My mother drove me to the airport
with the windows rolled down.
I had only a few bags.
I felt a thrill of genuine fear
it chilled me more than the freezing wind.
“Tell me how your flight was.”
I put my head down on my arm.
“Why’d you come here, then?”
“You were over there.”
I could leave him alone.
I would leave him alone.
“Do you want me to come with you?”
“Washington State” is composed of language extracted from the first half of Twilight by Stephanie Meyer.
“Now there’s a reason why I picked Twilight: the young adult novel has been put through the critical ringer. It’s widely regarded as a terribly written book with awful characters and a woeful plot and yet when the series came out, it was incredibly popular. So much so that it inspired insurmountable amounts of fanfiction based on the set of books. E.L. James’s equally popular (and equally terrible) book series Fifty Shades of Grey is actually fanfiction based off of Twilight as well. The movie Vampires Suck was also based off of Twilight in an attempt to parody and poke fun out of it.
With this poem, I am doing two things: first, I am putting sentences together that could have come from anywhere and then telling you exactly where I got them from. The meaning changes once you find out that I took the words from a book that’s widely regarded as terrible. The second thing I am doing is posing a number of questions. Is it okay to repurpose something that’s awful? When a work has already been borrowed from, when does borrowing from it cross the line? Since Fifty Shades was created out of Twilight, is it okay to take more out of Twilight to create something else? Since I’m not making a parody, is it okay to make fun of the series using its actual contents instead of larger-than-life inflections of it?”—Karishma Sonde