2 poems by Bree Jo'ann

Bildungsroman Is One of My Favorite Words

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Marissa Cooper was dead.
Serena Vanderwoodsen was a cloud.
People talked like a karate movie dub *chop, chop* on Grey's Anatomy.

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I thought about what I would wear the next day, channeling all the 
hot quirky girls in groups of hot normy friends.

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I attempted vague campaigns of Self destruction.
I watched sad movies,
read Jean Paul Sartre on weekend nights, 
attempted to eat only Lucky Charms and salad
but I just ended up hungry sitting in my big ten dorm room. 

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Emil Sinclair was rich
Holden Caufield was rich
Gene Forester was rich.

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I shoved my hands into my pockets as I walk out into the fall night,
channeling all the sad white boys in the world.
I went to another dorm for a late night snack.

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It seemed like you could only be existential from the center of the universe,
but there I was, teleporting from the underside of one rock to another,
wondering about myself as a point on a plane.

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Poor social skills made me bad at art school.
I watched too many TV dramas
and had poor expectations.

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Somewhere in the midst of all that plotting was a good old middle class black hole.

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Taking A Nap In A Pile Of Vintage Clothes 

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Interacting with others felt like astronomy. 
My virginity and my Weezer shirt were lazy space programs 

I wasn't good at kicking it, and it seemed like people could tell.
I didn't kick it as an adolescent in Gary, IN.
I sat in my basement til the wee hours, alternating between cable television and Dance Dance Revolution, hoping that one day,
I would get to do drugs and let go of a highly pressurized self.

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Maybe I was just doomed to be nobody because I was bad at dating the 28 year old skater boy who was more relevant than me.
I wasn't invited to the parties where guys put the necks of bottles in some girl’s butt, but I still had a place in the fallout shelter that smelled like incense and sold a variety of alternative lifestyles.

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My boss took me to appointments with the psychiatrist and the guys joked that he'd knocked me up.
My boss was a hoarder of old things.  Every space he owned was covered with various degrees of antiquity.

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I regularly crawled into the pile of unpriced vintage in the store's back room, 
Trying to get a little extra incubation before I was jettisoned out into alienation, 
like that was my job instead of customer service.

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When I did a little shimmy to pretend that I liked myself,
Someone stormed off.
When I was dizzy and nauseous from baking in a room full of intoxicates,
Another stormed off.
I guess the breath in my lungs was objectionable.

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When shit got too real, I imagined myself burrowing further and further into the pile of clothes,
Touched by so many foreign hands,
Clothes that used to belong to the dead or the bored.