two poems

by Hailey Paetzel

Homecoming Queen

September and no new books or fresh ink. I pretend Texas’s lack of vegetation is foreign to me as the plane touches ground. I pose as a native New Yorker to hide the insecurity that the Dallas skyline screams.

We are at America’s Drive In, and she and I stop mid laughter. Absent minded. Now hyperaware. Hyperbolic. Hypersensitize. My hands shake at the wheel, and I feel disdain for my clinical reaction. But she and I played on the monkey bars in our First Communion dresses. She understands. Brain matter on concrete. Pus from a laceration on parking lot tar. By the Whole Foods, high school love rots.

Home becomes hellscape. I call you without conscious volition the same night. High school lover. Hot coffee. Carnival ride. Marshmallow clouds. Half-used tampon. Fast food lemonade. Lysergic communion wafer. How could you still be so fruitless after six years of my tears filling the lakes of your fissures? You pretend I am an audio hallucination through the phone.

Age seventeen releases in me. Protein bonds. Fruit punch smoke and stimulant cocktails in a bathroom stall. Pen on saddle shoes. I hate it all. I hate the angles. They never took me. New York is overflowing. Texas has plenty. Commercial flight Wi-Fi is a call for help. Just take me.

Hildegard

I dream of the year 1326. The fireplace is my Videodrome. I long for a sexless appliance. A sexless combustion. Absence of technicolor glow. Every man on the screen lives as a roadside attraction. Users shoot up their veins with liquid crystal. I am sick from the restless hum. I am sick from others’ free stories. Free fantasies at the touch of a button the pop-up ad tells me. Report this ad only if glitching. Ignore for adolescent nudity.  

I discovered Manufacturing Consent at age nineteen through undergraduate anthropology. Little did I know of Chomsky’s hidden elite irrationalities. And four years later, in depths of the New York City, I encountered first-hand sources who marioneted these horrors. But my words were now up in the museum of natural history. I have studied humans and now wish for a change of genes. No equilibrium to be reached in our DNA sequencing. Yet, billionaire men study eugenics in Tiki bars. Prohibition pre-code sensuality.

Why can’t a record-clean male fall victim to unspeakable wrongdoings? Why must these men’s faces be preserved as if they are Venetian putti? At night, I visualize the chains others could wear if we were lucky enough. It is a horrible ache to want their glass skin slashed. But I need to see some blood split outside of the girls whose reflections I recognize. Painting as fencing. Our blood reveals itself in little droplets of iridescent dew and honey. But it is even more beautiful on the ones who are unexpecting.

Does your plane dream of electric sex? Ankles tied with etherCON cables. Titian’s white bull’s eyes. Unlike us, men like you are allowed to scream. Not forced to carve their own mouths. The words painted on your bodies do not humiliate. You do not pray for engine failure. For an emergency exit. “Literature only” burned onto the backs of our irises. I try to keep them open when the stewardess approaches. She offers me an oxygen mask filled with Rohypnol.

Men destroy their bodies delicately. Why can I not chain smoke with dignity? This aloof nature they project is a privilege I have studied since the playgrounds and the karate camps. In my bunkbed dreaming of Casablancas on the cover of Dad’s magazine. In 2006, I was a stronger girl. I was not afraid of becoming a father. The security of the supermodel is an illusion girls are taught by age ten. Sometimes it still creeps into me when my eyes are sold to the screen.

Photo of Hailey Paetzel

BIO: Hailey Paetzel is a New York-based writer and artist. She graduated from the Savannah College of Art and Design with a degree in writing and later earned her master's in museum anthropology at Columbia University. Hailey has been writing since childhood and was influenced by her playwright father. She has been published in Adanna Literary Journal, Glass Mountain, and Delude Magazine.