New American Best Friend (E.P. Chapbooks)

"Gatwood is at her best here: blending sharp storytelling with attention to craft, making sure each finish line leaves a reader breathless. These are poems that dig into you, build a home, and stay a while." - Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, author of The Crown Ain't Worth Much"In New American Best Friend, Olivia Gatwood slices with a sharp, keen humor into the beguiling and calamitous experience of American adolescence and young adulthood." -Carrie Fountain, author of Burn Lake Olivia Gatwood is a poet, fiction writer, and sex & relationships columnist at Bustle.com and HelloFlo. Hailing from Albuquerque, New Mexico, she is a Brave New Voices, Women of the World, and National Poetry Slam finalist, winner of the 2015 Rustbelt Regional Poetry Slam and has been featured on HBO and TV One's Verses & Flow. Author of the chapbook Drunk Sugar and a recent graduate of Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, Olivia has taught workshops on feminism, poetry and sexual health at foster homes, women's shelters, public schools and community centers nationwide. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. the boys and i are playing quarters with double shots of vodka and i am winning. by winning i mean i am not one of the boys but i am the next best thing. by the next best thing i mean i am a girl and i am drunk. every time i miss a shot, johnny gets to flick a quarter against my knuckles and now my knuckles are bleeding onto my thighs but every time i make a shot i get to knock back a throat full of liquor. i slam down the glass until it cracks up the side and now the game is about who will still drink from it, who will risk shards in the belly, who will cut up their insides for a pack of newports and it's not that i even want the cigarettes, it's just that i am not afraid of blood which is also part of being a girl. but being the only girl means making yourself lose when you've won too much so i bounce the coin off the rim of the shot glass and let johnny slice me open. in thirty minutes, johnny is dragging me out of the bathroom by my wrists and i can hear him saying something about blood on the carpet, about a drunk girl in the house who is staining everything and i think that means i must be the champion of quarters. johnny is the kind of guy who sleeps with a gun, not women. but johnny is always the one inviting me over for a game of quarters and sometimes i wonder if this is how johnny fucks. like maybe he is the kind of man who only screams when he is underwater or lets me feel how strong his fingers are without actually touching me. maybe that's why we're all here, even the boys, to let johnny hold us like a barred window. i work a double one day a week and on this day, don't answer johnny's call. by one day a week i mean two men break in and shoot johnny in the temple for two-thousand pills and i am scraping pasta from a business man's plate into the trash. at some point i'll tell you why i didn't go to the wake. i guess i never really knew johnny like that. by that i mean sober or in a church. when i say i didn't go to the wake i mean i drove by his house everyday for two years and the for sale sign never got taken down like the house would always be johnny's, like maybe the whole town knew what happened there. like maybe no one could get rid of the blood. Read more