Scott Sims

Trigger Warning:
"I put my first boyfriend away"
I say at parties because I am a dangerous girl.
Because I am better at Russian roulette than beer pong.
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In 2012, Disney released
A line of villain dolls depicting Ursula,
The classically full-figured
sea witch from the little mermaid
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The only other girl at the party
Is ranting about feminism.
The audience, a sea of rape jokes and
Snapbacks and styrofoam cups and me.
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This week I sat in an auto zone parking lot and cried for ten minutes because I couldn't change a headlight, which sounds like a lead up to a terrible stand-up routine, right? One where the joke is always on me? Like, haha, I ate half a bag of pretzel m&ms at 11: 30 in the morning
IN BED.

When My headlight went out, my first thought was "Seems right."
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In 2014 the World Health Organization released a report stating that at least 800,000 people commit suicide every year
That average is to one person every forty seconds
Statistically speaking, by the end of this poem four people will have taken their lives
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Instructions on Having the Perfect Panic Attack
Find a trigger
A job interview, the claustrophobia of mass
transit
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In which my mother's prayers teach me about joy
You know I have become acutely familiar
With the peculiarities of my local CVS.
I wait in line at the pharmacy counter
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Oh say can you see
Miguel wants to learn the star-spangled banner'
Miguel was the last fourth grader to
Migrate into my English as a second language course,
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You quit burning
Your eyes no longer reflect the flames.
You think you're done.
Afterall, you've wrung the gasoline from your hair.
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Taking its name from the 1944 film The Gaslight,

gas-lighting is a form of mental abuse in which false
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Sometimes, you are a lit match dropped into a boiling ocean. Sometimes, you are a stray dog proud of the sunrise after a long night of barking at the moon. Sometimes, you scream at the television, shadowbox mushroom clouds; your hand-to-hand hatred outclassed, outdated. You: post-apocalyptic litterbug. You: venomous spider in the basement of a burning building. You: whose anger is so vast, and so empty—all teeth, and no mouth, just that white rattle.

Remember: white supremacy is not a shark; it is the water. It is how we talk about racism as white hoods and confederate flags, knowing that you own those things, and we don't… as if we didn't own this history too, this system—we tread water.
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My little being, they tainted your obituary with wrong seven letters, S U I C, like this misery was something you wanted, like my belly burst sin, like I didn't thread your pieces together with the only joy I had left.

This home is your shrine now, your portrait is painted in Jack Daniels stains in the linoleum, the smell of your hair is trapped in billows of fireplace smoke, your laugh is a haunted house theme song I keep on a loop.
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Why black people don't get possessed by demons.
1. If my home were ever haunted it would not be my home
for long.
2. Let me catch a living stranger in my house and you better be ready for me to throw hands.
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Clowns scare the s*** out of me.
Psychologists call it "Coulrophobia."
You see for most people the altered features, enlarged feet, bright red nose, dyed hair, white face is comical.
Safe, but for those of us living with this phobia, these deformed humanoids come across as monstrous.
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Bang
My body was in a mid air somersault:
Time stopped - almost seeming to collapse in on itself
Earth became sky
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By now, you know their names, their cheekbones—
the tender hands they offered when you walked in.

You know the quivering strength of prayer and the art of making God listen.
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Communicating should be a very straightforward and simple thing to do but for me it isn't easy
Social Anxiety is the fear of speaking to other people
It's how you want to talk but you can't
because you think what you are about to say is stupid
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I was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1911 on 16th
Street.
By born, I mean they finish my construction.
I was erected as an edifice to the Almighty
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