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I Married the Small Press
Read more from this authorby MK Chavez


It happened like the things
that happen when you drink too much.

We’re a bad couple
we break up every other week. I’m embarrassed
by the small press. Just the other day
we’re at a poetry reading
and it starts to drink
watered down wine. The small press
gets piss ass drunk and complains loudly
that the writers suck.

I ignore it as long as I can
but when it starts talking shit
about itself
“The small press is lame,
it’s a pile of crap.”
I’m forced to pull it aside,
“Listen you idiot, you are
the small press.”

It stares at me and I watch as recognition slowly
creeps across its wasted face and then, it starts to cry.
I want to walk away but it’s wrapped
its junkie arms around me and is clinging on...

“Do you still love me?” it whines. And I can’t help
thinking about the good times, all the fucking in hotel rooms
and the late nights in bars, and the shoe licking in bathroom stalls,
and all of the mementos that it leaves behind,
odd shaped chapbooks, and little match sized booklets
with my poetry written inside.

I remember that this loser
is a romantic and that in a bar brawl
I want it on my side
because the preppy fucker
from the university is a sissy cunt
who can’t throw any kind of punch

and then I remember the way the small press
looks when it’s been properly laid

and I look at its gimpy, twisted up, tattooed, alcohol-bloated
body, and I can’t help myself. I slap its ass and cop a feel
and whisper into its ear “Shut up fucker. You know
we’re stuck with each other. Don’t you? ”




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