Jamie Buehner
Gross Brie: Growing Pains
Better Than Wondering How, Exactly, Nejat Died, Just Barely, Was
Gross Brie: Growing Pains
So you like the ocean and the mountains. You’re not just talking about going there for a while; you’re
talking about going there and only coming home when someone dies. Maybe I’m jealous. I never left and
I wanted to.
I don’t know if I want to or not. There are so many things I want to say.
Just fucking say them.
I’m getting fat. I bought gross blue cheese. I already drank the smoothie I bought for tomorrow morning. I
should have just gone to Subway. Gross brie. Why did she say that about dying.
Better Than Wondering How, Exactly, Nejat Died, Just Barely, Was
remembering how I’d found Johnny after having driven to his apartment after he broke up with me,
ostensibly to deliver his Christmas card.
He’d been drinking a pinkish colored Vitamin Water and watching the Weather Channel, guns underneath
his bed and one on his microwave.
I’d driven home, shoveled, and then sat down on this perfect snow bank remembering how his coffee
grinder/alarm clock, which went off at five a.m. sounded exactly to my ear like a gunshot.
And all the while the bank held me up, held me up.
Jamie Lynn Buehner is the author of Dessert Poems (Binge Press, 2012) and Catalpa (Red Bird Chapbooks, forthcoming December 2015). Her recent work appears in pioneertown, Sleet, The Midwest Quarterly, and the Wisconsin Review. She lives in Bonn, Germany.