Photograph by Michael Howarth (2023)
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You are sixteen, going about your day
on Instagram, on Percocet, maybe
Vicodin, pantyhose taut and straining
with ice around your medically unwise mouth,
he in South Dakota or something. You think
you like him, he your second boyfriend
of ten days, who asked while on top
of his car to be Facebook official,
after waiting for exactly 11:11
one week post-Homecoming. It is your first time
as the dumper, two years after the first
boy parted ways on 4/20 in a field
between your school’s gendered divisions,
just months before the next will never call you
because of trust issues he will claim to have
had since the day he was born.

It’s a long weekend in October, Columbus
Day, and the opioids make you want
to start some shit. His IG bio reads Home
is wherever I’m with you, Jenny
and you may not know much, like
what day it is or how many teeth you have
but you know your name
is not Jenny.

It becomes your favorite story for strangers:
the boy who emailed you three pages of apology
formatted like a DBQ because he allegedly blacked
out in the woods and posted another girl’s name
on the Internet. You imagine saying that sentence aloud
to a Dickensian orphan, to someone dying
of the Black Plague, to yourself
as a child. You imagine it as a Hallmark
made-for-TV movie, with a name like
Solutions Not to Lose You or Best Regards or
Still Working On It :\ or something else
ripped straight from the regretful Microsoft Word doc,
and Sam Page would play Doug, except nobody would ever
believe a face like Sam Page’s could be named
something like Doug, or that he could be seventeen,
or that your relationship began and ended
in two different Starbucks, less than two
weeks apart.

Regardless, he does and it did, and it’s not you
but Anne Hathaway who, after coming
off the opioids from wisdom teeth extraction,
enters the Starbucks on 45th & Peoria to meet a sheep-
ish Doug (Sam Page), lets him buy her a peppermint
hot chocolate and toss around clichés like
I was hacked and I’m praying
we can work this out and Jenny’s just some girl
I met in an online chat roulette site, I’ll block her
on Kik right now, and it’s Anne Hathaway who fucks
off to her mom’s 2007 Nissan Murano, shoves it
into Drive, and laughs all the way home.
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