Brandi Homan

I

Games We Play

Once when we were little and had sleepovers we invented a game. One girl was locked out of the room and the rest of us rated her, on a scale of 1 to 10, as a friend. Most of us averaged around 7, 7.5.

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When we were older, we spent a lot of time thinking about how cruel we were as kids, how we kicked our friends out of the room and judged them on a scale of 1 to 10. Kids are just cruel we’d think, shaking our heads.

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Not long ago, working in Corporate America, we filled out a series of forms. Each form was a performance evaluation for each coworker. This is what’s known as a “360-degree review.” We weren’t that cruel after all we thought, shaking our heads.

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Working in Corporate America, we distract ourselves by watching television shows. We like the ones where the characters are just like us, or the “us” we’d like to be. We spend a lot of time thinking about which Sex in the City character we are, deciding whether we should buy “I’m a Miranda” t-shirts. Except no one really wants to be her, and we don’t know any Samanthas.

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We used to distract ourselves by watching Friends, pre-Sex in the City. Which of us is a Rachel? A Monica? None of us could be Phoebe cause she used to live on the streets like the people in back of our building. All of us wanted to sleep with Joey, really, though we said Ross.

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When we were little and had sleepovers distracting ourselves used to be much easier. Someone wanted to be Ariel in Footloose, those red boots, or the blonde girl who drove the car. Even then, we could always find a Sarah Jessica Parker.

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Sarah Jessica, man. She just seemed so nice. We’d give her a 9. An 8.5 for sure.

Hi Pretty

You down at me sideways, underwing, close-

bodied. A faulty synapse, incorrigibility.

The anhedonia is killing me, matching

wrong songs to memories. Let’s be

ombibulous. I’ll brush your hair

straight back.

The best day split open mahogany,

saw butterflies. God and the like. We pin

corkboard, choropleth. Repeat: Meet me

at the xylotheque. We must live worth living.

Watching you button your jeans in the dark

is my only morning.

Drugstore Cowgirl

Do they really put shards of fiberglass in lip balm?

Pastiche, pastiche. Collage away.

I am not a poem-writer. I am a poem-MAKER! Cut

and paste. Where are the strings? Blow me a kiss,

Babe, let’s go to Walgreen’s. I’m out of mascara,

need to make me some masks. My eyes. My eyes!

Oh, the man in the ushanka. They’ve brought

too much change!

Brandi Homan is the author of Hard Reds, forthcoming from Shearsman Books, and Two Kinds of Arson, a chapbook from dancing girl press. She earned her MFA from Columbia College Chicago and is editor-in-chief of Switchback Books.