GRAND THEFT (AFTER FALL OUT BOY)

where is your boy tonight? i hope / he is a gentleman.
maybe he won’t find out / what i know–
pete wentz writes songs about teenage girls when he is twenty-seven
when i am a teenager, there is a man who spreads me like
a sheet-music cold-read / fumbled awkward under
the pair of tight shorts i always wore because
i thought they made me look older
but i am still a teenager and he still
holds me the way a thief holds
contraband / too fast-grab to be legal
/ so pete wentz writes a song about fucking a teenager /
and this man writes a poem about my ears, or my nail-beds, or
some other part of me he becomes the first to find
/ and pete wentz writes another song about fucking a teenager /
then breaks a cradle in front of patrick stump and patrick
looks at the splinters in pete’s hands and says “i will find
a melody for this” /  and i am at a fall out boy
concert with my friends singing along to what i think
is a song about the duality of emotion or the
fragility of time / but every song
i grew into myself loving is written about
a twenty-something fucking a teenager /
so every twenty-something dude in this mosh pit
is  is screaming the phrase
“god-complex” / “teenage-vow” /
building a word-church of young-girls every
time they thrust something stained at
the stage / so they are just doing what pete wentz
made a billion dollars doing // stealing // by
fucking a teenager so loud
a generation of other teenagers knew the
sound her headboard made and nothing else /
and i am lucky because the man who wrote about me
is not famous / did not play a thousand sold-out shows
where he told  the version of the story where
i was a bitch and left / not the version where i
changed my mind / and i am listening to a fall out boy song
and it sounds like just another song but it is /
actually a song about / a mother learning
what the worst is / the act of being fucked
when you are not old enough to be beautiful / the act of
being so beautiful men will tell you how criminal
you make them / the crime of once being a teenager and
how fucked up it is that someone will probably call me a bitch /
for not letting patrick answer pete with “nothing”
when pete asks him “what have i broken?” /
how there is a teenaged girl who
is not a teenager anymore who i hope still wants
to be beautiful in someone’s backseat /
how sometimes i walk past the walls he stained me up
against / wake up the next morning to find–
where is that girl tonight? you know / you’re not a gentleman.
you hope we won’t find out / what you’ve done–

This performance was filmed at the Last Chance Slam by Slamfind.

By Linette Reeman

Biography:

Linette Reeman (they/them pronouns) is a poet from the Jersey Shore who is currently pursuing a B.A. in history from Rowan University. Linette has represented Loser Slam (Red Bank, NJ) at multiple national and regional slams and this is their second year representing Rowan at the college national slam (CUPSI). They have featured at the Philadelphia Fuze Slam and for D.C. Trans Power, have been published by places like Words Dance and Voicemail Poems, and probably want to high five you.