Becca Klaver

Less Finesse, More Spank

for Tasia   

less Twin Peaks, more Ru Paul’s Drag Race
less velvet, more velour
less Dom Pérignon, more André
less diamond, more zirconia
less UV, more Faux Glow
less sugar, more Splenda
less manchego, more Velveeta
less treadmill, more Skechers Shape-Ups
less café, more Facebook
less grass-fed beef, more T.G.I. Friday’s potato skins
less pitch, more Auto-Tune
&c.                                
​

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Plot Point Two

I love so much to arrive blubbering upon plot point two the part where

the protagonist is driving in the rain or her lover has been unfaithful

or his mother is not really his mother or all three at once It is then when

I clutch my cherry cola and bite down on the straw and am so grateful


for the Hollywood Formula for Syd Field and those men in black glasses


who sat in back rooms tapping cigars charting the hills and valleys of story


I love to anticipate the sad part 60 minutes in when everything seems


hopeless but really you know the rain is manufactured and the hoary


old man in the garret will get his memory back and reveal that the hero’s

mom is really his mom and his best friend’s mom too and all along the love

they’d loved had been tucked like a script inside their cells And when I think

how in life I don’t know when plot points will pour down from above


I tug at my hair and gnarl my eyebrows and offer desperate frantic praise

for the staged break-up under the antique lamppost’s haze No praise

for flat coke and wrinkled straw and the sicksweet ache my stomach gets

warning me of the bad thing that hasn’t come but is coming one of these days
 

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Becca Klaver is the author of the poetry collection LA Liminal (Kore Press, 2010) and the chapbook Inside a Red Corvette: A 90s Mix Tape (greying ghost press, 2009). She holds a BA from the University of Southern California and an MFA from Columbia College Chicago, and is currently a PhD student in Literatures in English at Rutgers University. A founding editor of the feminist poetry press Switchback Books, she is also a member of the VIDA: Women in Literary Arts outreach committee.