Microwave Dinners

Triple Sonnet for Miley Cyrus and Microwave Dinners

Kaitlin Rikala

Face a panic attack over what to force for dinner, pass by gilded mirrors that are there when and where they shouldn’t be. Ridges of a thumb print. Alcoholic tendencies and the desire to Slide Away. Like Miley said, I’ll go back to the ocean. Back to the city lights. I will be rolling on the river, judging myself as I present all the details of my youth, when my hair was Cary Grant blue, nostrils were stinging, powder clinging desperate to fossils of follicles, delivered by miniature hamster tubes. Gushing weight of my lungs stab at me from

the corner, the spotlight. Losing my shit, notating the abstract and grocery store bagged cotton candy, can laugh at Willy Wonka’s childhood face as I stomp away from grainy television sets because nobody lives there yet. I graduate summa cum laude from Hennepin Ave, discoing, a gyrating boogie on display in platforms that give mothers heart attacks. The first taste of pussy dragged out from the lips of the dance floor. Knit my skin into a scrapbook. Kidnap me from scrap metal, gatekeepers of Dada. Write me letters on sheaths of paper blemished by

The Burning Giraffe, Lobster Telephone. Tapered boxes of Lean Cuisine. Hollow cardboard substances lacking sustenance. Unfold Vermont mac and cheese promises. Hesitate before being left in their vagrancy. Edible styrofoam cries. Slanted floors, occupied by peeling wood boards cradle the neck of my sidelong spine. Seams of fingers skim dry patches of a carpet burned patella. Hallucinate optical illusions, six-foot teddy bears from the bargain bin. Leaked stuffing groans. Fall victim to gravity, immersed in my melatonin mind, mint mosquitoes.