Poetry by Elana Rubin

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Vigil for Kayla 

They held a service for a girl today,
a girl from school who had that awful crash, 
and that is all I really want to say. 

The mourning doves sit quietly, their gray
backs rustling in heavy coats of ash. 
They held a service for a girl today

with candles in the park, her worn ballet 
shoes, chalk, a portrait propped against the trash,
and that is all. I really want to say

so many things to her mom and dad, the way 
they must have cut her crust, every lost lash
they held. A service for a girl today,

a girl who was just here. It’s strange. I pray
some god returns her, or a cosmic flash,
and that is all I really want. To say  

“I’m sorry” cannot fill their loss of Kay,
nor any mass of flowers, cards, or cash. 
They held a service for a girl today,
and that is all I really want to say.

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An Intellectual at a Frat Party 

Have you heard the one about the apostrophe?
It was too possessive. 
It drank too much.
It looked at pictures of dead people on Facebook and cried 
too much. It cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, 
burning its money in wastebaskets and 
listening to the Terror through the wall too much  2
until they called it Allen Ginsberg
and threw it in the dumpster, and it howled after them:
“You got the wrong guy.”
By then it wasn’t an apostrophe anymore,
just an empty bottle of Kahlua. 

I am me, but with my head full
of cotton balls. My friends are
deep sea jellies, pulsing blue light,
undulating in and out of existence. 
The apostrophe is Allen Ginsberg,
or Kahlua, or you, depending on its metamorphosis. 
The apostrophe is also a frog but not a frog
in the way I am me but not me.
I am egg yolk. I am purple. 
I am other

                          than this body,
                          crawling with back pain,
                          fused joints, anxiety, 
                          oil, headaches, summer internships, 
                          bad clothes, this poem, that poem, that other poem, 
                          tofu recipes, Kahlua, whiskey, Irish cream, triple sec, 
                          cheap mango vodka, the paper due in two days, the meeting,
                          the met, the children, the one eyed shrews, the hipsters, the llamas, 
                          the bubbles, the fire alarms, the orangutans, the pills the deranged, the birds, 
                          the church, the sleepless, sleepy, unloved, obsessive--
                          Hey Allen Ginsburg, am I fucked up enough yet? 

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2 From “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg

Elana Rubin is a rising senior at the Johns Hopkins University, majoring in the writing seminars. While she loves both fiction and poetry, she has a soft spot for form. Her poem "Student" has been published in Issue Eight of Minute Magazine.

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