memento mori with cherry lip gloss

memento mori with cherry lip gloss

By Grace Sleeman

oh, I cry on my birthday each year. how much farther

must I grow from my mother? not only that – another

ring on the tree trunk? or maybe my strawberries

didn’t last the night – I forgot to put them in the fridge,

and now they’re furred and shriveling. I was planning

on putting them on my cake. all of my plans – useless!

such is my birthday mourning. another year, and another

opportunity gone by to forgive myself the mistakes I’ve made.

another notebook closed, the pages full of teenage yearning.

I am twenty-five years old and still I feel the fizzy

elation of painting my lips slick and shiny with cherry-

            flavored gloss, red-tinted, just-bitten. the erotic tug

           of a lollipop sucked between tongue and cheek, bubble-

      gum center – crack the sugar shell, rip that shit off the

                              stick – I blow a bubble, I let you pop it with a glitter-

lacquered fingernail. glass bottles of Coca-Cola with the

                   sweat collecting on your fingers. it’s my birthday! we’ll 

   cut the cake with the buck knife my dad gave me,         lick

                         the frosting out of the serrated teeth. I just cut the moldy

parts off the strawberries and now you pick a slice from 

                  the top of the cake and lay it atop your tongue. you and I,

      we’re just wheeling through the years – red polish on our

                           toenails, skirts tangled in our shins. you’re trying to teach me

how to make a flower crown                    with dandelions we picked

                     earlier, but the stems keep splitting – my fingers sticky

                        with the bitter dandelion milk, collecting pollen. In the back

of your boyfriend’s Jeep, I roll the window down; I close

my watering eyes.                  on my knees, a mess of dandelions.