Poetry By Paige Passantino
Sugar Baby Sonnet
Someone in the psych ward told me
I looked like Lady Gaga, plus, who wouldn’t
buy a book about fucking? Julia went down the drain
in order for Charli to brat between her x’s.
We wore green all summer. I puked up
my freshman year in a hospital bed and woke up
to someone saying but you seem so happy?
My party trick: all those nights out dancing.
The next time in the ward, I was given a packet
about substance abuse. The most helpful thing
about it was the staple. Like tying a knot with
a cherry stem, one learns to tweeze those suckers
out of paper, build an arsenal of tiny weapons.
I’ve always been clever like that, daddy told me so.
Fury
Father’s control resulted
in me a fury, a rash
inclination towards the wrongness
of things, late nights, slipping
from the window at dusk and back
in at dawn, a doll’s hair chopped, blonde locks
scuffy and stuck up after their cutting,
my balled fists, my stomping feet, and then
his stolen car.
But why not, when he took
each liberty to find the things
that made me funny,
my awkward shape, my crying
that he mimicked at the bedroom door—
his knuckles in grass, drunken
fits, my refusal. I ran,
ended up with a man in his image,
an elbow sometimes at my throat, a fierce
madness, and love—how I never
found it. How the wrongness failed
to warn me that when I’d find my father
at the cliff, he’d have jumped already,
and I’d stand there, screaming,
still scared he’d push me.
