Daniela Olszewska & Carol Guess
How to Be Friends with a Lesbian
Two girls fight over a cabbage in the market. They tear its leaves out one-by-one.
This is the same place hedgehogs come from. When they were little, you kept them about your person.
Pockets are just holes with safety nets sewn in.
So much for the blushing bite.
Anyone can thread a needle. A rich man living in Tent City is indistinguishable from his tent.
I think I might be the poor man’s double entendre.
Love is the most overused abstraction, the alphabet’s version of pastel blue.
Dip in, dip out. How to spasm with the library + such floating over your head?
Dancing With the Stars is cute, but do you have to do it outside my room?
The frequency gets set up to solar eclipse.
Reality TV is nothing new. People have been peeping since the serpent snaked the garden.
Thank-you for your support.
I understand how plumbing works. You root around under the house. Come up with dirty boots.
With a Venus smear on the bottom of the right sole.
How to Avoid Leaving DNA at a Scene or How to Descend a Staircase Gracefully
Do the dirty deed.
Do it like you planned it. For a black or white photo-op.
Set a small fire for the smell of singed crosshair. Affect an air of eccentric.
Wear a peignoir trimmed in Siamese cattails.
You are a bump off doll with a sweet safe-cracker. Clam shut, dame-dish.
The low-down is you’re about to get clipped anyway.
Tiptoe, socked soles slippery-subtle. Sock it to time-lapse, camera cracked.
Think of the catwalk, pivot and moue. Lean into lean time, banister-width.
Ladyfingers sparkling with diamond dust.
Gloves finger shadow government. Some agents of holy hardboiled Hollywood.
Perfume lingers in the hop-room. Trail neither gardenia nor milkshake-musk.
You are a model descending the stair. You are a role model. You model roles.
You must not be seen in public cavorting with wrong people; fuck wrong people; pleasure yourself.
O, you are a straight shooter, all right.
Swipe dust with skirt scrim. Think snood, braids saddled in faux pearl swaddle.
Breathe into blouson cleavage crease
::::: ^^^^^ running from scene of crime; hiding in forest
%%{}%% lying to police while wearing form-fitting sheath
How to Draw an Accurate Mental Map of the World
Pencil in a sea for every pirate song in the key of E flat.
Explain the differences between saltwater and freshwater.
Compass the northwest.
Compare Atlantis, Titanic, and dolphins trained to kiss on the mouth.
There ain’t no mountain high enough.
Figure in for the glacial problem.
Some plate sliding is to be expected.
Ditto renaming post-revolution.
Old maps reveal xenophobia, racism, and religious bias; new maps reveal economic inequalities.
Q: Are these the same thing?
Some alien abductors require more troops than others.
If you googlearth your own location, you’ll go blind.
Shadow government headquarters don’t appear on any map. They have their own maps and mapmakers, and their own DJs for parties.
If you steal from a mapmaker, he/she will erase your address from the maps he/she makes. Your location will be represented as a fire hydrant or a waste treatment plant.
Mermaids have scales covering girl parts; otherwise, fake mermaids (hoax).
Hide the information in the Freud-made part of your brain.
Blame tsunami on president of Judas Priest fan club.
When in doubt, label all the capitals Providence City.
A: Africa is bigger than you think it is.
How to Ride Icelandic Horse
Get on a plane. Arrive in Iceland. Discover that Icelandic horses are fuzzy and fussy, and live in red barns. They graze for hours, draped in blue blankets. Horses in their dreams are clouds.
Pet your Icelandic horse gently. Call it “Sigrid” or “Astrid.” Feed it some hay.
And neigh at the clouds in the pre-thunderstorm afternoon. A kerchief full of carrots, sugar cubes, and tranquilizers and you’re scout-level prepared. Hum towards the hillsides—you’ve already escaped the wrong end of the fairy tale stick, what’s left to frown at?
Get on a plane. Fly back to your American town, minus Icelandic horse. Go to the mall. Buy sneakers that light up when you run. A red candle that smell like the potpourri of the innkeeper’s underthings drawer.
Miss horse. Draw countless pictures of horses at work. At play, at placid concentration of very green field, at escape from glue factory, and/or at jumping show with fancy bridle. Explain to your co-workers that you speak Icelandic. Respond to “Sigrid,” “Astrid,” or “Giddy.” Do not respond to “Becky” or “John.”
Stretch your ears and nose and, mostly, your neck. Brand your left butt cheek. And your right one too, it’s good measure. Take to sleeping standing up in your office manager’s two-car garage.
Be secretly pleased when your friends and co-workers stage a 12-step style intervention for you. Listen patiently while they read aloud from their prepared statements. They feel like they don’t even know who you are anymore, baby.
Peruse brochures for treatment facilities out in Arizona—they look nice, actually, most of them have vaguely Indian-sounding names. So much progress has been made over the past few years. Promising new treatments. Nothing like what it used to be, back in your mother’s day
Smile in grace-time, open your mouth to explain the situation as it really is, as the opposite of what these people in the room think, as, here, the thing is, you really are an Icelandic horse. Snort and whinny. Prancey prance prance down the avenue like it’s your 10th birthday in equine years.
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Daniela Olszewska is the author of two full-length collections of poetry, Citizen J (Artifice Books, forthcoming) and cloudfang : : cakedirt (Horse Less Press, forthcoming). She sits on Switchback Books’ Board of Directors and serves as Associate Poetry Editor of H_NGM_N.
Carol Guess is the author of numerous books of poetry and prose, including Tinderbox Lawn (Rose Metal Press) and Doll Studies: Forensics (Black Lawrence Press, forthcoming).
Their book-length manuscript of prose poems/flash fictions is called How to Feel Confident With Your Special Talents, a collaborative work based on the titles of articles on the user-generated content site, WikiHow. Pieces from the project have appeared or are forthcoming from Consequence Magazine, Fairy Tale Review, Sad Robot, South Dakota Review, and Stoked.