I stare at my phone and I’m fourteen again.
My boyfriend (seventeen thinking about college while I was trying to pass algebra)
shows me a picture on his phone a picture of my face
photoshopped onto Charlie Kirk
(his mouse caressed my cheek, lingered on my curvature.
He grafted me onto the perfect shape—
Kirk, the vessel for the shame he feels I deserve).
It’s his jab at my big forehead—
how my first boy’s cut
a pixie cut, he called it brings it out.
He tells me he wants it longer.
I laugh, (imagining my boyfriend’s wolfish eyes on my body—
the excitement of being wanted trumps the fear of being ripped apart)
he wants me to laugh—
wants to defang Charlie Kirk so he can guide him through
my pasture’s open gates—
two wolves about to tear open my neck.
Then the rest of the pack—Crowder,
Prager, Shapiro—would smell
my blood
pooling on the grass and eat what’s left of me,
until I am nothing other than his girlfriend.
I remember this moment as the closest he’d ever get
to calling me a man.
Today, I read the headlines—
Kirk dead by the teeth he thought would never hurt him.
I remember how it felt to break that piece of shit’s heart
and cut my hair even shorter.