) and has been hosting the Blood Jet Poetry Reading Series in New Orleans for the last six years. She has three books Memorial + Sight Lines (2008), Sound and Basin (2013) and Commitment (2015) published by Lavender Ink. Her recent chapbooks include: her Twin Peaks chap, Sleepwalk With Me (Horse Less Press, 2016), Beneath the Drift (Red Mare, 2019) and FUCK LOVE: I’m sorry someone hurt you (Shirt Pocket Press, 2019). Her fourth collection, BASIC PROGRAMMING, was published by Lavender Ink in 2018. Her forthcoming collection is called PLURALITY.
