Erika Szostak
The Mr. Right Application Process
I’d take you to the Bangkok Palace
in the parking lot of Femme Nu,
hottest strip joint in Honolulu where
They’ve got the magic (non)lights and where
I’ve still got a bellyache over this stripper
calling herself Trouble, sporting a ponytail
and these rhinestone studded cat’s eye glasses,
plus this twice-her-age husband who got himself
hired as her cocktail server and videotapes her
every slink and slunk with the digi clipped
to his belt, but anyway, Mr. Right,
so I’d take you first to The Bangkok Palace
to see if you could endure poorly piped
voluminous Thai pop karaoke crooned
by businessmen florid and crooked on Singha,
and check, do you remember that I like
yum yai and pink peonies, hate rad na, decaf and
endless mind-numbing, brain-sloshing talk
about any kind of surf, ankle-mushing, head-high
or otherwise? After dinner, Mr. Right, we’d go to see
Trouble dance and this is the important part, do you
agree, does she look better in those glasses or not?
Heather and Eric
Anchor Tattoo, Seattle
Erika Szostak is a graduate student in the Creative Writing program at Loyola Marymount University in LA. She is a former editorial intern for the Indiana Review and will be attending the Prague Summer Program to study poetry and literature at Charles University. She finds cubicles suicidal, prefers Chucks and Dickies to high heels and jeans, and finds it endlessly strange and slightly pretentious to write about herself in the third person.
