love letter to the moon or maybe my adderall prescription or maybe something else entirely

by Katy Haas

my dad always says you can’t take it with you and i say yeah, okay, real but he means money and i mean my safari tabs so i take a sabbatical and spend one full month parsing through them. mostly i pretend to shop on the internet even though i can’t afford that form of dopamine anymore. 

when my tabs are expended, i spend forty dollars at Goodwill and feel like a god for five seconds, hitting my weed pen in the fitting rooms until i’m wondering why i have to dig up dopamine from my backyard with a tiny plastic soup spoon, wondering why it can’t come in on a warm breeze through the living room window i keep open all summer long.

when i was little i thought i’d find a secret garden in the forest of my parents’ backyard and then i grew up to slowly kill every single one of my houseplants and to quickly fall out of love. it’s so hard to care for something as a hobby.

one morning in June, Angela tells me the surface of the moon is being sunburned. i only started wearing sunscreen when i started getting tattoos because it’s so hard to care for myself and who is caring for the moon? what happens to her when the earth empties itself of all of us like a dog shaking water free from its fur?

i want my brain to be better and i want to go to the moon to lovingly caress her craters with aloe vera, to whisper: i can’t take you with me, i can’t even though i want to. i want and want and want until my phone grows too hot in my palm. i think, when it comes down to it, my actual hobby is yearning.

Katy Haas is a queer non-binary writer, artist, and newly converted hockey fan from mid-Michigan. Their work has been in MEMEZINE, HAD, and also in publications with names that aren’t formatted in all caps. Their debut chapbook the algorithm knows i never stopped loving you (Bullshit Lit) is rumored to be about their break-up with their true love, a white noise machine, although the rumors are probably, ultimately untrue. Find them on Twitter (@katyydidnt) & Insta (@mouthshroom).