By Dinu Mahapatuna
Voices Editor
Welcome one and all, to the Great Plant Roast of 2021! Drumroll please, since our first award goes to....
The staff-writers! You’re staff! That writes! Sometimes, well! Thank you for doing a better job at meeting monthly deadlines than our own section editors. Maija Baroni! You’re gorgeous and I love you. But because this is a roast: Maija, you’re hideous and I hate you. Julia Quynh, we all resent the fact that you don’t live in this country. Stop being happy on Instagram. It makes me want to find you and rob you. Actually, if you keep flaunting your riches on social media, someone else might do the hard stuff for me. And Arwen Low! I both fear and anticipate the day you finally get your sex advice column. On that day, people will look to the sky and expect to be smited off the face of the Earth. Or they might get it on, Lil Nas X bouncing ass on Satan style.
Tomas! Tomas! You have done nothing to hurt me, so you may pass… For now… JK! How old are you? I ask since no one under the age of fifty is flitting around on facebook as if it’s a sock-hop except maybe you. You art nice, but your senior friends wouldn’t exactly appreciate your hooligan style.
Beatriz Neves! You laugh a lot. Which makes me suspicious.... I’m going to have to keep an eye on you.
Adela Pirillo! You are curious… Curiously awful at making juicy horoscopes! Girl we want you to roast us or promise us true love is imminent. Nothing less will do!
Dinu Mahapatuna! What a goddess. Super sexy, super smart… Need I say more?
Psyche! Recipe Ramble sucks!
You suck!
No you suck!
You swallow!
Touché....
Mayan Godmaire! I still don’t think we know how to say your name right (and that’s coming from someone who’s been called Dino). I would roast you further, but I actually can’t think of anything bad to say, because holy shit are you easy to fall in love with… Poetry time:
Mayan is a girl
Who sometimes looks stoned as hell.
Too bad haikus suck.
Wanna fuck?
Mia Kennedy! Why are you in charge of Sports? Seriously. Who made that call? You’re about as athletic as a Klingon orgy. Wait. On second thought… Darn it, the empire strikes again.
Jessica Gearey! You are well and truly over all of us and can we blame you? Honestly, I can't remember what your voice sounds like. Have you spoken ever? Do you exist? Wait, is Jessica a person or are we all Jessica?
Laura Gervais! Someone else at this publication I’ve never heard speak. You have the job that sounds the smartest, but that smart people are too busy to read. Thank you for doing what none of us wanted to do, but we needed, because… Reasons. Scientific reasons. Your section is the literary equivalent of kale, but I promise, someone out there is forcing themselves to consume it (us included).
Jill Goldenberg! Or as I like to call you, Photo Girl! Snap, snap. Hear that? That’s the sound of our publication cracking its skull on your club as your kind bombards the internet with aesthetic visuals. Ooga booga pretty picture is nice for see. Words? No! Words bad. Grrrrr.
Pipa Jones! You’re the epitome of unproblematic. Or so you’d think… Well buster, I’ve caught you red-handed for hipster plant trafficking! Leave those poor seedlings alone! Stop bringing them into your cramped studio and having your way with them you, you, MONSTER!
Benjamin Wexler! Pipa and Mayan might be our resident hipsters, but you are single-handedly our resident snob. Fifty years from now, I wouldn’t be surprised to see you with a plate of cheddar in one hand and (what you’d call) a chalice of wine in the other as you lecture a group of college students on the infinite merits of saying tomato instead of tomato. They’d say, ‘Who’s this guy again?” And you’d ride your ego into the sky as your hair waves in the wind.
Julie Jacques! You’re the mother I never had... And never asked for. Sometimes, right as I’m falling asleep, I startle awake to your face, looming above mine, whispering, “Where’s your article?” You have the aura of a tiger that somehow became the COO of a Fortune 500 and, in an alternate universe, the rest of us are your prey, begging for the sweet release of death.
Daylen Conserve! Admit it: You’re a furry. The Hello Kitty obsession, the bear hats… What will it take for you to see the light? It’s a disco ball shining over you and your anthropomorphic buddies as you grind your fluffy, tailed butts together.
That’s all from me! Better get some aloe vera for those burns.