Massgirl

by Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb

Is it cool to dedicate a book to “u know who u ahh”
Do you think the Atlantic Ocean will know I mean it
I am totally massgirl
I can’t help it
I ride with the top down
I listen to Robyn
I will cut a bitch 
I want to be slapped around
Pulled over
Issued a warning
Pulled over again
Spoken to sternly
I am wild to be called “YOUNG LADY”
I want to tumble from the fog of le Wednesday de Thanksgiving
The savagest night in the savagest city
I want to trickle blood from blunt force 
I want my wedding ring to open my lover’s jaw like a book
I want his tongue to read my braille apocalypse
I want Canadians to cower
I want other girls to wobble and puke
I run until my lungs explode
and everyone who rows the Charles can taste the blood 
innard molasses copper dust
I read until the library is empty 
break my face on the Timaeus 
the liquid gildings, the colliding bodies
I want to be a liquid gilding, to edge us all in gold
and burn with hot metal wrath the margins of everything
I smash a bottle of wine on the toilet rim because I have no wine key
drink from the shards
Sit on the bathroom floor
Wait for security to find me

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Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb is a poet, translator, and scholar of postcolonial literature and theory. Her poems and essays have appeared in venues including the Poetry Foundation, the Boston Review, FENCE, Critical Quarterly, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and more. Her scholarly book, Epidemic Empire is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press in late 2020. She teaches at the University of Toronto and lives in New York.