Thank you for the birthday party at Bliss, and all that entailed: fishnets, bubbles, another birthday girl, leather booths, lycee, martinis, people, tiaras, dancing, noise, burgers and fries at a diner at 4:30 in the morning with a boothful of cops and a server on roller skates.
Thank you for the jewelry, candy necklaces, notebook, chocolates, mixed tapes, scarves, CDs, incense, buttons, rings, calendar, tea.
Thank you for you for the heartfelt, helpful workshop of my poem, and the wink my teacher gave me afterward.
Thank you for the poem.
Thank you for the plethora of cupcakes.
Thank you for the stranger in the fedora and the orange leather jacket who said, with an English accent, as he lit his cigarette, you look very nice.
Thank you, after several sightings of the SATAN car, for the little silver convertible whose license plate read GOOD2GO, especially as I was presently listening to the Dandy Warhols’ “We Used to be Friends,” particularly the line, just let me know when you’re good to go, which has recently become my new Theme Song.
Thank you for my new job at the library, and the papers I am archiving, and the Very Important Poet who wrote the papers, and who left little notes for me, or me as he might have imagined me: library assistant, library girl, brown-haired, furrow-browed, glasses giving her a headache, neat handwriting, hungry, poor, last year’s boots. Very Important Poet, you are not far off, and I get your jokes, and I would like very much to meet you.
Thank you for the movie tonight in the arthouse theatre and the audience: everyone quiet and laughing at the right places (even I laughed and I don’t laugh in theatres), a row of drag queens in front of us. Thank you for Mr. Darcy walking through a field, and for fields, and for Mr. Darcy’s, though I have only read of them in books.
And the book I finished, Joy School.
And the cupcake I ate for breakfast.
Thank for you for the egret, which we mistook for a white crane,
and today, for the three of them, standing on the hillside. I saw.
Today my friend said, you have such encounters with the world.
I should have said, It’s just the world has only recently encountered me.
Let’s do it this year, okay? I’m ready. My work is ready. I’m waiting for you, but I won’t wait forever. It’s time. I feel it. I know it. Let’s do this thing. I’m good to go.
Love always despite that summer,
an awfully serious girl