Poetry by Campbell Brown

     Lewin Bormann CC




PARTY SICKNESS

mothers whisper like judgment day to their daughters on the streets as they pass
                  these are the girls you don’t want to be like. low-class, white trash, ghetto,
teenage rebel. accusations hurled with whispers 
                  turned witch hunt from suburban mothers out for brunch. 
caught in pauses, uncomfortable silences–                 i don’t want her in my house
                  you don’t want to be associated with a girl like that. thank god
my daughter isn’t a party girl. 

zoe was a self-proclaimed slut                   by the time she was a sophomore 
                 in high school, zoe ate all their hearts raw. we met in the hospital. diagnoses rolled in the way other
​kids collected pokemon cards. the least favorite nightmare darling child, terror of 
                 the doctors’ favorite head case, pathologized 
to hell and back. parents murmur what’s wrong with her? title sociopath, klepto, manic 
                 depression. zoe trades her body for a dime bag,
                 it’s whatever
boy of the week can get his hands on. mom mutters slutty 
                when she pulls out of the parking lot. i waited as she texts me 
about how funny it was to see them fall in love, maneater. 
                 i read her messages and can feel her
licking the blood off of her fingers through the screen.

zoe once told me that she'd been doing happy wrong since she was eight years old. 
                                 green glass bottles traded in         the way other kids collected arcade tokens. i guess when
                 you’re used to it 
all the smashed glasses just looked like stars to you. 
                                 zoe whispers. voice hoarse, my dad bought me lingerie and my mother’s 
                                 too fucking drunk to care 
i don’t know if i can keep coming to outpatient.                   i don’t know where             if     
i’ll be living, we make our way home.
mother says bad influence. their voices ring over each other like church bells     cracking 
                youngest daughter turned priest and absolver of guilt, god only knows 
they never would have let us into confessional dressed the way we did 
                 at fifteen
                 we would have burned 
                 the whole world down for the other girls we knew. 

                 we made bead bracelets on the carpet and rinsed the blood out of our gums;
we played pop music and picked the bird bones out of our teeth.
                 when we set ourselves on fire we ignited brighter than them all. 
zoe smiled like a cat with feathers in her mouth. “the nurses are all fucking scared of me.”
                we blazed bright enough to set this whole goddamn place on fire
she said, one day, we’re gonna tear these whitewash walls to the ground. 

all the girls caught illness quick 
                as god let our prayers freefall,                        and i always caught them too late to heal. 
all the girls cried 
                 so hard they threw up. all sick         
                                  to their stomach with sadness and hungover the next morning.
all the girls are catching party sickness, and it’s a fever they can’t sweat out. 
                 stealing cars drugs their parent’s money                 i stole their last minutes 
like if i tried hard enough                 i could have made it mean something.

i cut a clean break for the ones who can’t
                 for for the teen girls, mean girls, high school beauties 
prom-queens, outcasts, kinda-pretty-ugly girls
at eighteen AJ gave up everything she had for one last rush 
                of amphetamines.

i grew up next to sweetest girls you’ll ever know. 
                 claire was fifteen when she learned how to be skinny before she learned to become someone of
                 her own. 
                 kaitlyn crashed her parents car and lost the last of what could’ve been her childhood
                 at stupid parties she didn’t even enjoy.

                                 with the grab-you-by-the-hand girls
                                 laughing-kinda-drunk-girls
                                 glitter on their cheeks, tears in their eyes 

but they’re someone else’s problem, right?

teen homewreckers destined to end up on true crime documentaries
who you never wonder about         past the first glimpse
made of glitter and skin and bared teeth. they’re always there in the evening 
those carefree dancers                                      spun by the wind, 
girls of smoke and glitter who blow away in the air                                like something magic
leaving behind cigarette butts and lipstick kisses on the mirror

                                                                                     and me, who remembers them all, each like buried barbies
                                 and absolutely nothing else

like they were never here at all.



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cry pretty

do i miss it?
              i know i shouldn’t
              it’s been better recently,

but i mean, there’s only so many poems you can write about healing.

how much of sickness is a performance?         starving artists            ethereally dying dancers 
they tell me before he was found dead,          van gogh ate yellow paint. i see 
                                                                             what they think we look like, or what they think we should.
                                                                             skinny white girl in the bathroom,        always slender,     
                                                                                            always pretty.
                                                                              male directors make breakdowns with smudged lipstick and a glass of wine.
they never looked like me. they say that sickness feeds art.

the raw and real truth of it wasn’t something people wanted to hear about.
you want                                                           delicate girls sitting alone in bathrooms, pale,
                                                                              something you can sink your teeth into, come up     
                                                                                              sweet                and sick                and glittering

not rotting teeth and reality;
screaming at your parents; white hallways, that ill expanse of skin. my only 
                                                                             fantasy exists in the context of snapping 
                                                                             movie-star-pale swan necks, seasick
rubber and plastic toothbrush bristles 
down your throat, grease and sugar on your fingers.
they want                                                         ribs poking out from a lacy bra, not 
teeth falling out and hair going missing. 
they want                                                         extended metaphors in diaries when you’re dying. 
they want                                                         shitty coldplay songs with you crying in the music video.

sickness isn’t                                                   beautiful, 
isn't                                                                     palatable 
when you don’t shower for two weeks, could never find the energy to brush teeth. too focused
on the effort of not dying, of keeping legs still from shaking, of not staring too long at the
cleaning chemicals mom left on the counter
but people don't want that. It's not    
                                                                              interesting. 
people want                                                    shattered mirrors, silver shards, 
                                                                              quicksilver tears and beautiful grief. 

you think the neighbors heard                singing 
when we screamed our lungs bloody? heard             
                                                                              an angel’s choir 
instead of a child’s desperate cries?
heard police sirens                                        like church bells, ringing out into the night. echoing for
minutes, seconds. until it— 

you'd think it would stop, wouldn’t you?
a concrete conclusion. finally bleed out,                        funeral, black screen.
you don’t deserve an epilogue. you don’t get an ending. you don’t get 
                                                                              mourners dressed in black, 
                                                                               handpicked hollywood models crowded around a casket.
                                                                               “we are gathered here today to celebrate a life.”
                                                                                            beloved daughter. something flowery. maybe
                                                                               the pretty best friend gets up and reads 
                                                                               an appropriately sad poem. curtains close.
you don’t get that from me. you don't deserve a clean break. glass figures do not shatter neatly,
don’t break even.

they want movie scenes set to sad music; a morbid fascination with death and sadness as long
as they fit the boxes we want them to. 

we watch                                                                       the girls on TV, bruises blossoming shades of
                                                                                                          teenage blues. translucent wrists, bird-
                                                                                           bone-hollow, bleeding steadily
because healthy people don’t make                   the big screen.

                                                                                            we dress up in pearls while we get ready to die 
                                                                             because we want to be the kind of girls people romanticize.

but I don’t want to keep wondering what i’ll look like 
                                                                                            if my sickness gets the best of me.
i don’t want to be six feet under when i finally stop worrying.
I don’t want to have to cry pretty.

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Campbell Brown is a queer, biracial writer from Arizona. She likes homeric epithets, Oxford commas, semicolons, and em-dashes; she hates self-writing these bios because she’s scared of sounding pretentious. Find her on Instagram at @p0cketwatch3s and on Twitter at @cambrownwrites.
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