07.21
She enters the city with the windup and silent tick
of the best sex toy, a bounce and a slow burn,
recent advances in plastics have made rabbit hearts
obsolete. The man with the pug-ugly nose and fat lip
tells her to sign on the dotted line and asks her
to dance nude. He dims the lights and she’s no choice.
Her body turning to wisp and sunblind movement,
she dances to an old Edith Piaf and her steps
are out-of-sync but below the concrete floor
the rabbits of despair swoon and blush. You’re hired,
he says in mud-stodgy tone. He proceeds to penetrate
her from behind; there is no other way, until she forgets
the Plains and the too seldom rain, an angel’s piss,
her father used to joke until his rubber band of a heart
stretched and nearly killed the both of them. After
she found out he had buried The Last Dead Indian,
she no longer slept with him. In the city, the evenings
take on a purplish hue just before sunset, not entirely
toxic, claims the blind paperboy who delivers each day’s
news with a rasp and a pigeon’s smeared blood across
her door. The apartment is paid in full by the club,
which is really an after hours hangout for the grifted
and the philosophically maimed. She takes her hamburgers
medium rare and the pickles remind her of the taste of
last night’s penis before she stuffed the stranger’s
apologies in a jar. He made a slow rattle on the way out.
Over time, which is kept and set without fail by the
rabbits underground, she falls in love with a one-eyed
man whose hands play her like a cello. But he too dissapears
into the London Fog of his own inarticulateness.
She cries for days, for no one, really. Then, one day,
the blind paper boy knocks, offers her a fistful of
damask-scented plastic flowers, cheaper than what she
could find on any street corner below neon and electric unblinking eye.
No, she says softly, not wanting to wound him any
further. She covers her breasts in a bathrobe and closes
the door. That night, on her way to The Strip, she finds
a dead pigeon outside her apartment door. It’s wearing
a tag with the number of her apartment. She brings it
inside, holds the carcass, petting it, refusing to let
it go. She wants to feed it. But that, she knows
is another of life’s great hoaxes and anyway,
she’s out of bread