Die Young: Letter to Ke$ha | Charlotte Seley

  Charlotte Seley is a poet, writer, and editor from the Hudson Valley region of New York, currently residing in Kansas City with her cat, Lord Byron. She is the author of The World is My Rival (Spuyten Duyvil, 2018). Die Young: Letters to Ke$ha is her first chapbook.    I Know He's Not Really A Doctor They tell you not to write about it, but it's the reason—the sensuality smasher, total damager. Girl killer. It’s the reason we tumble simultaneously fragile and broken. Poetry editors won’t touch it, academia ribbons trigger warnings across our thighs. You’re not even allowed to talk about it—threatened and thwarted. As though real culpable experience was just an image on a postcard you committed to memory, maybe somewhere in rural Tennessee at the start of a tour buying beer and watermelon bubblegum. When you’re an artist, you feel first, so if something doesn’t feel right, you know it before it happens. You know and you live it anyway. Suddenly, danger is palpable; danger has a pulse,