I am trying to create a tangible experience 
in your car and my hair is wet.

It is 3 in the morning.
We are at a gas station.
You are thinking about distance
and about wrinkles on our brains,
how we are permanently encased
between the width of our skulls.

I think that I would like to
push my head against your head
for nine and a half years.

Then you will understand something
about my internal organs,
how they felt confused and alone
when I saw your face from the perspective
of four thousand planets,
when I woke up from a dream
and promised I wouldn’t text you,
when I felt an emotion as a placeholder
and touched every inside part of you.


I’m just trying to breathe over here.
You know as well as I do
what it’s like.
You’re just not thinking about it right now.

You’ve struggled to catch your breath.
You’ve fallen off your bike before, probably.
You’ve (probably) gasped,
like during a movie,
When someone said something really cool/rude/sexy.
I am saying something.
Am I saying something
cool/rude
(probably not sexy but im just flustered).

Hey.
I think we could still be
‘together’
even though
we dont really
‘like’
each other
that much
anymore.
I think we could still
‘do this’
for a while
longer
if we just established some
‘ground rules’.
I think we could
stay
‘together’
even though
it doesnt really
feel
‘good’.


I’m just trying to breathe over here.
You know as well as I do
what its like.
You’re just not thinking about it right now.

You’ve struggled to catch your breath.
You’ve fallen off your bike before probably.

You know how it feels when
you swallow a pill and it becomes caught
in your throat.

You are holding me back, somehow,
maybe not.

At night you fall asleep with one arm on me.
Your face is mostly plain.

You know that love will never feel like
being pushed off the edge of a cliff.

Reading your emails
I can feel something motionless
at the base of my head.

You are better than me because
I don’t eat food anymore
and you exercise sometimes.

Mostly you are better because you hate me.

If we just establish some
‘ground rules’
I think we could
stay
‘together’
even though
it doesn’t really
feel
‘good’.

(Source: peelsofpoetry)

thetangential:

“In the Victorian Era, sex was not thought to be enjoyable for women, who were famously advised to ‘lie back and think of the empire’ while their husbands plowed away. For women in the ‘alt lit’ community writing about sex today, the equivalent maxim seems to be ‘lie back and think of the Internet.’”

“Mira Gonzalez writes poetry that seems very true. I mean that both in the sense of emotional honesty and in the sense that she’s right, it does feel insane that you need money to develop a drug addiction.”

“Though it does contain the lines ‘I will touch your face using my entire body/ and we will recall a specific warm morning/ when we felt numbness in the space between atoms/ and our mouths tasted like the unattainable closeness of years prior,’ on every other page of I Will Never Be Beautiful Enough For Us to Be Beautiful Together, Mira Gonzalez is not the kind of poet who writes poetry like that.”

“The poetry of Mira Gonzalez might be described as ‘erotic existentialism,’ except that it’s not particularly erotic. In her poems sex often happens, but the act is described flatly and without detail, by way of explaining what her body is doing while her mind is contemplating the spaces between molecules.”

“Mira Gonzalez’s poetry collection I Will Never Be Beautiful Enough For Us to Be Beautiful Together arrives hot on the heels of the writer being singled out by Vice UK as an example of everything that’s wrong with the alt lit movement. That might be the best publicity she could have hoped for.”

“I Will Never Be Beautiful Enough For Us to Be Beautiful Together, a poetry collection by Mira Gonzalez, is being published in the same season as the first book by Marie Calloway, another confessional young female writer whose writing is native to the Internet. Sex is a frequent occurrence in both books, but whereas for Calloway sex is an extremely serious matter that occasions frantically intense introspection, for Gonzalez—like Megan Boyle—the act has a poignant absurdity. ‘He said “I’m gonna come on your stomach” 15 to 20 times while breathing heavily and putting his penis on different parts of my stomach/ every time I attempted to touch his penis he moved my hand away/ eventually I gave up on trying to interact with his penis.’”

“‘I feel like 400 dead jellyfish in the middle of a freeway.’ If Mira Gonzalez didn’t exist, Diablo Cody would have to invent her.”

“One day when I was an RA in grad school, I was eating lunch with an undergrad who I barely knew; unexpectedly, she broke down in tears and told me that a longtime friend of hers had started dating someone else, and that she barely saw him any more. ‘I just wish,’ she told me, ‘that wherever he’s going, he could just put me in his pocket and take me with him.’ I was reminded of that woman when I read the title poem of Mira Gonzalez’s new collection I Will Never Be Beautiful Enough For Us to Be Beautiful Together. ‘If I were two inches tall/ I would sit on your shoulder all day/ and nurture a relationship with your earlobe/ my hands would be too small to effectively touch you.’”

“I once asked Minneapolis poet Paul Dickinson whether he’d ever considered trying stand-up comedy. ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘It’s better to be the funny poet than the poetic comedian.’”

“Mira Gonzalez portrays bleakness in such vibrant verse that it’s hard to believe she actually wants to starve to death during sex. Still, I’m inclined to believe her.”

- Jay Gabler is proud that the final poem in the book was first published at Unreality House.

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Photoillustration by Mira Gonzalez via Tumblr