Only Worth Living If Somebody is Loving You
(After Lana del Rey)
Bad girls like I used to be,
lipstick askew, dark blue
pockets underneath our sunglasses
at night, sun dresses in snow-slurry,
wanting worms in our tequila,
car bombs in our bellies.
Playing our lives like a video game,
these bodies not our bodies,
these the characters we operate,
sweaty palms on joysticks,
wishing your strong-armed boy shapes were ours
or wishing you would see past our avatars
or wishing you would pop like zits
and die in explosions of fluid.
I won’t apologize for us, star-drunk
in parking lots, but I will say,
it could all have been better.
I could have fed you honey in my spit
and wiped the makeup off my split lip.
We could have abandoned the words
“bad” and “girl” with the other useless skins:
dripping chrysalises on the cold asphalt.
Heaven is a place where everybody understands each other.
(After Lana del Rey)
Bad girls like I used to be,
lipstick askew, dark blue
pockets underneath our sunglasses
at night, sun dresses in snow-slurry,
wanting worms in our tequila,
car bombs in our bellies.
Playing our lives like a video game,
these bodies not our bodies,
these the characters we operate,
sweaty palms on joysticks,
wishing your strong-armed boy shapes were ours
or wishing you would see past our avatars
or wishing you would pop like zits
and die in explosions of fluid.
I won’t apologize for us, star-drunk
in parking lots, but I will say,
it could all have been better.
I could have fed you honey in my spit
and wiped the makeup off my split lip.
We could have abandoned the words
“bad” and “girl” with the other useless skins:
dripping chrysalises on the cold asphalt.
Heaven is a place where everybody understands each other.
Briar Ripley Page is a writer and visual artist currently based in Central Pennsylvania. They have previously had work published in beestung magazine, Prismatica magazine, and the Random Sample Review, among others. You can find them online at briarripleypage.xyz, and their Twitter handle is @flameswallower. Briar used to hitchhike, and doesn’t really miss it.