Poems and Texts

“TBH” by Svetlana Kitto

TBH

today my exgirlfriend wrote me an email in all lower cases
with phrases I never heard her say before like
“its v mega right now”
“you need to stop to be honesting me”
and also “how are you spending your days?”

See, it’s only glamorous when she does it. It’s as if she dashed the email halfway down a slope in Aspen, and so obviously can’t be bothered with a simple it’s instead of its. Everything with her is like she’s skiing in sunglasses and Yohji while I’m on my period in my hot apartment washing out my third pair of stained underwear in two days. Watching Seinfeld in the middle of the day and justifying it to myself as a worthwhile intellectual endeavor that hashtag-Jews me. Falling asleep on the couch and getting woken up by the flickering modem that I keep thinking is a fire in the kitchen. Avoiding the fifth call from Peter the Holocaust survivor who yells “these are very important stories!” who I feel too guilty to tell I can’t interview for free. Debating whether to hold onto the purple dick and harness we bought together that I keep in an old H&M bag in the corner of my closet because I am too broke to buy a new one and I have a vague date tonight. Wondering where the smell is coming from while my leftover tofu lasagna spills all over the gym bag intended for that trip to the gym I never ended up taking,

today.

Svetlana Kitto

Svetlana Kitto is an activist writer and oral historian whose fiction, essays, and journalism have been featured or are forthcoming in Salon, The Believer, VICE, Plenitude Magazine, OutHistory, Surface, and the New York Observer, and the books Occupy (Verso, 2012) and the Who, the What and the Where (Chronicle, 2014).