Some Jokes Are Only Funny When I Tell Them

after 'Rape Joke' by Patricia Lockwood

I know I'm looking good today because three men in a silver transit slowed down next to me under the railway bridge, rolled down their windows, clawed and howled as though they'd never had a hot meal in their lives, never smelt fresh bread.

I only know my measurements in units of other people's hands; maybe that's why I can never find jeans that fit.

He waited until we were alone to show me the yellow-handled knife, and I was like is that a knife in your pocket or

If ogres are like onions because onions have layers, what do you call a schoolgirl skinned of her sweetness, her bitter flesh of angst, her stiff inches of skirt?

I am so disembodied and travel-sick I can understand perfectly why it takes eight minutes for light to reach us from the Sun.

I want to burn everything to the fucking ground but also I love most things most days - horses, honeysuckle. Pierogi from that family-run Polish place on the other side of town.

Like, I just want to eat pistachio cannoli and drink blue raspberry slushies and stroke every cat I see so there's always a reason for my lateness but even when I do these things, when I move towards the cat or the smiling deli owner or the self-serve slushie machine in the 24-hour service station it's not because I want to but because there is a knife pressed to the small of my back, flickering like the idea of a knife like the memory of a knife.

64