A poem?

Back in grad school, I took one poetry workshop—we were all required to take one cross-genre course. We were supposed to write poems about objects that we see every day. Being a weirdo, I decided to write about disgusting things in my apartment—a series I called the “domestic abject.” Spit-splattered mirrors, ceiling fans that badly needed dusting. You get the idea.

Aside from a few that the Denver Quarterly very kindly published, I’ve sat on those poems for years. But when I saw that Chen Chen had started a Twitter-based poetry journal called the lickety~split, I realized that I may be able to chop a few of them down to 280 characters.

And that’s how my little gunk poem came into the world.

You know what’s great about poems? You don’t have to title them. Fiction writers should adopt this practice.