On Coffee Meets Bagel I Said I Wanted an Everything Bagel with Strawberry Cream Cheese

Because it never fails me, at least in toasted form. One guy texted you had me at strawberry cream cheese and another mentioned tantric lovemaking and someone wanted to talk on the phone before meeting as a screening –– I passed the test but didn’t want to meet, judged too much already. I forgot how the beauty of poetry is that it can be anything so I stopped writing for swiping –– there’s no room for birds and leaves and trees and the way a word feels in my body, I thought. The search for love, an assignment I’d get an A+ on, check that box. I didn’t know that a person could take years to get over two dates. I didn’t know a person could want to love so much. I guess I could have turned the search into a poem, looked for the lyrical lines, the consonance and assonance of our bodies, our voices, more closely. I guess I could have let a few slant rhymes in instead of going right for the heroic couplet. I’m the kind of person who too often orders the same thing because I know exactly what I want. Occasionally, I’ll wonder if I was wrong. For example, I don’t want someone who likes golf, I noted –– and of course, the golf lover excused himself politely, and I asked him to reconsider, but he was already gone.

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Meia Geddes lives in Boston as a writer, artist, and librarian at the Boston Public Library. She is the author of THE LITTLE QUEEN and LOVE LETTERS TO THE WORLD. She holds a BA from Brown University and MS from Simmons University, and is an MFA candidate at University of Massachusetts – Boston. A Fulbright scholar, she has also received funding from the American Library Association and Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. She is a member of the New England Book Artists and founder of the small press and literary journal, Poetose.