Pet Sounds: A series in which teaching staff and students from the English Department reflect on a piece of music or song. [Read all entries.] [Revisit the “Headspace” series.] [Revisit the “Ongoing” series.] [Revisit the “Interrogative” series.]

Photograph: Jeff Chow

Forgotten Song in Spanish

She turns on the radio, listens to it from the balcony,
And bathes herself in smoke.
She chooses the foulest cigarettes,
saturated with nicotine—
Second-hand smoke is as potent as first.
She’s over-speeding her way to death and you
can’t give her a ticket.

Watches TV in pure darkness
to dry her eyes;
dehydrates her bones so
every time she gets up to go pee, feeling peckish,
her body aches a little more.
And from that, she thinks there is some triumph.

Perhaps she would repose in the couch that knows her best
when everyone has left her.
Her summer sweat-beads trace a head and limbs:
an all-natural suicide,
and then she truly becomes unreachable
to her Airbnb guests.

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Jeff Chow is a graduate of the Department of English (Class of 2017).  When not reading, he is busy making puns. [Read all entries by or about Jeff.]