have you ever seen a nigga meme her way off a cliff before all my homies will find a way to make
it funny if I was famous

maybe the shade room too there are types of ideation that only exist when you are given
the space the subway is liminal couch lock

happens at Queen station I sink at Yonge I wonder who threw themselves in front of the train
that made me twenty minutes late

I don’t have it in me to be polite all the time a phone service wants me to talk about mental
illness as a thing to overcome but let me melt into it

when a bitch hurts me I do not wish her well let me be pre and post traumatic I know you find
me stressful you hate perfection even its illusion

I say thank you to bother you I say I love you to haunt you and I only forgive people who don’t
deserve it so when I end my ashes burn your eyes

I know you won’t be crying for me but it’ll hurt all the way down
Yonge to Queen to King

Victoria Mbabazi is an MFA candidate with a concentration in poetry at NYU. Her work can be found in The Puritan, CV2, Feels Zine, Bywords, Untethered Magazine, Grain, and Release Any Words Stuck Inside You Volume 2. Her poetry placed second in The Hart House Review contest and her work has been shortlisted in Plenitude’s Flash Fiction contest and long-listed in Room’s Poetry contest. Her first poetry collection “chapbook” is out with Anstruther Press in January 2021.

Image by Radek Grzybowski @rgrzybowski