To Jennifer Love-Hewitt: I Saw you at Fendi Last Week - I was the Little Mohawked Squatter Punk Panhandler, by Lauren Brazeal

TRANSMITTED VIA FACSIMILE

RE: Los Angeles County case #24789. Letter was balled up and tied to a padlock, found thrown through the southern-most window at Love-Hewitt estate. Status: Unsolved

Dear Jenny,

                        If I had real access

to the internet I'd follow          and unfollow   and refollow you

on twitter,        proving how relentless I can be; and

                        I'd unfriend you every night

            on facebook

so you'd wake up

            every corresponding morning

to my sweet smile

broadening your friend requests.

I'd celebrate each homecoming as though it was my first.

                        Oh Jen, you'd ache

and love           and keep

my slender hands wrist-deep inside you, cradling

your weaker structures. Forget forever

how us girls evolved to cake

            foundation on unsightly ruptures. Never beg

for mercy from a man again;

curl your toes for my forgiving            tongue instead and crack

a little extra space

                        between those legs.

            I'd rip you

from that pretty red Moschino dress,

and hook your thorax on a pin            to keep you

splayed,           and still, and posed for action;

like a vulva-colored     lady praying

mantis—          I'llshow you other flower-mimic

predators we mutually

            relate to if you let me in

to this big terra-cotta

            house of yours. What did it cost you? 

                        I bet, combined,

our scars would trace God's    very spine.

It makes me sick how pitch

            perfectly alike we are: both of us women

—teenyboppers really—

            making origami of our sex

to serve a world drunk,

                        guzzling fragility.

                        Though you're the one they think about

when they're settling for me.

You stuck-up bitch I'd love

to show you how it feels

                        to withstand hypodermic teeth;

            be overlooked, replaceable,

dangling just inside the serpent's reach.           Jenny,

stay the hell away from Fendi.

            Avoid the bench I've claimed

as my new country. Don't play with me

down in the dirt or you'll find shovelfuls

of pinworms up your skirt.

We're not lover/twins, Love-Hewett,

            not even friends.

                        But I could be the orphan that you chose.

We'd laugh and eat together,               like on the show.

—On set you'll share vacation pics of us

together on your phone.

I want to hear you say it:

without her I'd just be alone.

In her past, Lauren Brazeal has been a homeless gutter-punk, a resident of Ecuador's Amazon jungle, a maid, a surfer chick, and a custom aquarium designer. A graduate of Bennington's MFA program in writing and literature, her work has appeared widely online and in print in such journals as DIAGRAM, tNY's Electric Encyclopedia of Experimental Literature, Heavy Feather Review and on Verse Daily. Her debut chapbook of poems, Zoo for Well-Groomed Eaters, is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press  in the spring of 2016. Her second chapbook,  Exuviae, a collection of sonnets dressed in prose, will also appear April 2016 from Horse Less Press.