Catherine Weiss

The Celebrity

The celebrity is hi gloss and baby talk.
No afternoons at the laundromat,

never swinging by the drive thru after work.
She won't be dialing zero and holding

to speak with a health insurance representative.
The celebrity is not a pop star but wants to be.

She puts out a single, critically panned.
Ten years later, we listen and it’s not so bad.

This celebrity has good cosmetic surgery. She lives
in a quiet part of a big city. Her driver wears a hat.

She is photographed often and has great skin.
All angles, this celebrity. She does a line

of products that we might actually want to buy.
She will have a book ghostwritten about her life,

which will become a bestseller—a Sargasso sea
of thought and anecdote, which gestures at narrative

but never arrives there. We want her
to do something drastic and entertaining

like shoplift, overdose, or get married
to a man who grabs her elbow. We want to watch

her punished for the easy life she doesn’t deserve.
She is how we learned to love each other, teeth first.

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Catherine Weiss (they/she) is a poet and artist from Maine, currently living in Western Massachusetts. Their poetry has been published in BOMB, Sixth Finch, Tinderbox, DIAGRAM, Up the Staircase, Fugue and Taco Bell Quarterly. Catherine is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Big Money Porno Mommy, from Game Over Books in 2025. Their book, Wolf Girls vs Horse Girls, was a finalist for the Maine Literary Award for Poetry in 2022. Catherine was also the 2017 Grand Slam Champion of Northampton Poetry and has competed nationally. More at catherineweiss.com.