Error #927 by Sam Savello

If aliens came for my home,

They’d be disappointed with what they’d find

Mountains of messy, half-worn clothing.

Condom wrappers.

Half-eaten candy bars that fell behind my nightstand.

What a freak, they’d say.

She throws nothing away and lets the trash stick her floor

Like syrup simmering on an open flame,

Congealing and sticking to the pot.

Don’t ask me how aliens know what syrup is

They just do

They know what condoms are too

Because sex still needs to be protected in the sky

The aliens would laugh and scrunch their open nostrils

Why is she like this, they’d ask

It’s almost as if

They programmed her wrong.

It’s almost like they tried to build her,

But she broke somewhere along the way

Samantha Savello is a Puerto Rican-American writer and poet from New York. She studied Hispanic Literature at Brown University, where she wrote her thesis on identity exploration through Nuyorican poetry. Samantha uses the pronouns she/her.