Amazon Prime

My best friend from high school lends me her password

so I can watch something about our dead movie star princess unavailable elsewhere.

There’s peanut brittle my friend bought, saying to me, don’t tell my husband,

           but it’s so delicious.

I smile seeing the same silhouette boots she wore when we were girls.

A team of models all seem to have raided her closet,

her kind of purple and green V-necks, lug boots. Y’all are crazy.

I think of the movie star princess answering an interview question:

Well they say love comes when you’re not looking or how about this:

You’re not looking and it never comes.


Maybe you can get lucky, have someone who knows when you are about to catch

your old hoodie sleeve on fire, who knows the catastrophe of the mind

will spring a dream on you so fierce you cry

at all the deer and the dead mothers in water after you wake.

 

Here I can watch something about our dead movie star princess unavailable elsewhere;

What we were when girls, passing notes in class

sarcastic and full of disregard for what adults passed off

           as meaning, or the future.

This dream of normal we declined, hurdled, or missed.

 

There’s a beautiful winner I know who makes the most of leaving New York City

to be in bluegrass. She and my friend and I, all of us—Kentucky girls

now leading East Coast lives and vice versa—

we click the same way, get the same way the things we need:

boots that keep out subway slush, the real candy

that used to be promised on the label of cans

out of which toy snakes sprang,  

candy all the pretend grandmothers

on television seemed to keep.

 
Cynthia Arrieu-King

Cynthia Arrieu-King lives in Philadelphia. Her work will have appeared this year in Crazyhorse, TriQuarterly, and Poetry. Her books include People are Tiny in Paintings of China and Manifest. 

cynthiaarrieuking.blogspot.com

http://www.cynthiaarrieuking.blogspot.com
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A Disorder of Written Expression