BE YOUR OWN CONTAMINANT

To the girls I met five minutes ago at this college party, 

My loneliness is slowly eating me from the bottom of my lungs. My girlfriend goes to work at Ramsey Aldi, so I go to sleep, wake up as the sun sets depressed-as-shit and craving something big. Knives would help. There’s only so much a girl can do without drawing his own blood. My mother says I look disgusting with my blue hair so I dye it red, feeling her loathing for me pulse. Her metallic covers my tongue like the diamond missing from my ring finger, bone sticking out like a half-mast flag. I come home, to the dorm on the fifth floor, where the Svetka Pepsi is warm, where I can hold a PRIDE pin over my favorite lighter and pierce my ears. From the window, tens of shooting stars fall into the Ramapo mountains, so I drink. We wrap up in each other’s arms during quiet hours, hoping the R.A. doesn’t come around. We sing Sleeping With Sirens. He kisses her boyfriend on the lips and the hash pens fall to the ground. I don’t kiss him but I run out into the negative-one degree weather armed with just a liquid blanket, life is about getting fucked up with new girls, I come home. Come home. I am savage and innocent. 

Ronit May is a twenty year old social work student at Ramapo College. Their work has been published in The Closed Eye Open’s Issue XI, The Blood Pudding, StreetLit, and more. They are working on their second chapbook, A Sentence Is A Garden You Stumble Through (Hoping To Pick A Word So Beautiful).