CONNIE MAE OLIVER

Drug Abuse Resistance Education

I like your “like” but it’s too late
to like
Unsolved Mysteries and Primer
Impacto

We are
the first people
not to know
how things got here how did this lamp
get here? This pen.

Officer Greg brought the D.A.R.E. bear

I took
a bite of zebra
cake

OFFICER TELL THEM

basically
the first time is the best
and nothing after will compare so

my name is Officer Craig

Raymond if
I have to tell you
one more time

you’re going to Ms. Carney’s room

children don’t
don’t
even try it even
if your friends try
to peer
pressure you don’t

it’s going to feel
amazing and you’ll wish
you hadn’t because guess
what the next

time it won’t

be as good

in the fifth grade
you go to the Roadhouse Grill
with your bad best friend and her family
and she explains
you can just throw all the peanut shells on the floor
that’s the kind of place this is

you don’t want a cigarette

only because
you don’t know how to want things like that
you’re staring at the malachite owl with tiny gold eyes
that dad brought back from Bolivia like

already impressed by this or that
you smoked tho

the janky sliding bathroom window fell and smashed on the pavement

and you told your bad best friend’s mom that it was you

children my name is Officer Keith
you think I got this
spiky hair from

toking it up

NAH

Officer Ben with
the eyebrows all the way up here said
heroin is like nothing
you’ll ever experience

but they did
give us everything
an officer dog a smoky
bear a righteous lion
Nick News & Sprinklin’s

I use a gas stove igniter
and send it over the green transformer

Deadass

R flung three quarters
            one nickel and five pennies                                      loudly on his auditorium
desk
during an anthropology lecture

It was midsummer and the AC was on high;

I wrapped myself in a Gap cardigan. Money! he whispered. 

I gathered my things. Where do you think you’re going? he asked.
             No se.

             He tucked his book under his arm, an acrylic-rich black

suit jacket loose                                 on his bony frame, and shoved me; we stumbled
over sweatpantsed legs crossed in the dark,
and emerged, cold                 and squinting
                                                               onto a cinderblock courtyard.

This guy swears pt. 1

The university campus was composed of architectural innovations—blinding geometries for the chemistry department, flanked by palm trees and metal installations.

FIU’s nature preserve underwent a “prescribed burn” in my sophomore year. A handsome ecologist from the Galapagos taught my lab course in broken English. Has leído El Principito? I remember him asking me on a sawgrass path. R cut class to smoke cigars that were top heavy on his skinny fingers. He dipped them in his coffee so they’d make his teeth good and yellow.

He found me one day late in September at the university bookstore scanning the magazines.  See there, he said, pointing, See that? I lifted a copy of the Russian newspaper. My father, he said.

This guy swears pt. 2

R’s estranged father, Rudiger, was editor of the city’s Russian paper and had recently re-emerged in his life along with regalitos—dinners at Versailles, rooster statuettes from Martinique, a pair of black oxfords, a bottle of Hugo BOSS, and a Toyota Corolla. At times R played operas at full volume, and at others he argued severely with his girlfriend on a flip phone. When he wasn’t fidgeting wildly or scolding the air, R told stories. He was a horrendous driver and in his gifted car we cruised through unincorporated Dade & went on a number of occasions completely over sidewalks.

Connie Mae Oliver's first chapbook, Cosmos A Personal Voyage By Carl Sagan Ann Druyan Steven Soter And Me was published in June 2017 by the Operating System. Poems in this issue are from a forthcoming book titled "science fiction fiction" (Spuyten Duyvil, 2020). She is editor of FEELINGS, was born in Venezuela, and lives in New York.