My First Cousin Once Removed: Regarding Your Inquiry
1. Sure.
2. She’s still young, I guess.
3. She paints and wishes and likes fancy things.
4. Never believes me.
5. Teases me mercilessly.
6. Canned foods repulse her.
7. Pretends she can’t stand me.
8. Can’t orgasm to save her life.
9. Makes everything about herself.
10. Suffers from excessive jealousy.
11. Doesn’t have a family anymore.
12. Acts like she has no choice.
13. Knows how to seem extremely polite.
14. Has consistently failed to make a dent.
15. Always mad and sad and never the same.
16. Loves Gatorade (almost every popular flavor).
17. Wants a destination wedding — wants elegant wedding moments…
18. Growing up, she bullied her younger siblings sadistically.
19. Grabbed her mother’s genitals once at the breakfast table.
20. Got grounded for six weeks after that.
21. Then set a small fire in her father’s study.
22. The mother: a successful homemaker who made sure to feel good about herself always.
23. The father: a closeted bisexual businessman who thrived in 1980s Manhattan.
24. I’ll get to my first cousin once removed’s terrible grief in just a moment.
25. She used to have a sense of humor.
26. She needed to get a life.
27. I needed to get a life, too.
28. Want to French kiss her again.
29. Want to ejaculate on her face again.
30. So sorry that I said that.
31. Just really wish I could have sex with her one more time.
32. But certainly you don’t want to hear about my mess.
33. And now I’ll never get to her terrible, terrible grief.
34. We used to get together every now and then.
35. Rebecca.
***
Cilantro
My ex-wife, she hated cilantro.
My father and brother, they hate it too.
My mother and I, we love cilantro, we put it in fucking everything.
My father, brother, and ex-wife say it tastes like soap.
But my mother and I: we severely disagree with them.
We raise our voices at them, we wish cardiac arrest on them.
Because they are useless freaks with legitimate genetic conditions.
And when it comes to useless freaks with legitimate genetic conditions, we must force the worst possible outcomes.
Love against hate, good against evil—my mother and I burn alive.
***
What Mom Said This Afternoon About My Emaciated Father
Do you know what it’s like to be married to a man whose bottom is smaller than my face!?
Then she pressed PAUSE.
What a cautious sip of HOT tea on her part…!
In the meantime, my father poured himself a stiff, skinny drink.
And? What? When water changes? In the COLD afternoon? What an unholy letdown.
Then again, life lets you down like this all the time.
Have I neglected to mention the rocks in her throat?
Then she pressed PLAY.
Will you just look at your Daddy’s little disappearing bottom!