How Gasoline Heart was Born

Titties out for Poetry.

“Everybody know-”

I close my eyes and think about standing at the bus stop, trying not to drop it low, writing poems on my phone.

“I’m a motha fuckin monster.”- Kanye, Monster

I tapped the poems into my notepad app, muttering along with Kanye, sometimes in the dark I’d stand under the streetlight spitting Nicki’s verse to myself. I wrote poems I wanted to read to Mykki Blanco, or I wanted them to be whispered in my ear by Saul Williams.

“I’m fucked up. I know that. I need help. I’m so sad”- Mykki Blanco. Loner

I wasn’t trying to write a legit chapbook. I had zero belief that I would ever actually do that, so I just wrote the poems.

“Freeze without an answer Free from all the shame”- Cedric Bixler-Zavala, Omar Rodríguez-López. The Mars Volta The Widow

It was the first time in many years I very earnestly wrote poems for myself. I wrote out of my body, my pain and exhaustion and anxiety. I wrote into my body, booty bouncing on the two and the four, my jiggly ass, how I can’t twerk but I can make my thighs clap.

“Run up motherfucker, get shot”- Will Putney, Vincent Price, Ernie C.& Ice-T. Body Count, Talk Shit, Get Shot

I wrote poems that I knew wouldn’t be touched by most poetry magazines. That, would not make me a pobiz darling, that spoke to my relationship with words and genders and everything. I wrote poems to…