skin and everyone drinking or laughing
parties aren’t so bad it’s just that I’m older now
and angrier or less angry and I worry I’m going crazy
because I’m trapped by my landlords who won’t leave
and I don’t want to see them or talk to them and I don’t want them to see me
so I’ve barricaded all the windows and even my plants are starting to suffer
but I spy on them
and their adorable middleclass kids using walkie-talkies
in the reflection in my toaster oven
because my breath is stuck in my throat until
they drive away for the day in their silver Prius
disposable coffee cups placed on the car top and the doors flung open
waiting for the little disorderly family and the little Manhattanite doggie
to climb in though we’re not allowed to even have a cat or gerbil or turtle here
I’m always getting myself into these situations
and I think about all the parties I’ve ever been to which is quite a few
from the fancy Democratic fundraisers in Upper Eastside arm-trophy
Whitney Board of Directors apartments for small-town Maine island politicians
hallways speckled with tiny unhung Basquiats and Lady Pinks leaning
against the baseboards
to the ones where I was the server of tiny hamburgers on buns
with my hair pulled back and my biggest faking-it lead-red-lipped smile
plying calories to skinny women who refused
to even meet my eyes
to the ones where I was throwing up on the way to the bathroom
and the ones where my two
middle-school friends and I played Boggle til midnight
and I wonder sometimes
if I’ve come very far at all
since that time I got stuck in the coatroom
at a party outside of Boston twenty years ago. I sat there for hours,
a dictionary open in my lap.
When people came to search for their jackets,
sometimes we entered into an intimacy. They were lonely too.

(by Becca Shaw Glaser, first published in Columbia Journal, November 2016)