blood pt 2  

✧ 2023 Gearhart Poetry Contest Finalist ✧

could you please let the duolingo owl know that we broke up? 

you’re both haunting my spam folder 

and i don’t want your language anymore. 

how do you say “no one should date the embodiment of their id” in [language redacted]? 

you wanted me to scoop out my body’s soil and replace it with yours 

were you surprised or disappointed to find i’m entirely composed of kraft spirals and malaise? 

a bee stung me yesterday

first since childhood and now i’m forced to connect to that 

and i’m feeling homicidal because i’ve stubbed my toe 

and because you told me i had no self respect and you were 

right. 

             now i’d like to be back on that 8 minute flight 

8 hours before you told me that.

contemplating existence as usual over soft leather sheen of ocean surface 

imagining it breaking like pudding skin & cool rush of quick descent 

the freedom of a death at the hands of someone else’s mistake— 

not my problem. 

i thought maybe if i try noticing a new building each morning 

i’d be a better person in a month. 

and at the spa they scrubbed away every skin cell you’ve ever touched 

but when i saw the girls with their mothers, all nude and smiling 

i cried in the jacuzzi—

if i had been those girls, your blood wouldn’t be in mine now.

sometimes i still know what it is to be loved 

when pulling litter clumps from between helpless cat toes 

and when i google “still ok to wear overalls one strap?” i feel a little like i know myself again.

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CAITLIN GILLMETT is a poet & educator based in Hoboken, NJ. A graduate of Boston College, she teaches high school English and writes and performs poetry throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn. Currently, Caitlin is working on her forthcoming chapbook, blood & breakfast, an exploration of intimacy, mundanity, and existentialism.

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