2010
07.24
No one knew about my love affair with him,
the bottle of champagne I hid in my desk
drawer at work, waiting for me to crack it
open against the file cabinet like a
woman in a big, floppy hat christening
a new ship that was about to sink away.
No one knew how I kissed a bottle of Bud
before bed, its rim cold under my chapped lips.
He stayed with me many nights, on the nightstand
beside me, getting warm the way I liked him
so that I could kiss him good morning again.
Yes, I hid my passion for his taste so well.
But then he cheated on me with my best friend
Sue from next door, visited her one cold night when
her husband was gone and she was so lonely.
He came the first time in the form of frozen
margaritas from my own loyal blender
and he just never left after that first time.
I don’t like to share my lovers or mixed drinks,
but I loved him way too much to let him go.
2010
07.23
They are going. He tells her about fifth grade. Her sausage is in a can. His flower matches her bathroom rug. They take plates. She looks across. He reminds her of Joey. They talk about suits.
She sketches Joey’s tattoo. His stomach is loud. They tell them not to come in now. Someone whispers. The alarm is set for eight. She watches the lightning. He says what.
His pillow is under hers. The sink is running. Nothing she says. They go outside. Hey they say. His hand touches her stomach.
He says hey hey hey. She sips. Hey she says. He snores. She texts Joey.
They go. She asks for thousand island. He’s sat. The box is full.
She empties. He holds.
They are going.
2010
07.22
So the story of Lucas Stroud comes out. I never really knew him, he was my older
sister’s age. Well, I only knew him because she screwed him, like everybody else,
one week at a time. Another notch in her bedpost. When she died in that motorcycle
crash, I thought those names went with her.
2010
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
2010
07.20
I walk distances that do
not exist on maps.
Sometimes, I surprise myself
by walking too far,
to a place where mountains
become giants and the sky
befriends the land.
But sometimes, my feet
go numbed. Neither could I
further nor return.
I squat next to a
dead cockroach, exposing its
hairy feet to fluffy clouds.
Squashed shell and bursting guts
portray the beauty of death.
It flips over its body with its last breath,
like an acrobat doing
stunning tricks in a circus.
Death – my neighbour – you tell
me it’s all about fate when I’m
stuck at a spot,
like a
mashed insect, not able to
expand its map anymore.