Poem [Lana Del Rey has collapsed!]
by Julia C. Alter

I am processing the tragedy of Skinny Lana. 
There’s a photo of her at peak juiciness, walking past 
a sidewalk sign advertising COOLSCULPTING. 
Gym shorts bunching up between her thighs. Her dimples 
of saddlebag cellulite, L.A. sunlight glazing the stubble 
fuzzing her calves. There is no rain in California. 
Who doesn’t want to kiss a dimple? A peach? 
A dewy-ass cheek? She’s holding a wax paper pastry bag, 
a creamy iced latte and her phone, blinking 
into the middle distance, mouth a glossy pout 
and fresh gel nails—ten cherries on top. 



&




the only thing that still fits me is this black bathing suit




&



As a pre-teen counting calories in my food diary, 
I never understood how my little sister ate 
those sundaes every night and stayed skinny. 
Three scoops of Ben & Jerry’s gilded 
with spoonfuls of Nutella, crushed Oreos, 
globs of Skippy peanut butter, Lucky Charms. 
Then I found the stash of laxatives stockpiled 
in her bathroom. Lucky charms.


&



I first learn about Ozempic from my friend Erica, 
whose laser technician tells her she can’t come back 

for more sessions since there’s no hair left
to laser off. She’s not on a GLP-1, but her friend is. 

Erica explains it to me—she just like, doesn’t get 
pleasure from food anymore. 

Pleasure—the revolt of it. I could gag on the word. 
A word that lives in someone else’s body.

But this was always the dream, wasn’t it? 
Someone else’s body? 	A “magic pill”? 

A shot that could make you not want 
food so badly? A shot that would make you 

smaller and smaller until you disappeared? 
Kate Moss’s infamous quote—nothing tastes as good 

as skinny feels. And invisible tastes even better—
the most delicious superpower. 


&


But I remember when my baby brother 
wanted his nanny Alexandra to hold him, 
instead of our 100-pound mother, because
Alex doesn’t have any bones. So boneless Alex
snuggled him, and gripped him 
slippery in poolwater in her functional 
one-piece, teaching him to swim, and gave him 
milk and tucked him in while our mother went 
to parties, played tennis, took the Concorde jet
to Paris, got herself down to a zero 
to fit into runway-sample Valentino gowns. 


&


Smaller and smaller 
until she fit 
in my father’s palm. 
He made a fist 
around her 
to keep her, but kept 
cheating on her, no matter 
how small 
and blonde she got. 


Down to a zero. 
It took her twenty-five 
years to say she was done. 


And still she says to me
you’re still hungry?
you’re already hungry?
you’re hungry again?

haven’t you had enough?


&


I am wrapping my arms around Lana’s sloping shoulders, folding into the type of hug only a woman who has really lived can give. A hug with no hunger in it. I am a baby woman, starting over, drooling on Lana’s cotton hoodie, nuzzling my nose into her neck, tugging on her thick braid. Thick everywhere. The thickness of women rubbing together. She smells like dirty roses and fresh cream. She holds me and whispers thick things to me: French toast, weed smoke, butterscotch pudding, a crowd of a hundred thousand singing your words back to you. 


&


I love the storm of her body, though I can’t 
forgive myself for my own thunder
thighs. Resolutely thick. Thick going 
into forty without an end in sight. 
Beefy legs, my son says, pinching 
them when I’m bending over 
with the Dust buster, sucking up 
fallen crumbs. The way I contort myself
to arrange these beefy legs 
in bathtub pics for my beloved 
to make them look leaner, though 
he loves them just like this. The right filter. 
The optical illusions we’ve mastered. 
We all thought we’d be skinny 
by now. Here we are, in America, 	
collapsing like a lung.


&


The only thing that still fits me is this black bathing suit


&


Oh Lana Del Rey we love you get up


&



Lana can you breathe easy now? 
You’re fifty pounds lighter, riding 
Jeremy’s airboat through the swamps 
of Louisiana. Lana, they say there’s no way 
you hit the gym—no way you did it naturally—
the housewives picking over your paparazzi 
photos like picking the meat off a rib. 


Skinny swamp queen, 
are you finally good, gliding 
through the humid marshes?
The alligators—closed-mouthed—clear 
a path for you today, but could snap 
you like a wishbone tomorrow.


Lana, you can’t write on an empty stomach.
How many songs will be lost to your starving?

REUBEN GELLEY NEWMAN
Jews Against Genocide

O G-d
stand against
deceit engine

idea cage
dead age
no innocence

do not
wait do not
sit staid

in distance
O stain
on G-d’s
goodness on
stained nation

incite instigate
donate indict
abide engage

no nation is good
no one innocent in

a genocide
we instated

no note no window
no notice no song

O Adonai

now agitate to
wage good in
no G-d’s abode

                         —confession of a UPS driver, with condolences
                          to the families of the fourteen people who died
                          when UPS Flight 2976 crashed


In darkness, can joy be held like a child?
A brown and gold-tailed plane crashes. Freight
and boxes of crickets’ burn—in this unfurled
ruin, why do I think of the insects first? Fate,

a crashed brown and gold-tailed plane. Freight
planes once carried passengers. Cabins were full
of life. It’s easier to think of objects. Fate
is a small word. Three pilots die in the rubble.

This plane used to carry passengers. Now it’s full
of cargo—paychecks and pets’ meals are flown
in a small world. Eleven others die in the rubble,
among them a three-year-old girl on the ground.

My cargo, too, is paychecks. Pets’ meals flown
Next Day in planes heavy with important things.
I was once a three-year-old girl on a playground.
Sometimes I chased corn snakes. Shunned swings.

One day, in my heavy truckful of important things
a box of crickets busted open. Their songs unfurled
in overtime—corn snakes’ meals found wings.
In darkness, I want to hold their joy like a child. 

Only 10,000 monarch butterflies
are left. All citrus can be traced
 
to just three species: mandarins,
pomelos, and citron. It cost
 
$4.3 million dollars to prevent the spread
of a single Ebola case in Manhattan.
 
Fences are fictions.
Have you ever wondered
 
whether water is waterproof? 
Test it
 
with drops of dye
into a water glass.  A moat
 
is magical thinking between you
and me. The line between
 
victor and vanquished
is permeable. Water like
 
light  finds its way
through the cracks.

My beloved generation 
when there are no dms left 
to slide into, where will we go?
Lmao—the hour is late and the light
is passing.

The V of geese in the noontide sky
is on its way to something good
I'm sure of it. Tell me boo, are you 
on your way? I'm here to put clover 
in your Roth IRA. I'm here 
because the line of your jaw is set 
for me like a trap, the leaping lynx 
in the bio.

They haven't made a GIF for this,
the way bae calls me Icarus
when I get mouthy. Behold, each
feature—eyes, nose, hair, ears—
slowly disappears, my open mouth 
alone lingers to sing a while 
before it's taken by the sun. 

Lo, the hour is nigh, my chariot must run 
its sweet riot, bro: I'm for the sky. 

O my people, hear! I'll soon be ash
and bone. Good news, come near: 
one enchanted sword wedged deep in AI's 
heart of stone demands a human hand. 

Tug it, hidden king—this withdrawing 
might save everything. Freak what you heard
RE the demerits of pulling out.
Godspeed! Take heed— 

wretched are the labor pains 
of the artist who never gives birth;

shall ChatGPT inherit the earth?

I used to think I could ignore 
the sex lives of men, how they 
fucked the willowy young assistants,
sweet faces plastered on websites 
in a mockery of representation. 
If my colleagues were brilliant 
at deal-making and showed me 
specious respect, I could claim 
I didn’t know about young pussy. 
But I knew about young pussy 
because I was once young pussy, 
ogled by teachers, fondled by 
my father’s customers, my friend 
raped by her stepfather, my friend 
raped by her older brother, rumors 
in my town of even younger girls
not talked about, so the only thing 
I could do was be vigilant in defense 
of my young pussy from predators 
everywhere. But I would dream 
teenage sex dreams about rape, 
awake sweating with arousal, sick 
with shame, as if force was the only 
way young pussy was allowed 
to feel pleasure. Now my daughter 
is young pussy, and I dream 
fantasies of violence 
against the men, the elites, 
the President of this country.

typical morning orange juice orange yolks smear the
kitchen counter first drops hit like pennies then
nickels then harder something’s tearing
loose next door stilts swaying toilet
spitting slipping on wet floor
wind finds every crack
every fault the house
screams at its
seams

still

lost birds in
broken light windows
gone tree limbs strewn across
a debris-filled riverbed we called
our street power lines sparking setting
fire to the empty house next door someone’s
screaming one block over someone’s screaming
someone’s screaming no no no no screaming no no
no no no one’s coming to help us       at least not for days

The news today says the new president wants to start  
denaturalizing some citizens. I look it up: “to make something 

unnatural.” How does one do that?  By putting a hat on a horse? 
Sunglasses on a sunflower? Painting a tree the color of a tree? 

I was naturalized in 2002, under a portrait of George W., 
and swore allegiance in a room as colorful as the world. 

I learned to speak American, learned to say “out” and “house”  
by depressing the back of my tongue as I spoke. 

Now my heart races when I smell BBQ and I get a tingle 
of pride listening to Ronnie Van Zant croon about freedom. 

My wife, American born Jewess, traces her American roots 
back an impressive three generations.  

My family never stayed anywhere that long, either forced out 
by rifles and rape, or when the borders of their countries  

shifted beneath them, one flag swapped out for another. 
Naturalized or not, they were never natural, never real 

citizens. They were always zhyds, meaning Jews, a slur 
across all Slavic languages. In 1762, Empress Catherine II 

invited all foreigners to settle in Russia with one exception: zhyds. 
Say the word out loud and you can hear the revulsion, the hate. 

I may look like you, America, with my eyes and my hands, affections  
and passions, my sneakers, Rock ‘n Roll t-shirt and khaki shorts, 

but I’m not fooling anyone: I’m not you and can never be you.  
One day my bones may hang in a Museum of Unnatural History.  

They’ll wire my jaws together so that I’m always smiling.

I was standing on a corner near the Guggenheim, 
just me and three thousand other people
waiting to cross. A few seconds after the light changed, 
a cab tore through and almost hit the woman in front of me. 
The guy to my left screamed mother fucker in English, 
as the woman beside him shouted something in Dutch, 
and the man next to her something in Hindi, cousins, 
no doubt, to the slur about the cabbie 
having sex with the woman who abracadabraed his breath 
into the chalice of flesh. We all looked at each other 
with an expression that, in the language of the face, 
translated as asshole, smiled and moved on. It's the smiling 
I adore, the recognition of how alike we are 
in our differences. If you want to meet the world, 
come to America. People arrive with suitcases, 
and without, with twenty and twenty million dollars 
sewn into the lining of their chakras, by plane
and foot and boat and raft and balloon 
in the past, when air ships were a thing 
that made people look up and wish for a life 
in the sky. It wouldn't surprise me if the cabbie 
swore at us in French or Spanish, Swahili 
or the Hebrew that leapt out from the deli 
I stood in front of an hour later, wondering which came first, 
the bagel or the shmear. A smorgasbord of languages. 
Of hair, and noses, of songs and dreams and genes. 
If you think of people as metal shavings, you're weird, 
but then you can also think of America as a magnet. 
People are attracted here from everywhere. 
Because they're tortured. Or have restless soul syndrome. 
Or believe in a god who'll get them harassed 
or killed at home. Whatever our problems are, 
we've been the closest thing the world has known 
to an open door. Some say close it. Maybe. Sure. 
But then again, as the children of light, of stars 
that died and passed their reaching on to us, 
we could also crack it wider.

Soon after bombs stop plunging
from the sky over Tripoli,
I invade the “Mommy and Me Class”
at the pool. A storm broods.
Lightning slithers through murky clouds.
The chance that swerved
the bird of artillery that killed
the general’s baby granddaughter
threatens to march us to the break room
for a politically warped safety video
in which Longfellow, a cartoon whale
in Florence Nightingale bonnet,
warns the only black kid
in a gang of white kids about sunburn.
Our sleek teen teacher bobs
in a cheerless hub of eight tubby moms
and girlies in peppermint suits.
My son and I, lone males, hide
the distant dreams of deposed kings
behind the forged passports
of our smiles. The hypocritical adults sing,
“If You’re Happy and You Know It,”
paddling hands and feet of rebel kids.
Each turn of the matriarchal wheel
sends looks of ethnic cleansing
in my direction. Who can splash off
the stain of not belonging?
What dark weather decreed us
too heavy for this year’s styles?
What tyranny snares me in the whirlpool
of fatherhood? My son, pure Viking,
hair as white as Arctic sun,
innocent eyes of fierce democratic blue,
senses the change in regimes
as we slip into The Lazy River.
Under guard of a goofy fiberglass moose,
I learn I must dunk him three times,
loving him more each time he comes up
screaming murder at this world
in which every small life matters
as long as the newest circle of leaders
obeys the command to drown its hearts
and immerse the young in the lessons of dying.

A parade with tanks versus a parade with tubas.
Both metal. Both go to war. Remember The Tuba Wars
of Upper Silesia? But only one guarantees oom pahs
and I'm a big fan of oom pahs. Is that the correct spelling
of oom pah? Here's the British: oome pahe. The French:
je suis a cigar. A parade with rocket launchers
versus a parade of ants wearing tiny black arm bands
for all the ants who've died under someone's shoe.
Time must be spent doing things that take time,
so I guess why not a parade of people singing
"I did It My Way" versus a parade of devices
meant to kill people who may or may not know
who Frank Sinatra was. This country doesn't need
a military parade, or another extra large soda,
or more quick oil change shops. A day at the beach
for America would be nice. Maybe see a movie
with Mexico or Canada. Perhaps a few adult
education courses, Advanced Hand-Holding
or Hand-Holding for Beginners for those new
to the dream of affection. My favorite parade thing:
big men in tiny cars wearing fezes, the men,
not the cars. But tiny cars wearing fezes
would be my favorite thing in all the world
as I understand it right now. Is this where I admit
I don't understand it at all, or do I do that
in another poem, maybe a poem with a shark in it
and me lost at sea in the ocean of the poem.
I know, a sea is not an ocean and a tank
isn't going to wear a fez any time soon.
I've got to go. It's getting early
and I'd like to be outside when the birds punch in.
When the parade of sunlight begins. My heart
is not a tuba, more of a piccolo, more of a home
my blood rushes to and runs away from
all day long. A parade of days and years
of trying to be better at knowing what I should want
to be better at. A parade of baby steps.
Should we live every day
as if we've just learned to ride a bike,
or should we ride bikes as if we're playing tag
with the wind? Yes. And should there be
other choices? No.