Dear Tinder guy, if you’re going to be a creep, then at least be a mass murderer
I’d much rather that you just flat out murdered me, quickly please
don’t keep me captive in your garden shed
for the next sixteen years
feeding me mince and white bread and overcooked carrots
and, worst of all, weetbix for my breakfast;
inject me with a muscle relaxant, drag me across
the kitchen floor and tie me to a chair,
then needle into my vein and drain all my blood
even though I am looking to have sex
please don’t be a rapist if it turns out
that I’m not interested in you;
none of that, just slice my throat open
and get off on the pump of my arterial blood
decorating the room
if you feel cannibalistic urges after I’m dead
that’s fine, I can’t protest anyway,
just don’t be nice and tell me
how you’re looking for your true love, your soul mate;
get on with it and slam an axe into the back of my head
riving my skull open while I browse through your CD collection
First published in Queen Mob's Teahouse (2019)
Also published in
Food Court: Summer Lovin' zine (2020)
About Paula
Paula Harris lives in Aotearoa/New Zealand, where she writes and sleeps a lot, because that's what depression makes you do. She won the 2018 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize and the 2017 Lilian Ida Smith Award, and was a semi-finalist for the 2020 92Y Discovery Poetry Prize. She was the recipient of a Vermont Studio Center writing residency in 2018.
Her poetry has been published in various journals, including Passages North, Barren, New Ohio Review, SWWIM, Gulf Coast, The Spinoff, Poetry New Zealand Yearbook and Aotearotica. Her essays have been published in The Sun, Passages North, The Spinoff and Headlands: New Stories of Anxiety (Victoria University Press).
She is extremely fond of dark chocolate, shoes and hoarding fabric.