by Erin Green
I came to America in a box with the words
“Fragile: This Side Up” stamped across it,
but it wasn’t a tramp stamp.
I didn’t get that until my senior year of high school.
I needed something to make me feel like I wasn’t a pariah.
My mother always told me,
“Don’t make an ugly face or it’ll get stuck like that.”
My hypothesis is that I came out her vagina making ugly faces.
I’ve been called a piece of shit a few times in my day,
but even shit has layers,
layers of skin that can resist the assault of insults
for only so long before it just
bursts.
The tramp stamp going across my lower back is a
phrase written in bold print, specifically saying,
“Finish Your Dinner.”
People regularly ask me in the YouTube comment section:
“Do you have any dignity?” It’s an interesting question
because with my cataclysmic insecurity,
I know if I don’t make it in life I can always spend my time
cleaning up white girl vomit and dog shit in the streets
of New Orleans after Mardi Gras.
I don’t have to worry about loving myself because
I have the cheat codes to that.
I’ll use it right before my health bar reaches
zero. I could spend perpetuity doing this:
using cheat codes to self-love.
I came to America in a box with the words
“Fragile: This Side Up” stamped across it because
I was too young to get a tattoo of it, but somebody,
somewhere, needed to know that.