EAT PURE, BE PURE.

In a mass text
Coco makes the big reveal
she’s begun
a juice cleanse
as a ceremonial
gesture for her
becoming a model.
I go to call
my friend, Yves,
who works
for a local for-
profit news blog,
to see if she
thinks it’s a story.
Uh, she says, It sounds
relatable enough,
but I’ll probably
have to tag it as
“Entertainment.”
Yves doesn’t realize
Coco is recovering
from body dysmorphia.
When I tell her,
she says, Oh that’s
breaking/heartbreaking news…
is she going
with Urban Remedy
or Suja?

YOUR WORLD IN ONE COLOR.

The winter has meant
a surge in my consumption
of lip balm, my go-to
being Burt’s Bees
Island Passion Fruit.
On one of those nights
when everything seems to be
a commercial for the same
thing/product you don’t need…
but need endlessly,
Chanel asks me if I believe
in transcendence. Hmm,
transcendence, I think aloud. We begin
saying the word transcendence so much
that it, transcendence, seems to reject
itself as a possibility.
On the Burt’s Bees lip balm
there is a miniature tropical scene.
I believe in vacation, I say.
But doesn’t it all look the same
after a while, she says, Blue sky
blue water, blue drink? Oh.
We decide we’ll paint our house blue.
We go to Home Depot to look at swatches.
We read Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, which is…
about the color blue.

REWIND ANYTIME.

Chanel, you have to
see this, I say. I pause

the DVR. She comes.
I unpause. The Bachelor…

from The Bachelor…
is wearing my…

Banana Republic shirt…
with the stripes.

That’s so funny, she says,
that’s your shirt.

Uhuh, I say, crazy…
Crazy, she says…
 

Peter Cole Friedman is a poet and visual artist based in New York City. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Imperial Matters, Similar:Peaks::, Five Quarterly, and The Sensation Feelings Journal. He co-edits the virtual literary and arts magazine glitterMOB.