My literary merit is a tweet at 9:01 on Saturday night.
No likes, zero RTs.
The tweet is about goats.
Saturn squares my Aquarius Moon and Venus squares my Cancer Rising.
Every time I look up what my squares mean, I immediately forget what they mean.
I immediately forget your name when we first meet.
I cannot remember names.
Or faces.
I could put Tracey Emin’s “My Bed” to shame.
My ex had a mattress that cost him a thousand dollars.
I left a large circle on the mattress, and my ex called that circle a stain.
Nah, that circle is the moon. That circle echoes tides.
My orgasms are worth more than any mattress.
After we broke up, did my slightly OCD ex buy a new mattress?
If my ex did not buy a new mattress, then the woman he is sleeping with does not know about the moon.
When she is fucking my ex or sleeping in his arms, she does not know echoes of tides are beneath their bodies.
And, if she does know, she is closer to him than I ever was.
Good for her, must be nice. Etcetera, etcetera.
In a dream, I return the key to his house.
In waking life, he had a one-bedroom apartment, and I did not have a key to return.
I broke up with my ex to pursue an MFA in fiction in a small white town.
I moved to this small white town to pursue my dream of writing.
I do not know about this whole writing thing anymore.
Let me rephrase.1
I do not know about the institution of writing anymore.
What is it that Flannery O’Connor said about workshops?
“It’s the blind leading the blind, and it can be dangerous.”
“So many people can now write competent stories that the short story as a medium is in danger of dying of competence.”
Instructors teach Flannery O’Connor in their workshops, and they fail to mention what she thought about them.
I learned what she thought about writing workshops while editing Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Nothing Ever Dies.
Nguyen equates competence with averageness and points out that it reflects mainstream values, which “cannot threaten the literary industry.”
On Facebook, Nguyen posts a link to a New Yorker article: “How Racist Was Flannery O’Connor?”
Maybe one day I will post a New Yorker article: “How Racist Was OSU’s MFA Program?”
Just kidding. The New Yorker only cares about the Iowa workshop.
Tonight on Twitter someone tweets the em dash is named after Emily Dickinson. Ha. Ha.
My high school teacher told our all-girl class that Emily Dickinson became a hermit after being rejected by a male editor, whom she loved.
My high school teacher failed to mention that Dickinson wrote poems during the Civil War.
I read that detail in an interview with Claudia Rankine.
Arguably the Civil War had more of an impact on her poems and her life than a rejection from a male editor even if he held a position of power and she loved him.
Arguable. In her Blaney lecture, Claudia Rankine said, “Emily Dickinson is writing and you wouldn’t know the war was going on.”
A man emailed to say that he watched the Joan Didion documentary and thought of me.
His Twitter handle is @ManicPixieFuckBoi.
I did not fuck Manic Pixie Fuckboi enough.
I masturbate thinking about the sex we had and could have.
I’m begging for his hot sticky cum on my face.
I’m on my knees.
I’m such a good girl.
I have yet to reply to the email.
My orgasms are my reply.
He feels my orgasms on the astral plane.
I told my ex I liked Spaghetti Westerns.
I regret liking them.
I watched a rape scene in a Western while cuddling with my ex on a Saturday night.
I said, I don’t want to watch this anymore, and turned my back to him and the screen.
My ex continued watching the Western on his laptop.
He was drinking whiskey called High West because he can have his myth and drink it, too.
My father loved John Wayne, and my ex loved Clint Eastwood.
I’m not sure I would have continued dating my ex even if I did not move to the small white town.
On a Saturday night, I am alone and online. I am a girl at night on the internet.2
I’m looking at neon signs created by Sam Durant.
I post a photo of a bright red neon sign with black lettering on Insta.
In the photo, two white men in black suits stand in front of the red neon sign.
They stand in front of giant black lettering that reads “End White Supremacy,” and their pale faces glow red.
My body is burning from the inside.
One day I’m going to know what to do with all this heat, and you know what that means.3