Upstart 1996 (Round 2)

Let's workshop this poem about a young woman's cramped and unremarkable urban bathroom, set against the backdrop of her aspirations for stardom.

scent of the day: La Liturgie des Heures, by Jovoy Paris (serene and meditative liturgical thurible scent that brings you, however, less to a polished urban cathedral than to a musty-mildewy cellar of a monastery, one hidden in a coniferous forest where St. Francis of Assisi lives alongside a variety of animals)

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Upstart 1996

The exotic air of the stardom-dreamer in black tights—perfume,
a unisex citrus (CK One), overdone like her smokey eye shadow—
only stands out all the more against the banality, the animality,
of her studio bathroom, its prewar porthole sighted on the Z train
(whose legless panhandler on a skateboard knows her by name):

the toothpaste-splattered mirror, too small for both shoulders;
a cast-iron pipe groaning through cracked tiled of black grout;
a Bic razor, a dusty roach trap, under the chipped-paint radiator;
a pair of panties, audacious in their discharge; a tube of Monistat
squeezed at the fuck-the-future midpoint; a Duane Reade bag. 

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