My Cardboard Balcony

Exiting Atmosphere by Belinda Roddie I flatten these streets in my black men's jacket, my maroon men's shirt, my black women's slacks and my brown women's shoes. I feel like I can take over the world and bounce it on a string like an overpopulated, CO2-choked yo-yo, yanking it off its axis and letting it drop along the cosmos into the freezing chaos of a second existence. When I remove my shades, I can feel the sweat crystallize on the bridge of my nose. I let the beads descend to my chin. I am melting in the bay area summer heat, and I am merging into a pseudo-metropolitan galaxy where the noise is all white and garbled and unable to communicate anything to anyone.

Study, study, study That was the solitary word of advice my parents gave me when my grades still remained mediocre. Here's the thing, though: I was  studying. When I wasn't out running errands or working my part-time job at Mister Chu's doughnut shop, I was sacrificing my social life, sports, and extracurriculars to stare at a biology textbook and wonder just what the fuck it was trying to tell me. The results were in: I was not the academic type, and no amount of note-taking or reviewing was going to change that reality.