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  • Writer's pictureNika Mavrody

Dear Zac, Abe, and Bennett in the Ukrainian Village

I think the first time you were unavailable it was for your mother's hospitalization. "I'm like a fag who loves pussy," my husband said as I was reluctant before we made love. Then he went out for a smoke. 


In Paris, which is the setting for my dance debut, one year I couldn't find you so I met Marco. My husband, who was born in Hong Kong, stayed in your hometown some years too before his family returned to the United States. 


According to my calculations, congratulations you don't have AIDS. No one liked my writing about HIV at the comedy club where I completed a course in stand-up; these days I feel more like a virus than one of the viral celebrities everyone emulates. Speaking of Dennis, I found a teenager with a modelesque look and no dance training posting Instagram reels as a personal blog. 


We last saw each other at Target the night before I delivered a poem scaffolded by scholarship (that is, an original contribution usually awarded an advanced degree or a book deal... perhaps both) for the last time. She was proud of feeding back so many words to her professor whose colleagues had once instructed our teacher in biology so that he would eventually praise L'Etranger by Albert Camus as the greater accomplishment, because Pristuplenya i Nakozanya was much longer but effected the same morality. Will he accept my LinkedIn invitation?


I met you because of him; my parents encouraged me to attend another, newer school closer to home, but he was one of Mary's new hires, boasting to be a graduate of a university on the East Coast regarded with the Ivy League. I once imagined making out with him in a car just to think about how he blushed; luckily he was assigned to my class the first quarter of high school. 


The following year, I enrolled in an accelerated science course only to learn what was really going on at his alma mater. A mathematics professor with colleagues had submitted an article claiming achievement in experimental physics to a popular journal in the academic humanities hosted by the university in question. Upon publication, the authors revealed their work was a hoax designed to intervene in the overdetermined rhetorics stoking poststructural theory. My sophomore science teacher distributed the newspaper photocopies as if this was making a mockery of literary studies, as he explained was intended, rather than his own discipline. 


Wouldn't you email Jesus Christ if (t)he(y) were listed on WhitePages.com?

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