All that Authenticity May Be Getting Old

by Kat Georges

 

She was The Mistress of the Sewers

Living concrete hard in a high top gutter.

Then she found religion and dripped into a job.

 

Started eating, started sleeping, starting thinking, started up

some high-step ladder to success. Dreaming big dreams

like a big girl and a big girl she became.

 

Waking one day alone in well-heeled penthouse

with a Pekinese in one hand and a smart phone in the other.

Under a star-lit ceiling hand painted by Jamaicans

 

Next to a hand carved distressed nightstand made of walnut

trimmed from a fallen branch of an organic tree in Kenya.

Atop it, a colorful crocheted cover from a Bolivian women’s collective

 

and a suitably rusty lamp made of found discarded nuts and bolts

collected by Honduran artisans and sold online by Crate & Barrel 2.

She slept under a quilt she purchased with a friend. There was some

 

story behind the 24 squares, but it was complicated and kind of

hard to remember. Was supposed to raise awareness or something.

Her phone alarm went off with a Tibetan singing bowl ringtone.

 

Time to get up and make coffee from coddled Ecuadorean beans,

which she poured into a sunset gradient hand-blown glass espresso cup,

stirred with a tiny spoon crafted by silver miners while they were trapped.

 

It was all so authentic. She’d supported the poor of the world for years,

buying only from collectives or their online representatives. It was so real;

her purchases reflected her philanthropic heart, which beat under a

 

very well-matched pair of 36D breasts, designed by a very white, very clean,

very rich doctor in Beverly Hills, who—for only a slight additional charge—

sucked out her belly fat, straightened her nose, and made her wrinkles disappear.

 

She never told anyone about it. Not a soul. Well, only her husband.

She did it only for him. She didn’t ever want to be lonely. Again.

And there she was . . .