When at a Certain Party in NYC, by Erin Belieu

Here's a poem that's kind of funny and wry, and this suburbanite feels it.

When at a Certain Party in NYC

Wherever you’re from sucks,

and wherever you grew up sucks,

and everyone here lives in a converted

chocolate factory or deconsecrated church

without an ugly lamp or souvenir coffee cup

in sight, but only carefully edited objets like

the acanian soap dispenser in the kitchen

that looks like an industrial age dildo, and

when you rifle through the bathroom

looking for a spare tampon, you discover 

that even their toothpaste is somehow more 

desirable than yours. And later you go

with a world famous critic to eat a plate 

of sushi prepared by a world famous chef from 

Sweden and the roll is conceived to look like 

“a strand of pearls around a white throat,” and is 

so confusingly beautiful that it makes itself

impossible to eat. And your friend back home—

who says the pioneers who first settled 

the great asphalt parking lot of our 

middle, were not in fact heroic, but really 

the chubby ones who lacked the imagination 

to go all the way to California — it could be that 

she’s on to something. Because, admit it, 

when you look at the people on these streets, 

the razor-blade women with their strategic bones

and the men wearing Amish pants with

interesting zippers, it’s pretty clear that you

will never cut it anywhere that constitutes 

a where, that even ordering a pint of tuna salad in 

a deli is an illustrative exercise in self-doubt.

So when you see the dogs on the high-rise elevators 

practically tweaking, panting all the way down 

from the 19th floor to the 1st, dying to get on 

with their long-planned business of snuffling 

trash or peeing on something to which all day 

they’ve been looking forward, what you want is 

to be on the fastest Conestoga home, where the other 

losers live and where the tasteless azaleas are, 

as we speak, halfheartedly exploding.

This originally appeared in 32 Poems and was reprinted in 2013 in an anthology of the publication's best poems. 

De donde eres?