I WAS TRYING TO START A SENTENCE—

it took so long now that my brain had been discombobulated by corporations. Most I forgot halfway through. By daylight, trying to muster up clauses in me, to puzzle them toward some sensical arrangement—
     I tried it: locking myself in a room alone, as so many suicidal women-writers have advised. But in this room and every room now was our president: storming the public radio station to hiss about all the groups of people he hated, which was nearly every group of people, which made me want to destroy all men because of him, which caused me to slump like a dying dahlia all day in bed…
     In the alone-room, too, burrowed among frumpy pillows and scratchy Afghans, I was hijacked by a documentary I believed would steer my sentences in some proper direction. It claimed to be about "humane meat," featured interviews with the friendly kinds of farmers: the ones who don't pen their hogs in stalls or leave their cattle to die in their own shit in the heat.
     On one of these kinder farms, a wispy blonde twenty-something who looked, in her Wranglers, her cowboy boots, her 10-gallon hat, like a child playing dress-up, named each and every cow. Gertrude, Fiona, Marsha: all day long she patted and nuzzled and sweet-talked them. Then at sundown, guided them into a nightmare-slaughter-trailer with her miniature freckled hands.
     Other kindnesses were extended by her. For example, on their last day of life, she gathered up her chickens and invited them to drink from what she referred to as a "stream," but which was clearly just a flooded indent in some mud outside a barn. In the dead of night, men in headlamps grabbed the birds by their feet, swung them screaming head-first into truck beds.
     I am trying, but these sentences—that comprise the stories of creatures who are not now and will not at any future point be winning—are not sentences for fiction, I know.
     I mean: I am no fucking chicken. Nobody's trying to buy or sell or eat me. Though this will be the fate of other creatures in different documentaries, it is not my personal plight.
     Alone in my room, I breathe easy and sleep like the dead. It's just like the freckled woman says: as long as she doesn't make eye contact, she and her flocks are just fine.

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ME, TOO

The sun is only on half my face—correction: the sun bludgeons half my face only. There are just a few shitting birds, the worst birds, pigeons, surrounding us as my half-sunburnt face moves toward my ex's face on this decrepit stoop.
     Clearly I am writing another masterpiece about my life!
     This happened yesterday, too, during the terrible party of the terrible child of semi-estranged friends where all the suburban parents were mimosa-loaded. I gasped in horror as the sugar-crazed birthday boy razored through plastic and cardboard with his fast, mean teeth.
     A mountain of hyper-masculine action figures and bloodied-up wrapping paper rose like a war while a halo of parents applauded the landfill of child-waste, which would one day consume the Atlantic.
     When the Hawaiian-printed divorcé invited me to "get busy like it's high school," it was like being stroked by jackpots of good luck.
     My square of cake trembled on its polystyrene plate as he ushered me down, down into the cobwebby basement by the small of my spine. I couldn't tell if it was hot or not: fistfuls of sponge, melty rainbows of Funfetti crammed into me until I couldn't breathe.
     My shower later would go on for as long as I wanted; eons of squandered water searing me lobster-red.
     One day I'll write a story where I am pleased because I have pleased myself—where I desire myself like a hammer through a glass fucking ceiling.

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"I Was Trying" and "Me, Too" appear in my forthcoming novelette-in-shorts, SERIOUS LITERATURE! (Stalking Horse 2027) The book, which exists someplace between metafiction, essay, and stand-up comedy, deals heavily with the challenges of being a woman experimental writer, examining and re-examining, among other things, Virginia Woolf's claim that "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction" in light of our current sociopolitical moment.