Cosmic Tantrum

Sarah Lyn Rogers is the author of the chapbooks Autocorrect Suggests “Tithe” and Inevitable What. She wrote the Catapult column Internet as Intimacy and has edited award-winning fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

"William Blake taught us that nothing could be scarier than fairy tales for grown-ups. T.S. Eliot taught us that selfhood inheres in the desire for self-erasure. Somewhere in the wild space between these guiding poetics, Sarah Lyn Rogers’s Cosmic Tantrum lays a table for tea."—Rachel Feder, coauthor of Astrolit: A Bibliophile's Guide to the Stars "As its title suggests, Sarah Lyn Rogers’s Cosmic Tantrum brilliantly confronts society’s infantilization of women by pulling an Uno reverse. What happens when society gets the “good girl” that it asks for? These poems rage during meditations, they defy in corporate emails, they turn their brattiness up so loud that we all turn to watch their meltdowns. But in our watching, we are forced to reckon with our own discomfort with Rogers’s “outsized” anger. This book reminds us that a tantrum is often a result of our own inattention and neglect. How do we soothe the monster we’ve created?"—Taylor Byas, author of I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times  “Too much of this world’s currency / is shame,” writes Sarah Lyn Rogers, in Cosmic Tantrum, which frees childhood of its innocence to indict the false motives of conditional love. Flipping the language of business, fairy tale, and dissolution, Rogers rewrites girlhood to offer a refuge from domesticity. Shifting form and address to reason with Kafka, Charlie Brown, Little Edie in Grey Gardens, and the ghosts that haunt survival, Cosmic Tantrum summons mischief to banish harm." —Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of Touching the Art

• DedicationWarm Blanket TantrumThe Content Is Supposed to Burst from the ContainLocal Beast Time Travels, Body Swaps through Glitch in MatrixRage PracticeNo One Wants to Volunteer for an Embodiment on Earth AnymoreA Toast to the Dismay of Certain IndustriesCosmic TantrumBaby IslandPosture of DreadWhat Is the Bird in Charlie Brown’s Name?“That's all I need—an ordered life”Cross-Section of the Nervous/Solar SystemLocal Beast Recently Inhabited Shared SpaceSubtweeted Again in the Shared Google DocSome Brainwashed Dude on Twitter Insists That to Be Valuable a Woman Must Possess the Mathematically Perfect, Suspiciously Babylike Skull of an AngelLet’s Practice Kissing, Compare Bra SizesHalloween and I’m the Only One in Costume on the SubwayShut-in TantrumVerminDespite Many Proclamations, Little Edie Never Leaves Big Edie at Grey GardensWhat a Person Makes You Hold—What You Hold for Someone—LingersPlease Answer to the Best of Your AbilityEgg TranceGolden Child TantrumTo My Teenage Self, Who Always Fell for ItQueen of WandsSelf-AnthropologyTantrum about My UterusSymptoms Depend upon Method and Duration of ExposurePot-BoundNot Everyone Would Sooner Kill You Than Admit You Hurt Their FeelingsLocal Beast Withstands Record-Breaking Silent TreatmentApplicant Must HaveRenterLittle Edie’s Memories and Her Flag DanceGuided Meditation with Mean VoiceArtfully Vague TranceI Could Signal Dominance in Email Correspondence as Trained but the Concept Is Offensive and I’m BabyHalloween: “What even are you, anyway?”The Townsfolk Enact a Strongly Worded LetterLocal Beast, Kind of a Little Bitch ActuallyNothing TranceGuided Meditation with Inner MotherThe EmpressAutocorrect Suggests “Tithe”It’s the Local Beast, Charlie BrownGuided Meditation with Inner ChildAdvice from an Upper GraderExhibition: What Is It Like to Make Something That Matters?In Which Music Activates the Ventral VagalGuided Meditation with Dead MusicianArs Poetica with Need and Wild CatsAcknowledgments