Bruiser

2) Cody’s only my half brother, but he doesn’t know it.
I once knew his father, but not his last name,
Or where to find him.

3) Men were constantly falling in love with my mother,
They thought she took away their innermost pain.
But that was actually me.

4) We once joined a cult that eventually changed its name
To The Sentinels of Brewster.
I don’t want to talk about it.

5) My mother developed ovarian cancer.
But I couldn’t take it away;
I have no ovaries.

6) She left us with Uncle Hoyt when she first got sick;
She knew if it spread to other organs,
I would get it, too.

7) She called me every day until she died.
I still talk to her once in a while.
When no one’s listening.

8) Someday I want the government to find me,
And pay me millions of dollars
To sit near the president.

9) Someday I want to be on a Wheaties box,
Or at least on the cover
Of TIME magazine.

10) Someday I want to wake up and be normal.
Just for a little while.
Or forever.

27) ORIFICE

With neck hairs standing on end, secret panic
tripping in my brain, I cross into the petri dish of
despair, the chasm of chaos, the school
cafeteria,

Where larval troglodytes of blue and white collar
breeds practice the vicious social skills of
peacock preening and primate posturing amid
the satanic smell of institutional ravioli,

When I reluctantly join the line for food, I avoid all
eyes but notice, across the cafeteria, Tennyson
and his girlfriend, Katrina,

Who cling to each other like statically charged
particles, and I wonder if Bronte might cling to me
in the same way, even while under the judgmental
glare of the hormonal high school petting zoo, if
she didn’t avoid the cafeteria on principle,

When a hairless ape named Ozzy O’Dell forces his
way in front of me as if I’m nothing more than a
piece of soy-stretched meat lurking in the ravioli
and calls me the nickname he would much rather
call the special ed kids, if he could get away with it.

“Hey, Short-bus, make some room.”
“No. The end of the line’s back there.”
“I don’t think so—we’re in a hurry.”
“So am I.”
“For what? Freak practice?”

While he laughs at his own idiotic joke, I think how, in
the past, I would just let it go, but meeting Bronte
has changed me, and I’m boldly standing up for
myself in places that used to give me vertigo, so
as the lazy-eyed lunch lady hands Ozzy a plate of
ravioli, I tell him how shaving his head for swim
team was not a good idea, because it