A Poem, in which a Poet who Hasn’t Been on a Date Since 2010, Attempts to Use a Dating App

Just be yourself, they said.

I can’t go on dates. 

I don’t know where I’m from.

So, where you from.

I’m from a box of cereal, 

with sweetness and crunch, a good mouth-feel. 

I was born to a judgmental bank of snow,

‘to learn His holy purpose,’ said the snow, 

My whole life, the snow said this.

‘You’ve got to decipher it, His plan,’ she said, shivering.

I’m a decoder ring, unused,

lost in a box of cereal from the 20th century,

with facts on the back and a key

in me, if snow does the talking 

it will be quiet in the future, don’t you think?

What was the question?

I can’t go on dates, until I remember how

small talk is done, if I ever did that: small 

talk before the divorce. It starts out: So,

are you from here? I’m a class traitor from the last 

gas station before Utah, a half-full glass with a PhD, a brass

ash tray bolted to the driver’s seat of the delivery van 

my parents borrowed from my florist grandpa 

to drive us to Colorado

to show us Trail Ridge Road. 

‘Turn around, kids, give Iowa the bird!’ 

We gave birds, we became birds, we were moving up, 

up, so high, so high in the air,

‘there is no god here, above these clouds,’ I said.

I am from these clouds: 

cirrus that accumulates over the leeward slope at dusk.

I grew up thinking tundra’s darkness under new moons must be what god is

if indeed there’s any energy in excess of dirt.

I’m deleting the dating app. 

The pride of the Chicago-born guy to say

I’m from here, born and raised! You?

Who? I had lived in Chicago for nine days

by the day of my first class in grad school

when I stopped 

in the laundromat on Irving Park 

to get my clothes, the TV was on,

news was on it, and a plane was in it.

Then plane was in a building, then another one. 

They slipped into the ground, straight down

and even now,

I shudder a little, popping Cheetos or carrots or gum in my mouth,

a good mouth-feel, a quick snack, I shudder even so,

when a passenger flight tows 

its grotesque shadow down Jackson in the setting sun, 

slips its body behind the middle of the Willis, past the Cock, over our luscious 

inland sea. All I asked, he says, 

was how long you lived here.

Define lived, fool. I cannot meet you for coffee.

I cannot with the app’s little profiles,

The drop-down-2-option-menus that deny my truths,

my times, my contradictions are like chocolate,

you can taste them, have some:

I am a religious atheist, an introverted show-off,

A shy comedian, philosophical non-serious fire-sign 

born in a box of snow, 

back when snow smothered like a judgmental

mother, I prefer the Holocene, the lake hard-iced all the way, 

I am my own plan. There is no plan. I have energy in excess 

of ground, here, is where I birthed myself: breakfast lover.

cat owner, mom of one, date for nobody, talkative 

quiet type, occasional drinker. Anxious but fine. 

Poet, in other words. You?

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Molly Sturdevant

Molly Sturdevant's writing has appeared in Orion Magazine, The Dark Mountain Project, Crab Creek Review, Poetry Northwest, About Place Journal, and elsewhere. Nominated for a Best of the Net and a Pushcart, she is recognized as a Western Federation of Miners Union Scholar. Her labor-history novel is forthcoming in 2026.