Excerpt from Leigh Stein’s “What to Miss When”
Tiger King (2020)
I sometimes find President Trump’s voice reassuring. Not what he says. Not the actual words . . .
—Lorrie Moore
The caged tigers are hungry for whatever you have:
Walmart meat past its expiration date, a sickly calf,
short story master Lorrie Moore. She was asking for it
when she confessed his voice soothes her
like she’s his pet. The caged tigers don’t care
about your contributions to arts & letters,
that you sit in a distinguished chair you built
on the grounds of your personal exotic animal park—
they just want to eat. It’s been weeks
since anyone threw a juicy thoughtcrime
into their pen. One of the older tigers,
who’s been too busy birthing cubs
to keep up with her New Yorker subscription,
might need a younger tiger to explain
how we’re starving for someone to blame
for our broken systems. We’d cancel a baby
if it gave us five seconds of relief. In one story,
Lorrie Moore offers a cure for depression:
stop drinking, stop smoking, stop eating sugar,
cut out caffeine. “Do this for three days,” she writes,
“then start everything back up again. Bam.”
Goundhog Day (1993)
I’m a celebrity in an emergency:
I never had to care about other people
until I got stuck in a time loop where
all of a sudden there are consequences
for my behavior, and I’m beside myself.
I’ll give you a hint, Phil, you’re a dick
to work with, but it’s the ’90s,
when women were better at taking jokes
because they had no recourse
unless they wanted to be known
as the nagging-bitch-in-residence.
“I hate the term ‘cancel culture,’”
Rita says in a winsome accent
as she lobs a snowball at a child.
“I prefer ‘accountability culture.’”
“Tu es très charmant,”
the sardonic weatherman replies,
because he’s had a thousand days
to become fluent in her love language.
Isn’t it romantic when a marmot
brings a pockmarked misanthrope
and an upbeat lady together?
You couldn’t make Groundhog Day
now because it’s built on the premise
that even the most colossal jerk can learn
and grow—instead you’d have to make
a comedy where two hot cynics
drink themselves to death in the desert
because of quantum physics. Hilarious!
“What if there is no tomorrow?”
Phil asks, reading our minds
like a weather forecast.
“There wasn’t one today.”
Romantic Poet
When I drive to the specialty grocery store
that sells the parmesan without animal
rennet because now thou knowest too much
about how the cheese gets made, that’s me
saying I love you. Bright star, I’m the minder
of our wedding budget spreadsheet,
supervisor of how much jargon
appears in thy work emails,
the scorekeeping scullery maid.
According to Keats, my love language
is “acts of service.” I’ve memorized
your preferences so I can recite them
like lines written in early spring:
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man?
My friends call in peril
and I give them career advice—
when thou hast big hammer energy,
everything looketh like a nail. Four months
the length of five long winters,
I wandered lonely as a cloud and found
myself ending every phone call with
Love you, too. No one doubts my ability
to learn a new language. No one but you
sees the child I become at night,
after my shift is over, how adrift
I become over tasks undone.
Everywhere You Look A Spectacle
I wake up and touch my phone to see
who was thinking of me as I slept.
Every day, a new series of betrayals
among the same players, Andy Samberg
in a Hawaiian print shirt, dinosaur spectator,
desert sunset, me in my bridesmaid dress
trying to suicide my way out of the time loop.
The subtweet is an art, like anything else.
I do it exceptionally well. I can cry on command
alongside the best of them. My touching, off-the-cuff
toast was perfected over the two decades
I spent scrolling past lonely avatars.
I would never say, All you need is love
but I might say, Have you ever considered
antidepressants? For our honeymoon,
we’re going to 1994, where the notifications
arrive by mail. Anticipation is a turn-on
until your meet cute becomes routine.
Cristin Milioti had to teach herself
quantum physics on YouTube to escape
the rom-com’s repetition glitch.
All I have to do is sign off,
all I have to do is sign off,
all I have to do is sign off.
Excerpted from What to Miss When, copyright © 2021 by Leigh Stein. Reprinted by permission of Soft Skull Press.
