when my pretty cousin walked in. Sometimes
it’s like a fly lands on your neck
and you swat it, but it isn’t a fly, it’s big,
and it’s not dead, you feel squirming pointy bits
and the sticky middle under your hand. Except
that I am you, and I am also the bug.
My cousin didn’t knock because
it wasn’t my bedroom.
The Cogito Ergo Sum Fallacy
There was a girl in Mathematical Logic,
a woman rather, with skirts and cheekbones
and a grownup wool coat. We passed notes about Gödel
and Turing: truths that can never be proved,
logic that twists back against itself,
a mental machine spinning on and on
in an endless loop. One day she said,
“I forgot my gloves. You must think
I’m an idiot,” and pressed her hand to my cheek
so I could feel the warm chill. What I thought was,
“She’s flirting,” and then, “With me? No way!”
What I said was nothing.
The Ipse Dixit Fallacy
The graying hipster asked Kelsey to back up
his spoken-word rant. As she beat out a groove
on her djembe, I was thinking how overrated
the distinction between simile and metaphor is,
how a simile can become a metaphor
the way the plain girl in the movie becomes
the pretty girl just by removing her glasses
and hairpin. The dude said, “Woman is nothing
but a bundle of contradictions, pretty to look at,
dangerous to touch.” I went to the bathroom,
but when I came back he was still talking.
