Sarah Galvin/July 2016/Writing for this is not NOT a peep show

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​THAT ASS IS ETCHED INTO THE UNIVERSE FOREVER
Vibrations are infinite, so every time you slap an ass, your appreciation of that ass is etched into the universe forever. This intersection of sex and math is where I’d expect to find the erogenous parts of concepts, but somehow they are nowhere to be seen. Every object designed by a human is in some way a device for intimacy with the abstract. The longer I live, the more convinced I am that every object is invisibly but outrageously effective, except for manicured lawns. Every time you obsessively mow your lawn, the realm of the abstract is waiting for you to fall asleep so it can masturbate.


IN GALLERIES
It’s places like this, surrounded by edible sculptures, ceramic pelvises, and pieces of other planets, that I think most of my stalker. When I was a teenager I showed my mom a drawing my first girlfriend gave me of Kermit the frog with two cacti growing out of his head and the caption: “I fuck pigs.” My mom said her friends would have been too afraid of offending each other to exchange things like that.

In places my stalker would never venture, I’m most aware I’m being pursued, places like the parking garage where my first girlfriend and I covered an office chair with tinsel and spun each other around until it collapsed, wondering if it was art. We slept in the same bed every night for a year before I even got to touch her tits, which for that year, like me, were composed entirely of wondering. Now, both of us having all the sex we want with people far better suited for us, we sit in bars talking about insurance.

When we met we played Judas Priest on screeching 45 under a table, eating cake with our hands that we had baked secret messages into. I wanted to kiss her like I wanted my next breath, but I couldn’t—I felt something bad might happen, like somehow I would be followed.
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PEEP SHOW
“Why does this even exist?” read the caption below photo of a flower on social media. The caption was a joke, but in an age when everything has a bird on it, the sentiment was refreshing. Birds are probably great, but the best peeps are silent, be they glimpses of nudity or marshmallows. Does anyone ornamented with images of wolves and owls even know these animals are not marshmallows? To be honest, the only time I’ve been totally convinced birds aren’t marshmallows was when I witnessed two male pigeons mating and was legitimately turned on. Directly obtaining a resource from another organism was so alarming I had to dress up as a combine harvester immediately.

Sarah Galvin is the author of a book of poems, The Three Einsteins and a book of essays, The Best party of Our Lives. Her poetry and essays can be also found in io, New Ohio Review, Vice Magazine, and Pinwheel, among others. She is a regular contributor to The Stranger newspaper. She is a winner of the 2015 Lottery Grant, a 2015 James W. Ray award nominee, and was considered for what would have been the first Radio Flyer Wagon DUI in Washington State history.