a boy on Tinder told me my poems were too depressing.
Poetry by Laura Andrea
Previously published by Vessel Press.
and what of that girl/ the girl I’ve never written about before/ the girl that desperately tries to understand love by writing about it/ despite never feeling it/ the “real” way at least/ the way everyone else wants her to/ the girl who gets told it’s ok that it hasn’t happened yet by people on their fourth and fifth loves/ the 23 year old secret virgin/ the girl whose virginity is a stamp of disapproval/ the girl who toys with telling people she’s saving herself for marriage even though she doesn’t believe in it because that’s less mortifying than admitting no one wants her/ the girl who likes boys and girls so there should be more options, right?/ the girl who cries in debilitating fear whenever a high school classmate gets engaged/ the girl who sleeps on the right side of her full sized bed and pretends that the last boy she kissed is stuck at work and will slip in later/ the girl whose sadness is pathetic and shareable only through poems so people think it’s hyperbole/ the girl who deserves more than these shrieked poems/ this is all I can give her.
Laura Andrea (she/her) is a cuir, boricua fiction writer and poet from Carolina, Puerto Rico. She’s currently pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Texas at El Paso. You can follow her day to day online @lauranlora.