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Beanie Baby Feb 2014
I don’t know when the alarm goes off, but when I come after lunch to get my books it’s probing, pulsing, beckoning through the dorm. It does not fluctuate like mine, which crashes and recedes-waves on a wall. It chips away at my sanity with the reliability of the aorta. I lose a sliver each second I am not crushing the power button of the dorm clock. I cannot be the only person who frequents this hallway during the day, or can no one hear its grinding wails? What Lucifer enthusiast set this alarm when no girl should need waking? I cowered today when I heard it seeping under my door, this immovable constant in my life. I believe now that it only sounds for me. Maybe I have forgotten something and this is the sound of it struggling inside a mental prison. Maybe one day I should let it ring, and ring, and ring, until I wake up.
Beanie Baby Feb 2014
This is the thing about girls who don’t believe they’re good enough for certain guys. A girl can spend her entire life being just average. Good grades, fine at sports, just pretty enough, but they’ve never been perfect. It’s a thing they come to accept about themselves. So when a man comes by who is always three steps ahead of the girl in everything they do and they declare their love for the girl, she’s lost. She’s hooked Adonis and she doesn’t know how. The man tells them they’re perfect and they can’t accept that about themselves because they’ve always been just enough. The man’s love for them buoys them up to a level they’ve never been at before but even then they know they’re on a pedestal, not standing on their own two feet. No matter how perfect the man tells them they are they can’t believe it about themselves, and it hurts. It hurts to be a star in someone’s eyes when you can’t see it in yourself. So they become bitter in their bliss. They let the knowledge that they’ll never see what he sees in them boil inside them. Fester. And they do petty childish things in their bitterness. It becomes a part of them, and then an opinion about them until petty bitterness consumes them. And people who said all along that she was never good enough for him start to sound like prophets instead of jealous liars. Then they are lost. And the man notices, he holds her at arms length and sees she is no longer the person he fell in love with. He sees her self-consciousness is now a consuming reality and he doesn’t know what to do. He shares with her what he feels and is clawed to pieces by accusations and resentment. The vows he made to always love her wring him dry. Do they still apply if the person has changed? If they’re no longer the person he fell in love with? He doesn’t believe it. He leaves not a wife, but a stranger. And the stranger who was once a star in someone’s eyes is average again and she breaks herself down. She tells herself she was right and she was never good enough for him. She doesn’t recognize how much she’s changed. She doesn’t see how she squashed her angelic qualities with self-deprecation. She couldn’t avoid it, and neither could he. To ride on someone’s coattails who is always larger than you makes you smaller than you ever were before.
Beanie Baby Feb 2014
Behind the double oak doors at 71 Horatio Street, lower west side, there’s a pink striped hallway with a checkerboard floor. Up the stairs to the right there’s a corner bathroom with a drip in the whitewashed stucco ceiling that will start when you take a long shower upstairs. The window has rusty bars over it and looks out over a backyard made of brick, with potted plants. Past the corner bathroom there’s an apartment with long rooms and creamy walls. This was my house,, but across the apartment, past the corner bathroom, through the striped hallway, and down the stairs to the left was the entrance to my home.
**** and Liz Merryman to this day live in the bottom apartment at 71 Horatio Street, lower west side. Between each spindle on the carpeted staircase down is a wind up toy from ****’s antique collection. They still work, but my sister and I may be the only kids that he’s ever let touch them. Beneath the staircase is a jar of butterscotch that magically refills whenever someone takes one, or five, or sometimes even ten.. The living room in their house is where all the living goes on. The kitchen is in the living room, recipe’s hanging from the ceiling on bit’s of faded cardstock or stationary. The dining area is tucked between the spice jar and the bookcase,  a glass coffee table from which **** and Liz have eaten their way through thirty years of marriage. Out the sliding door is the brick backyard. If you sit on the faded stones and watch the unrestricted ivy wrapping around the potted fruit trees you can almost imagine you are in London, and that under the brick there is real soil not a subway station. I paddled my way through childhood in that backyard on 71 Horatio Street, lower west side, and if I cried when I left New York City, I cried for **** and Liz, and the apartment at the bottom of the stairs.
Beanie Baby Feb 2014
On a fine and sunny morn
On the third or fourth of may
A boggart and a bumblebee
Went to town to play

They met up with a mugglewump
But little did he say
So the boggart and the bumblebee
Bowed and went away

They found their friends the Fuglywhits
And asked them out to tea
They bribed them with jam crumpets
But the Fuglywhits weren’t free

Much dejected did they carry on
The boggart and the bee
The fine and sunny morning
Was filled with little glee

And then the boggart came upon
A wondrous revelation
That put their moping frowns
Into quick cessation

They need no other colleagues
To have collaborations
Two could play together
In satisfied elation

And so the fine associates
Proceeded to be gay
On that fine and sunny morn
On the third or fourth of may
Beanie Baby Feb 2014
A poem you’ve never heard

Baby’s friend said she was fat so
She stripped it off like onion skins
Cigarettes took a layer
Aderol the next
A bout with bulimia the final
She was bony and skinny and Baby’s friend
Said she looked good
But her clothes hung like bags
Her muscles felt like string chesese
*** wasn’t even fun because her bones
Bit like iron
So Baby put on weight
Like comfy sweaters
A superhero’s cape
Her friend sneered and snorted
But Baby stopped caring and in the end
She was *****
She was bold
She was beautiful

— The End —