Elizabeth is a queer/non-binary writer and editor based in Charleston, South Carolina. Their work has been published in Emerge Literary Journal and Barren Magazine, and they are a first reader for Ploughshares. Their debut chapbook, For Love, and for Cruelty was published in January 2020 by WordTech Editions.
You may also listen to Elizabeth read their poem here.
Fry Day
The graffiti on the bathroom wall
begins to glitter—
something cosmic
about drugs and bathrooms.
The DJ plays trance
and not to be snobs
but it isn’t our scene, so we smoke
and slip away, exiting the bus
thirty blocks early to stroll
and the cars shine chromatic
jewel beetle green violet
the grass spot lit by streetlamps
and the talk noise I always
think is so prophetic
rolls right out of us.
The through line—
the drugs, the anatomy of the drugs
the nose, the tongue,
the lungs, the heroic throat
that swallows each
poison down with such
precision, the gut,
I am sorriest to the gut.
Anyway, we’re black holes dressed
as planets and the weather
stays the same, never changes
doesn’t help the brain, the other
part I forgot to mention, the brain
so overworked and retains
so little as hard workers
seem to do.
My brain fries
(remember when I said
I’d print a shirt of fries
that read Fry Day?)
when we gather
for pride and lounge around Civic Center
it’s bad vibes, I can tell
when I leave and even
during pride men catcall me the same
because safe spaces aren’t real
and I guess I should take the hint
but I take a hit of acid and a million
other things instead and try
to pretend at the after party that
“Blurred Lines” isn’t playing
in a “safe space”
and I try to unhear
the girl retching on the bathroom floor—
the gut, the throat, the choke—
the bouncer busts down the door
(it doesn’t shimmer this time)
and dumps her on the street
like a greased sack of fast food
a Hefty slime slick bag of trash
and we are flipping, we
are smashed but we know
the hospital has a second chance
and the throat gags
in the backseat of the Lyft—
I am sorriest to the driver.
The funny thing about Fry Days is
that pain doesn’t just
disappear with fear
it shifts with the walls that breathe
the branches of trees
that all sway in the pleasance
the graffiti looping in self indulgence
so yes, I admit, I go home
and take stock of my anatomy—
the nose, the tongue,
the lungs, the gut doesn’t want
to be a hero anymore and
when the brain loops
she could be me, I retch
and expel the cosmic grief.
More from Elizabeth on the context of Fry Day
This piece was important to me for a number of reasons. I'm now sober, but this took place during a time in my life when I was in my early twenties, was scraping by in San Francisco, and was an alcoholic partying to avoid dealing with trauma, social anxiety, etc. There was a lot I learned being an intoxicated queer femme who often went out alone--that there was nowhere to escape cis men because the whole world is theirs, that people like me were often seen as disposable, that the LGTBQ+ community was still not as much of a community as I wished. I was trying to make sense of it all when my brain had the least sense to operate off of. The particular story detailed in this poem was a turning point for me. It was the final push I needed to start moving toward sobriety and be better, for myself, and for others.
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