I write suicide notes in bed late at night
So they’ll know when I’m dead
That I was not insane, or worse, unkind.
That I took the time to tell them each
What they meant to me.
To my mother I owe my green eyes
And floor length auburn hair.
I would like to thank my sister
For the pillow case she crocheted
On my twelfth birthday
And the five dollar bill she has sent me
On each birthday since then.
Everything I know about shop-lifting
I learned from my eighth grade best friend, Linda Hope Treadwell.
One Saturday Bobby Butterman, going on thirteen.
Taught me how to kiss, slid his little tongue in
And out of the spaces between my teeth.
Sebastian Lust gave me a three-week-old fetus
Which I named after him and flushed down
The toilet at the Howard Johnson’s
On the New jersey Turnpike, near Camden.
Sam Plumm, who played Wimbledon three years in a row.
Is responsible for my powerful backhand. My first true love.
And my father, a master of the two-line letter
And the fifty-six second phone call.
Liked to say that “brevity is the spice of life.”