by Sasha Debevec-McKenney
after Khadijah Queen’s I’M SO FINE: A LIST OF FAMOUS MEN AND WHAT I HAD ON
I watched Andrew Barth Feldman & Cooper Hoffman & Maude Apatow & Judd Apatow & Leslie Mann get drunk at the wrap party for the movie my boyfriend worked on & I was wearing my 3.5 inch Croc heels in color: Bone & a very short blue dress that my best friend gave me for free because her boobs were too big for it (mine are not) & I had on my dad’s old chore jacket because it never gets actually cold enough in Atlanta to wear a heavy jacket & the denim matched the dress & the trim was almost Bone & I joked about telling Judd I fell asleep listeningto the 40-Year-Old-Virgin Director’s Commentary for more than a year when I was in high school & I didn’t end up telling him but I did actually want to tell him his jacket was cool—it was dark blue and covered with flowers —but mostly me and Henry stood outside and smoked cigarettes over the barrel fire & he pointed out all the people he had been telling me he hated for the last six weeks & my last boyfriend was a therapist and an overly positive person so it felt great to be dating a hater like how I’m a hater & no boy has never brought me to a work party before & this was like the weirdest work party I could imagine because all the departments work so separately nobody really knew each other & the actors are called “first team” which I guess made everyone else second third fourth etc & also a lot of the actors were like 20 & drunk in the way 20 year olds get but I did want to tell Andrew Barth Feldman that last summer when I was working at this arts camp in rural Michigan where I had nothing in common with any of my coworkers—none of them would go see the new Mission Impossible with me—one of the only good memories I have is laughing in the movie theater at No Hard Feelings & I especially liked the part where he pronounced “vermouth” as “ver-mouth” but I was a plus one at this party & it wasn’t my place—ironically the movie we were celebrating was literally about an older woman auditing a poetry workshop where two of the boys fall in love with her & it ruins their friendship & I run poetry workshops & maybe I was falling for Henry but I probably was going to have to move away in like eight months because that’s the nature of academia until you get tenure but it was nice anyways to be there at the party with him, him kissing me in a room full of celebrities & him still being taller than me even though I was in my 3.5 inch Croc heels & it was my first time being in a room with celebrities if you don’t count writers as celebrities & I felt really special & glamorous & he drove us home a little drunk but I still felt safe & maybe even chic & then today I bled through my black underwear on the bus like a normal person
Sasha Debevec-McKenney received her MFA from New York University. She was the 2020–2021 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin and is currently a Creative Writing Fellow at Emory University. She was born in Hartford, Connecticut.