alyssandra tobin / poem

so spit it out

I am always in a themed hotel in the pirate room my teeth flashing gold. I lay down beside no one & wake up trapped in the computer again. A virus. A bug. I eat candy & fantasize about old hollywood. I want to love one person til I die & I want it to feel good fucking you feels like fucking the moon. Imagine! There’s always a siren & a crater. A man speaks to me & then another one does too. The vagaries. I lived in a town by the sea I did & I saw so many men in hats from LL Bean. A guy died up on the balcony. That cop shot himself in the Starbucks parking lot. The ocean comes in & out five hundred times a day. I drive high without planning to I feel so bad after, the sirens are after me. Most people never go to jail in their lives but I know I deserve it. Bad poet bad girl bad case of the heebie jeebies. & a laugh. Do I write tidy poems oh god the cool poets certainly think so. I write for my own damn snakeskin self. I love you baby I love you despite a world that would scoff at my heart 

---

Alyssandra Tobin was grown on Boston's North Shore. Her chapbook, PUT EYES ON ME NOT LIKE A CURSE, was published by Quarterly West in 2022. Find her poems in Poetry Northwest, Puerto del Sol, Salt Hill, Grist, Gigantic Sequins, Banshee, and elsewhere.