"All the fucks I give (are so, so many)", "Cavities", "Cry 'Girl'", "Going to be Don Quixote in the end" & "Your damn little red roadster: glimpses of a relationship in haiku" By Maia Brown-Jackson
- Roi Fainéant
- Jul 27
- 6 min read
All the fucks I give (are so, so many)
“Look at me,” people say,
gesturing empty arms to open air.
“Look at all the fucks I give.”
Implying, of course,
that the air around them is devoid of fucks;
that they give zero.
“Look at me,” I say in response.
“Look at all the fucks I give.
Look at them.”
Because they are shining bright enough to blind
like radioactive waste in a children’s cartoon
because I don’t give zero.
I don’t know how.
I started a pile of fucks very, very young
and it tilted over
and spilled into the Mariana Trench
and still I added until I started worrying about rising sea levels
and stopped with that one.
Then I started haphazardly flinging fucks into the night sky
until it got too bright for it to still be night
and I had to stop doing that, too.
So now I cradle my fucks between my palms,
my stack growing ever taller.
My mother asks when I’ll put them down.
I need my hands, she tells me.
I need to be able to defend myself;
I’ve become an open target,
just clutching my fucks to my chest so they don’t fall
and I can’t see over this ever-growing pile any more
and I’m already clumsy
and soon I’ll have no choice but to fall
(but I don’t let her know that).
And I can't answer her,
because I don't know how to put them down.
No.
Instead, I always manage to balance just one more on top
like the world’s most desperate game of jenga
and then one more thing happens
and you can bet I’ll give a fuck about that, too,
and my god it’s exhausting—
Hope is so fucking exhausting.
But what’s the alternative?
Because I have too much unfinished to be an epilogue yet.
Maybe I’m an ellipsis, an em dash, a semicolon—
something that says this sentence isn’t over.
And maybe I am more vulnerable,
less prepared to protect myself,
a few more wounds than most from years of fighting battles I could have ignored,
but that same stubborn nature that won’t let that piece of me,
deep inside, stop believing in good,
that’s a virtue, too, because I am not admitting defeat.
Even if I trip and fall again
and again
and again.
Even though there are no guarantees.
Even if my only shield against yet another
fractured bone from clumsy feet
and an obstructed view is fragile defiance.
I still give all the fucks.
And arduous and painful as it is,
I think I prefer it to the alternative.
So, to all of you out there,
all of you who spread arms
you don’t realize are begging for something to carry
if only to soothe a soul too defeated to weep over the fear
that it’s grown empty and it doesn’t know what it’s meant to do anymore,
then go ahead:
Look at all the fucks I give. Take one of mine.
Cavities
Published by Dipity Lit Mag, 2024
Just take a minute to be grateful
if this morning when you rose,
groggy and disoriented, perhaps,
you didn’t need glass
or silicon hydrogel polymers
to see your face unblurred in the mirror.
The cosmos and cesium,
the nebulae and nitric acid—
yes,
they will kill you,
and yes,
you have no say,
and yes,
yes,
yes, you are an overripe wound
suffocating under the heel of the
overlarge capitalist mosquito
who sucks and sucks and sucks and
never bleeds you dry but leaves
that annoyance, that prick, that itch—
and yes,
that is your fate if
you believe in fate,
and that is your destiny
if you believe in destiny,
but also: fuck fate.
Fuck destiny.
Try to hold, for just a moment,
the gratitude that this morning when you woke
the same cortisol that runs through
your veins poisoning you with epigenetic trauma
inherited from the ancestors hunted and slaughtered
also gave you, perhaps, the genetics to
eat leftover cake for breakfast without
worrying too much about cavities.
Or brush well and eat the cake, anyway.
It's time to get used to saying, “Fuck you,”
and doing exactly as you please.
Cry “Girl”
Includes excerpt of “Holy II,” published in BlazeVOX Journal, 2023
I tire of being human:
I wish to be holy.
My hands, bless not bruise—
my mouth, sing not sin—
my heart, unbroken with purpose.
It doesn’t make much difference,
though.
My time is limited here,
and no matter if I bruise
or bless,
you still spit girl at me
like it’s a foul word.
I wish I were a shapeshifter.
In my dreams, I am
wolf,
lion,
beast.
In my dreams,
I am born free and
unburdened,
and no one will deign
to underestimate my power,
and pretty will be the
least important thing about me.
In my dreams,
I shine gold
and blind you with goodness.
All my mistakes
are turned to art,
and I race to the cliff’s edge,
and hurl myself, unselfconscious, at the stars.
In my dreams,
girl will be my battlecry,
and you will cower when I call.
Going to be Don Quixote in the end
On that day that I was slammed into a landlocked shipwreck
and there was someone crowing on the prow—
well, I didn’t care if it was my dying hallucination
and didn’t hesitate before I took their hand,
restless and ready for a bad idea:
they changed everything.
I knew my destiny I always had and
the sky was such a plain blue that
I was already mentally preparing for disaster,
so I canonized myself patron saint of tilting at windmills
because I’m going to be Don Quixote in the end, anyway.
They touch me like the end is coming, and fast,
with their hands rough, with their hands soft, with their hands—
and their voice rasps like spilled ashtrays
with still-burning cigarette butts
as they read my body like braille,
my too-pale skin the canvas for their fingerpaint.
They are an enigma, promising me with a wicked laugh
that we will find the cosmic significance of it all,
then they crash me like a flickering neon orange sign
(VACANCY; NO VACANCY;
VACANCY; NO VACANCY)
into heartbreak—
before repenting on their knees and
begging forgiveness between my legs.
I'm so absolutely mad over them,
but I start to fear waking from these opium dreams,
crushed by gravity—
start to wonder if I had gone too far this time—
and our atoms are flickering now
and I’m worried this may be the time their wings finally melt
and then they tell me to
hold on
and
crash!
slam!
We break into 1605
and now we’re crossing swords with windmills
until they turn to giants and—
suddenly—
I’m—
!—
Your damn little red roadster: glimpses of a relationship in haiku
I LOVE YOU. You love
me. Yet neither of us are
very good at This.
I don’t know if You
And Me could ever be a
We, but I do know
that something about
your little red roadster and
all those iced coffees
you buy me makes the
FOOLISH, NAÏVE, part of my
brain absurdly Hope—
Somehow you can make
me believe I'm loved as much
as a Saint's Last Prayer.
We’re drinking champagne
and whiskey on your roof and
we know We’re In Love.
Your arm is around
my shoulders and We Never
DEFINE WHAT WE ARE.
Chasing toads, skipping
stones; m y skin ghost-pale on y o u r s
as you catch my hand.
We act as If We’re
Holy, though we just ROT to
plant food in the end.
I'm a Hurricane
Manifested and I'll wreck
you; still, please, kiss me—
So I just b e g you
to BRUISE ME LIKE DYNAMITE,
force me to combust.
Your grin (Dark, Hungry)
emerges as I d r a g b a r e
f e e t across hardwood.
I slide my heel down
the column of your spine, and
count the vertebrae
while your TEETH and TONGUE
Write An Indigo Sonnet
on my carotid.
I let myself be
The I c a r u s to your s u n
for the Chance To Fly.
To meet Apollo,
I risked it all and got too
close but Still: I FLEW.
I WISH we could live
happily ever onward,
but that's not Our Fate:
our stolen time is
not enough; but we pretend
for just One More Day.
Always ONE MORE DAY.
Just One More. We're not ready.
Please don't rouse us yet.