Pro-Annihilation – Darby Hyde

October 30, 2021

Blank Backgrounds

 
this poem is sponsored
The gun in my hand is so hot that my palms blister.
I’m a pretty girl and I am very hygienic.
I’m a pretty girl and I wash my hair every day.
I’m a pretty girl and all the other pretty girls say
you’re not supposed to do that.
I’m a pretty girl with a full chalice.
I have a foot in every heaven and every hell and every river
between heaven and hell.
There is only one river. My foot is the difference.
I’m a pretty girl and my gun will never go off. I will never reach intermission.
I contain legions. I contain phalanxes of empty ships
lonely with bronze. Every outside of my body is bronze.
I’m a pretty girl and I’ve never been catcalled.
I’m a pretty girl and one time on the subway a very old man
who I didn’t know kissed me on the lips. He tasted like pickles.
I’m a pretty girl and one time when I was sixteen a very young man,
older than me, grabbed my ass at a pop punk concert.
Every pop punk band is a pretty girl. They all claw and scream
and every text they text another pretty girl
is in a google doc somewhere.
Pretty girls never know when what they say is being recorded. Or where.
I’m a pretty girl and I glug beer like an ugly man.
I’m a pretty girl who gets all the parts.
Pretty girls can play ugly girls but never the other way around.
I’m a girl who purses other girls’ knick-knacks. I have glossier
cloud paint in every color. Each color is blood at a different stage of wetness.
I’m pretty and trad so when I see an exposed ankle
my knees go clack-clack like the mouse in my radiator.
When I see exposed blood I smear it on my cheeks.
When I see a schoolgirl skirt I froth at the upper thighs.
I’m a pretty girl because whenever I see an ingrown hair on my thigh
I pick at it until it bleeds.
I’m a pretty girl because I don’t have trauma.
My therapist told me I’m good at therapy
so I stopped going. Pretty girls aren’t good at anything except pretty.
I’m a pretty girl and I’ve never gotten a UTI. My urethra is curvy in all the right places.
I’m pretty in the same way the ocean is deep.
I’m deep in the same way the ocean is pretty.
I’m pretty in the same way French is a language.
I’m pretty in the same way Hadrian wrote his own memoirs.
I’m a pretty girl and if you rub my skin the wrong way
your hand will raw.
I’m a pretty girl and if I stop swimming I die.
The ocean is a cold place. I’m turning my back from Ozymandias.
Ozymandias was a pretty girl because he commanded despair. Despair is a pretty girl
because it never works.
I’m a pretty girl because I never intend to lessen my trunk from my legs.
I’m a pretty girl because I hate the desert. The desert is an ugly man
because I’m a pretty girl and I hate it.
I’m a pretty girl because I hate the way Maggie Nelson writes about sex.
I’m a pretty girl because when I write about sex I take out all the ugly parts.
I’m a pretty girl. This isn’t an intermission, it’s an ending. I am tattooing a period on my wrist.

 

consuming desire

 

Peeing outside as someone who needs to crouch is such a thrill,
the wobble, the wind, the avoidance of splashback
behind the 7-11, by the dark Prospect Park pond, on a London hill.

Everyone I love is so afraid of the imminent kill. 
I am afraid of the kill and of the air inside a room, but not the fact that
peeing outside as someone who needs to crouch is such a thrill.

The threat of the rapist is whispered about by the women at the till.
Methed up shadow, crouched, ready to take the girlish honor they already lack,
behind the 7-11, by the dark Prospect Park pond, on a London hill.

No indica, dollar slices, old bay crust, white crust on dollars will
bring the courage one needs to mingle with the drunks amnesiac.
Peeing outside as someone who needs to crouch is such a thrill,

equalling the dread of the moment after the words spill,
balls of spit and dredged up soul-mud volleyed at men in packs
behind the 7-11, by the dark Prospect Park pond, on a London hill.

I need the blank background, where I can brush up against other stoppered bladders.
I need a wide space to relieve myself of so much unfurling of spirit, unfurling of lack.
Peeing outside as someone who needs to crouch is such a thrill,
behind the 7-11, by the dark Prospect Park pond, on a London hill.

 

optimistic futurism

 

It’s all calories in and calories out like one long calamity,
calamity jane a prostitute proselytizing with a rifle pointed at 
my breaking back every time I sit down to fill 

myself, my head, my body. My heady heavy body 
shills itself
I shuck oysters and shuck corn with my ungrandma I

huck my body over the two foot tall
wall separating the cars from the chesapeake
bay where the red water says

ready or not here we are!
no redeeming qualities for me, no red meat for me, please,
no thank you, I’ll take a water but not bay water no

i’ve seen corpses in your water on the news, now
i only drink blue water yellow lemon white cracked ice
a silver straw stuck through it all please

no amount of silver jewelry presents will make an ungrandma a grandma
no 100-calorie hard seltzer will make anyone slender
if it’ll make me slender I’ll make like calamity jane and get deadly drunk on a train

art impresarios from the east village only drink sparkling water
eat paleo puffs from louboutin boxes
help interns build portfolios, I’m just an intern with a shower in her kitchen but

if this was a futarchy I would kill robin hanson
cuckold his wife – who I am sure only drinks sparkling water –
pour sparkling water, I mean bay water, I mean baltimore city water

full of fluoride all over his prediction markets, ask economist robin 
hanson – did you predict this? do you still want your brain frozen now?
if my brain was frozen and I unfroze in the ozone future where killing yourself is government zoned

if the extropians are right and we all live forever it would just be that many
more years to count calories in calories out,
count the little calamities my body accumulates, the pounds

that time subtracts and adds to my sub-attractive body,
count the unswept artists with pill-rattling pockets at galleries in the east village who
want to take a polaroid of my teenage face – they ask when do you work here? are you ever alone?

 

jerry hill and 2 zig-zags
 
Brotherly sadism, Indian burns
bruise sweet fading arms, and yet, a Colt bucks – 

come here, babe, take your fill of these forty
five heads, horsemen five, many sizes up. 

A rival approaches, sizes me up – 
let’s play Edward Fortyhands he coos, hand

coiling, impossibly. You know what?
Natty Boh and Poe deglaze my stomach

so much faster, so much bloodier. Beer
and your many fingers rip my thirty 

foot intestines, alt lit fucks my twenty
foot intestines, your id parties like so

many tissue horses prancing, like sweet
girls who dance on bedded heads of yellow

glasses. These beakers drag my crow’s feet far
ther down, I squat, no hands free, grass tickles

thighs, Colts nip with frost at triangles of 
skin. Let us examine. Let us tar. Let

us tread bubbly. Chug these chords, chug this 
pro-annihilation. Nature now covets 

a vacuum. An arm wreathed in bruises 
isn’t empty cygnus hymn, or vessel.