speaking in cliché - by rayne fisher-quann

i wrote this piece to be read aloud at a show i did in brooklyn last week. it’s meant to be read sort of like a monologue. it’s fiction, but it’s mostly true, and the parts that are technically fake are actually even truer in the emotional sense. it’s nice to see you guys again. xoxo Here’s a list of the things I did that summer. I cut my hair. I lived in a big wooden house next to a bog and listened to David Berman every day and cried in the kitchen. The light was yellow in the morning and it made the dust in the air look like fireworks, or like the fluorescent flecks of shrapnel that spray out when you grind metal against stone. During the heatwave I filled the tub with cold water and stepped in and out, in and out, in and out. I tried being anorexic again. I played piano in the nighttime. I turned 19 and I don’t remember anything about it. I let my boyfriend have sex with me. Before I only gave him handjobs because I had a medically too-tight vagina and also because I was scared of

i wrote this piece to be read aloud at a show i did in brooklyn last week. it’s meant to be read sort of like a monologue. it’s fiction, but it’s mostly true, and the parts that are technically fake are actually even truer in the emotional sense. it’s nice to see you guys again. xoxo Here’s a list of the things I did that summer. I cut my hair. I lived in a big wooden house next to a bog and listened to David Berman every day and cried in the kitchen. The light was yellow in the morning and it made the dust in the air look like fireworks, or like the fluorescent flecks of shrapnel that spray o