Collage No. 3
by Olivia Nyah Rose
Polaroid No. 1
Where the fuck is my birth certificate.
Polaroid No. 2
In my dream, I visited Mac at the gas station. His boss spoke to him sternly, with a voice raised slightly over standard. I guess he fucked up something with a lotto ticket. He had tears in his eyes as he looked up in his boss’s eyes and said, “I’m sorry, Dad.” Over coffee, I treat him as though this Freudian workplace slip about his dead father actually happened. It takes me until we’re done with our eggs to remember it was just a dream.
Same day, nap dream
I killed Sal. It was nice.
Polaroid No. 0
When I was still young enough to wrap my whole hand around my mom’s pointer finger, I threw up at my first sleepover. It was at Samantha’s house. Her mom made us homemade pretzels, like the ones you get at the mall. We helped her twist the dough into a shape resembling a broken heart and baked them.
We didn’t have the kind of salt the mall uses (you know, the coarse and pearly white crystals), so her mom used the shaker of iodized salt from the table. They tasted like drowning in the ocean, and,
within the hour, my mom picked me up just for me to continue throwing up in her car. I still can’t put salt on anything without a lump giving birth to itself in the pit of my throat. Yet, somehow, I refuse to acknowledge that I can still feel his hands everywhere they should have never been.
Polaroid No. 3
Sal asks the customers if they want any caw-fees with their hash. I try not to fantasize about turning his nose into a crater in the center of his face as I’m walking to my table that just sat down. Turns out, thinking about trying to not think of something is just as potent as allowing the thought to run free. When I walk by him, I’m reminded that I am at least three inches taller than him. This does not help.
Polaroid No. 4
I can never tell if my plants are dying because I am overwatering them, or if they are dying because I am not giving them enough water. I wish they would tell me what they want. Then again, if someone asked me if I needed more or less of something in order to survive, I don't think I would have an answer for them.
Polaroid No. 5
The mud in between my toes feels so good, I forget where I left my shoes. So now I am walking home on the side of the road barefoot. Nobody is looking at me but I can feel their eyes even when they’re not. Maybe it’s coming from the clouds. Maybe they have faces.
Polaroid No. 6
I’ve been working as a waitress at this restaurant for four years longer than Sal has. But, when he started working here he said straight to my face, “Do you know the proper protocol for greeting a table?” I want to take him to the vet and put him down.
Polaroid No. 7
Mac and I get stoned using a Poland Springs water bottle from nine months ago, and a wrench bit we stole from Lowes waterfalling over a quart Chinese food container. There is a two-foot gap out my window between the sill and my neighbor’s roof. I consider crawling out and laying flat on the rooftop ice with bare skin as Mac and I laugh over the way our daddy issues have such different contour lines. We are on two different sides of the same fucked up coin.
H2oh-no
I know that I am made of water. Mostly water. Logistically I know this, but it feels like I am made of something darker. Earth maybe. Stoneware at the very lightest. But I feel more like a dark terracotta or a red clay. Not viscous enough to get stuck in any particular positions. Also not liquid enough to be entirely free flowing. It is dark, but at times creates such a fine slip it is almost transparent. Sometimes it’s filling my lungs, other times it fogs up my brain. There are even times where I am convinced it is dripping out of my nose, and the cashier at the grocery store working the nightshift is too out of it to say anything to me.
????
I don’t know where to get a replacement social security card. Maybe I could just start my entire identity over?
Polaroid No. 8
If I see one more man on the street with a scraggly grey ponytail that has a full-moon shaped bald spot peeking out of the top, my cortisol levels are going to be at the same level as a single mom lifting a car off her only child.
Polaroid No. 9
There’s a loud buzzing noise that seeps into my ears in the white spaces between the words my pottery teacher is speaking to me about the techniques he uses to throw a bowl. I put my elbow on my desk and rest my ear in the palm of my now supported hand. In this moment, the buzzing drowns out any talk of creation. Instead, there is a reverberation between my temples that takes me out of the place I physically exist and transports me to the void I seem to perpetually crave. Maybe the clay is too stiff today.
Polaroid No. 10
In an internet deep dive, I find a picture of Sal and his fiancée. She’s taller than him by a long shot, so in his Venmo profile picture her elbow is resting on his shoulder. After this, I drift off into the most
restful night’s sleep I’ve had in months knowing that I would be able to fuck this man’s wife if given the opportunity.
Garbage Town
It was finally time to throw out my dried out Ivy today. I imagine throwing the empty pot off the fire escape to shatter, but instead I place it on my bedside table as a homage to growth.