Ranney Campbell

Drippy Burger Sick

 

The big burger with that mayo and red onions and tomato slipping and sweet piquant pickles and doughy buns so thick makes me sick so good at the time of the eating but empty really just taste on my tongue squishy some sort of warm luxury, except the crispy lettuce

but just iceberg
not romaine
I will pay.

And the beer wasn’t so fine I’d rather have a nice chai latte or green tea with honey but it wasn’t for the taste but the buzz and for the checking-out-of-this-life for a while and getting rid of that exerted smile-act I put on like a habit to keep me

from crashing
all the way
down.

Substitution of the actual with delusion is good and can play in your mind it’s a useful device a way to pretend to go blind to the real world and say it will be okay you can say to yourself that you will have success and live there for a time and get through another day,

and another day,
and another day,
then another.

It would be so fun to play with you again but we haven’t played in so long the fun is gone it’s all been too much talk about future falls no future of love or at all and about love or the lack thereof or how you have none and all that round and round impalpable you never-ending insist on bringing into the conversation.

I want to go back to before
I became open
and ruined it all.

It used to just be
dripping lurid jest
and sparking intellect

if I could go back
not submit
not consider that

     partner

yours,
                           future

Weeping cheese dissolved in my mouth leaving me hungry numbed like cheap beer that tasted like shit but drank fast for the drunk ‘til I passed out cold now hungover and fat I want to go back but I can’t so what do I do with you I do nothing with you and you can add me to your list of women who longed but I can’t add to you to my list of men I wanted for friends who only wanted to fuck me.

 

Ranney Campbell is from St. Louis, Missouri, but lives in Southern California. Her chapbook, Pimp, is published by Arroyo Seco Press and other work has appeared in Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Hummingbird: Magazine of the Short Poem, ONE ART, Storm Cellar (forthcoming), and elsewhere.