Scott Sims Poems

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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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 Sometimes, you scream at the television, shadowbox mushroom clouds; your hand-to-hand hatred outclassed, outdated.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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