April 2020 for Alexis, my best friend
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Contents
Loveline Commiserating To Be So Estranged Depreciation pt. I Depreciation pt. II Last Act In Which Finders Keepers Doesn’t Apply Anymore Scared to Death Blue, Muscle Memory Blue, Clockwork Humankind We Say We Love Each Other But We Eat Each Other Up Mourning Glory Makeshift Papercuts Dark n Stormy In Two Ohio Under the Weather W 135th St, New York, NY Howl One Long Longing When I Thought Bradley Cooper in that Movie was Going to be Okay The Afterlife ‘Til Heaven Calls
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5 7 8 9 10 11 13 14 15 16 17 19 20 21 22 23 24 26 27 28 30 31 32 34 38
I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world. - Maggie Nelson, Bluets
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All my love and heart and everything, everything. - Zelda Fitzgerald, in a letter to Scott
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Loveline
Missing by default, binging on blue-planet breath to feel fine. Codependent respiration, comparison of blue to planet, how else to make sense of the distance? Sick-lickly, there goes the floodgate, a fair share of surrender and warfare in settling. Elevator silence, eternities in the hours to measure the parting pore by pore. So as to be certain of its permanency. If found: return to shoebox-sized room in Harlem, to circadian rhythm, sleepwalking through sucker punches. In braille the suffocation, glorification, for my eyes only. Tethered to arrogant sky, one more injury to date, another unspectacular poem about the sky. My dying horizon, dead and light-years gone. For better or worse, my very first favorite swinging fist all along. Busted up, brave for you. I’m halved, I’m sorry too, please come sweeping into the room. Beneath the blue of the TV light, punitively, 5
Tuesday’s to stay. Fingers where the hair stops at the back of your neck. I regress, prove the point: heavy tolls, MTA fines, holding my breath until my face turns blue. Enormously, you, my parts, my mouth of which curls around a kiss, drinks dishwater over dehydration. Mistress, solstice the devastating home stretch. The audacity I have as axe meets brain, just to take the edge off. My leaving, our loss, I didn’t mean to make a sound.
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Commiserating
I coil into something more vulnerable than I am meant to be and toss my dinner down the garbage disposal. In an everyday apocalypse, the fluid in my eardrums and apathy on the commute across boroughs warns against reasonable expectations for happiness. Here the parade of weekday Chinese takeout and my indulgence in a stranger’s misfortune. And making the necessary appointments for you but never myself, my inability to follow-up while following your every move. Your lullaby, my loneliness - our ugliest, least nurturing process of living. In the checkout line at Trader Joe’s they know I am complicit. And they know I know, but I keep consuming in my bottomless, white-washed hunger. It’s someone else’s party and everyone thinks something is hilarious, finding a phone charger, morphing into moving figures. Tallying the losses, the jury deems us guilty. I am unable to oppose the verdict and stumble out to the stoop. My silhouette is plural but misery goes without company. The indie beat blasts and I cower. At least pretend I like anything I like. A cacophony of sound rings from the hallway, silverware falls off the counter and clatters, and a million tiny candles flicker in a room with no one in it. If the world is ending we are passive. You are careless because you can afford to care less. Suspicions confirmed - no one cares about anyone except for the one person who said they’d show up but didn’t. My face is contorting while I cry. I continue to cry as precaution. The train is stalled and every passenger is crying. Underground, in rush hour traffic, we are separated on the 3-train, and you’re searching for me between the cars. It is golden hour outside but we can’t see for sure. In the clear, out of the clear, I love you. Like sitting ducks in a pool of our own self-interest, this is our preventative measure.
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To Be So Estranged
When observing creatures in a fishbowl, New Yorkers skim along the surface of the surefire cure to fulfillment. Bearing down onto the blue plastic seat closer to the unknown part of metropolitan earth below rock bottom. Your coldest monotone: stop throwing guilt at me. I’m partying here in my manic vortex, the Astor Place cube turning and being pushed, tilting an inch off its axis toward my gravitational pull: your thumb against the back of my hand, eye to eye until there are no details. Scanning the storefronts to no avail, exciting myself by the hypothetical mirage of your plain expression. With my guilt-ridden, ordinary grief, I carry the dead weight and steamroll through the imaginary. Mortifying, the look I’d guess you’d give. You live in a place I never touch. In a trance, the average passerby is walking another home. I’d die for just about anyone, but for you most desperately.
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Depreciation pt. I
Water pours over old coffee grounds and ruins the morning. The faucet is leaky, the mind is a coffin, today’s date an expiration. 18,000 people are asking something of me in the adjacent room. Pills kill off the symptoms and sidestep the disorder. I take a screwdriver to the broken part until it is more broken. On this paper route, I am detour and I am flight risk. I dilute boundaries into blurred lines as if to wish you too close for comfort, as if to foresee the weather warning. Last seen caught in my eyelashes, flattened on the windshield, what’s obvious to me is outdated to you. At dusk, I forgo direction. Cramped with a stiff spine in the holding cell, fix my posture, regain some composure. I pace and plead. White noise. Mail returned to sender. Your voice, a dial tone. I nurture this obsession. Everyone I love is reachable only through this device.
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Depreciation pt. II
Under the table, I feed myself scraps. I finger glass stems with friends. Swipe left, swipe right, slice into myself. Crippled by the reduction. Pacing, in spite. The singularity stretches such astronomical lengths, taps your shoulder as you turn away. Becomes basic necessity. Warrants the wear and tear, I reason. Flowers grow around the absence until the pot is knocked over, dirt spilling everywhere. Now it stains. Now it is under my fingernails. Thinking I deserved the garden, feeling soiled, wanting the garden again. This urgency is inaudible. This is normal panic.
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Last Act
Heaven, where I don’t remember anything. But I can’t bear the blue forgotten and who will write it down? I sewed, of course, and wanted to reap. Clothed you, in summer linen, the birthday I blamed you for forgetting to wash your hair. Your hands were tied so I ironed the clothes, packed them neatly for when we’d be ready. Abandoned our hiding place, flocked to the city to properly sever our heads from our unsuspecting necks. In a letter, I said, there is this and then there is everything else. In another letter, maybe the fiftieth or sixtieth, you wrote: the sky knew we were coming that day. Hoarded and hoarded some more, dragged my belongings across the stage far past the bitter end. The playwright specified: YOU ARE TO CARRY THE WET RAG CLOSE AND YOU ARE CAREFUL NOT TO WRING OUT THE WATER. Met you in the parlor, I was so careful. At evening time, 5 o’clock I was so careful, I was. Cradled a gentle man the way I would a bird, as you chipped your own front teeth falling down the wishing well, just to pull me up, while I was there to pull you up. 11
Helping hands performed an autopsy and a disappearing act deep inside your hospital cot. You asked me to stay a while and I did.
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In Which Finders Keepers Doesn’t Apply Anymore
Out for blood tonight, clean for your carving. The fallacies proved to be insoluble, stuck on the roof of my mouth. Sensibilities gone to shit. Cinematic you and cinematic me - grace, intimacy, a mess made in vain. Moving in tandem against the swelling sun. The sun’s disapproval of the torrential summer day where we had plans to take a bath together, and you were going to come back later. When someone says they’ll come back later, they either do or they don’t, and then I got the phone call. Sirens. Cliff’s edge. Identity theft by F. Scott and Zelda. Meet me, my killer. Come back to bed. Cling to me while I cling to the pitfall, while I practice contrition. Would swallow you whole to spare you the bite. Our massacre is gutless, and with its steel grip, I love a liar so I become one too. Fumbling for the phone. Ragged breath. Forced entry, causing a scene. Do I have a permit? What do you mean I need a permit? Rosebush, red shoes, red flags. The sheer familiarity. Your extra rib. Your hairy legs. I told you, I know. Holding your body down on the floor, quick! Get help! Raw to the touch. Hitting the brakes. The rarity of the rod wedged in our hearts. Driving toward the cliff, running to the cliff, spitting up Sorry’s suspended from the cliff. Don’t look down, look at me. I know.
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Scared to Death
If I brake suddenly, both the passenger and I and everything will fly forward. Getting to know the deep end meant making a home in it, and so the self-loathing, the shame, the pitiful and idiotic melodrama brought me so far as out of my mind. Strategically I love you by never speaking to you again, a profound and tortured way to live without. In all my grand illusions, you needle through me, ink to skin and pinch by pinch we get away with this. On a skyway over a suspension bridge and Lake Erie, the arrows point upward. Smashing the guard rail, disregarding the speed limit, saddled with remorse and the grandiose idea that I may see you again in the beautiful blue beyond. Oh lover, this fervor, I repent and repent. I cannot picture forgiving either of us. I don’t die but I keep meaning to.
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Blue, Muscle Memory
I love my appetite suppressants and my recurring nightmares and sour breath voicemails of cruelty and tenderness. The fog of fatalism is, like, conditionality and syphoning serotonin from my brain and every system in the U.S. profiting off this suffering. The scribbles across symmetrical lines and the sharp objects under our pillows. Then a hysterical sob and more linoleum tile and bracing myself for goodbye. Then strangers crawling around inside of blue body. Bag my produce, reply to texts, moisturize and take nutritional supplements. My cheap remedy to sustain, for now. I resent the edge of the subway platform and the gravity that stands me up straight in the shower. Intimately, I savor blue feeling. Then, startled by the paralysis, I recoil and repeat - a violent uncoupling. At half past six, I’m stepping into my shoes, salting my wounds in the sewer. Licking them clean only to return to the sewer. Keeping my head above the wood floor, out of your ass, making vows to do this and that. Fickle, the birds scatter in flight, bound by paperweight. The wind cannot carry them and so they drop dead. What I’d do for some certainty. What I’d lose to seal my fate. Mistakenly, I never let this go. Someone I once kissed for a few hundred hours is somewhere in the crowd. But there is no someone and even worse, no crowd. Heart hits the floor, splits between sidewalk cracks, the penny landing tails-side up. The devil found its way from my shoulder and into my gut, left there to grow old with me. I projectile vomit at the lateness of the hour, how I’ll soon be awake and will do this over again. I want to disappear but everybody has my location. I can’t even say your name.
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Blue, Clockwork
We kept getting even until the world turned on its side and the floor was pulled out from under us, tablecloth ripped from our finest porcelain. Our language was whittled down to bare bone. I shrunk and shrunk when left to my devices, calling out to you in my sleep. The woman on the shoreline with stones weighing down her pockets, in the end, was no match against the weight itself. Logic rejects this, these little deaths after little deaths. Held hostage, I’d escape, fragility aside and a sick sense of freedom in sight. I’d return and be accused of reckless endangerment, yet promising to never leave again. The easy-come denies the easy-go, and now today lingers somewhere in the continuum. The infinite, empty-handed almosts dare to salvage what is not mine. Straight face, look busy, sorrow. Kiss, keep busy, sorrow. Coming to terms, I occupy myself with non-dairy milks and the fluffing of pillows and the pursuit of equal policies and practices. Falling into the Hudson, drudging back out, renewing the subscription with indifference. Trivialities. My growling stomach, my dizzy dialing. Waking up in the in-between to validate his or her valid complaints - the validity, the saddest part. There is no grand gesture, no whopping discovery of pocket change, not a single finishing touch to flip a house on HGTV. No last minute miracle or human repair. Which is worse: delusion or hopelessness? I remain running in place, thinking I’ll meet you there soon.
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Humankind
Wronged when I’m right, victim as fiction. Aware of my frailties because I have to be aware. Stay alert, perform the pleasure, hurt badly here. Conditioned well to impress and repress. Hypersensitive, my existence offensive. Female satire, like speaking with certainty to be deemed narcissistic or written as a statistic. Medicine, a luxury when holistic. Beg to remember your smell ‘cause modern sadness is prolific. My expansion is only at someone’s expense. This is common sense. I don’t have time to be heartbroken! The exhausted moon. Limited silver spoons. This not free That not free procrastinate and curate a playlist over a eulogy. Texting sonnets, consultations, fine print. Pausing a moment to finally mourn it. Anger, un-allowed. Then male rage then sudden death. Crop-top, electro-pop coping through astrology and privileged with a day job. Plastic bags, guilt, makeup grease, guilt. Leaving the oven on for the fun of it. Income is not wealth, the clean break
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loses to the battle of mental health. Depressed in Urban Outfitters, the temporary everything, your status updates for daily worshipping. Hot girl, dumb caption, hot girl creates her own contraption: cognizant till it’s no longer fashion. Bathtub used by forty-four other people, Wi-Fi, electricity, living this life must be lethal. Stranger’s leg against mine, unflinching to prove my own resign. Proving, please stop looking at me like that. The unrelenting ache, delete delete delete undo-ing just to repeat. You say it’s going to get better, but the mistrust, the confession - my word is never enough. City sobs, systems oppressive, liquor making this absence even more expensive. My contributions to capitalism are wholly pathetic. Dancing with sewer grates underneath, your pity and FaceTime’s poor connection. Turning back to turn myself in. On the evening news a man is being blown to bits. Then, the surprise when somebody else call it quits.
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We Say We Love Each Other But We Eat Each Other Up published in Minetta Review, fall 2018
There are two eyes in my chest and when your head is on my heartbeat I am warped into your mind, weathered and disturbed. You and I, the junction of two nerve cells, afraid of making this into a loss. The synapse, as consequence, is usually not okay. Here are the facts: Me, still halved. You, proven guilty. Can this sit on the table forever? Can these reparations be settled? I cry for no one else and it bounds the sky. I slip into your hands because I have spent all my time missing them. Anger forgets last year’s burial with a tight fist. In the early morning, before the sun checks in, I stare for hours. Your eyelashes like wheat fields beneath the curtain light. Before you wake, almost nothing hurts. In this still-frame you cannot lie to me and I cannot be made a fool. I consider the window and then turn away. Back and forth from the bed to the doorway, the burden of debt we bear. I am unable to keep away long. You are beautiful and I am tired. There is never enough rest. We are about to touch, about to destroy. This thing we’ve built has no insurance. The palace crumbles. You are undone for me, as I for you. Invent me an old self or a thing that will refuse to rot. Something to hope for. The day ahead is its own premonition, and I rehearse how to say, You are at no fault for your addiction but aftermath is implied. These are words of which I borrow. In your sleep I kiss your mouth. In your sleep I kill for you. Look at me, I am starving. I rage and remember. In your namesake, watch as I eat my heart out.
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Mourning Glory
Crater in the road. Coat rack of dirty winter parkas. Like a child in a lunatic eclipse, I love and make a fuss. The carpet squares, stripes skin-deep, silver before gold. Lukewarm downpour and your graveyard-hands, blue-eyed Greyhound trips across state lines. Needing the reprieve, I learn good and better bed-side manner. Bodily, all the kinds of sick there are to be. Beyond bodily, deadly, to be blunt. December hymn: gone away is the bluebird. Up and away until it’s unbearable. Love is sanity but a complicated second nature and in this little house, on memory lane, plastic angels decay on suburban tree lawns. Mumbled under our breath, as children we surpass the crater, the coat rack, the damned carpet stains and owe everybody an apology. You left your hands here, O, mourning glory, disintegrating curtain light. Your very fast half-life.
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Makeshift
Sometimes good is good and other times it is salvation, like when Alexis and I would go to the grocery store next door together. Exiled in the dead of winter. Or when asked, have you eaten today? Or when deciding against giving any explanation. In the midst of fluorescent yellow light, tender to the touch, although our bones are protruding. Although it’s uncomfortable to talk about, like, I’m on the verge of implosion, aren’t you? Laughter swings saturated, a momentary departure from the dysfunction. I hope it’s hers but it isn’t. Hardwood peels under snow boots, soon to gather dust, our harrowing collector’s edition of days we couldn’t bring ourselves to go out there. The sun sets midday. The calendar takes a month off. Hand-washing dishes and hoping we might be better later is the best we can do. Unknowing this is anything but ageless; is fleeting and may soon be out of reach. To archive is archaic, by nature, and with our child-sized stomachs, I am ungrateful. I testify, when it’s good it’s great, but the monsters in the closet are terrified too. Your decadence, your sweet face and the crook of your smile. The shadow over all the rest. Still archaic. I can’t do you justice, especially in the language of sleeping pills and lanes of speeding cars. When the going gets tough, the exits start to look the same. And when the going gets really tough, you’re already gone.
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Papercuts
Inside a papier-mâchÊ moon we bleed berry-red, naked bathroom bodies rebelling in the apartment on Greenwich Street. We have everything, all of it, forever. We have so much that we laugh at its size, that the pomegranate seems like a good idea. We crack the pericarp in half, harvest the seeds with our fingernails. The juice, an attack, a revival - you laugh as it sputters onto my cheek. Drips down your chin and dyes us both in one swift motion. This is not about: contents may cause indelible stains. This is not about: peeling. I pry open your crescent lips with my own, pretty in the kitchen at midnight. I never noticed the delicacy. How we learn to resolve only after revolting. How the afterglow precedes the blinding. You pull out my hair and I let it come out in clumps to quell our hunger pains. No one is good until you love them and no one is bad until you love them. The deck of cards never plays its best hand, and we are greedy and rotten, quick to call this torment. For our satisfaction, it stings. This adoration, an abyss.
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Dark n Stormy
half-haloed I know you don’t mean for the refraction of light so I photograph the luster and the luster only so I blame the bar top of where we’re two out of billions a drink now please on second thought without thought make that two both for you to be filled to the brim and with the loss of buoyancy the sinking the arrival with cracks all over wishbone split before our hands could get there first and we walk into love like a room we never knew our house had sometimes with so much heart that you are outside of yourself other times not there or here at all it isn’t easy to be unwell but your smile is my lover’s smile in this space the smile is flat and rearranged and then I pull away and then I think twice counting thin white lines filing lined-paper lists on how it will get better I’m neither leaving nor staying conflating the end of the night with the end you lick the knife clean while I watch without faltering your eyes just can’t meet mine talk with your hands tell me with your skin like child swaddled in silk I slip in you and the very moment I’m away the missing is so familiar I blink right through it
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In Two
On all fours, clawing through cellophane our rug burn race where I overdo it again chasing you down a carpeted hallway. Gulp down spoiled milk, skip save-the-dates use plain language to psychoanalyze the chip on my shoulder and the incessant, internal black hole with everything I can remember inside of it. The domesticity we made from it. Its comfort, its god awful consistency. The first time you made me into something beautiful you spared all my feelings. Wrestling this into place, the old wooden walls talking up a storm. Or is it me, or is it you? Supposedly, there is the leaver and the left, and an entire life spent feeling nothing until feeling this. Someone is screaming, I think I’m moving my mouth, biting the hand that feeds me in the glorious thick of it. Ashamed, I blush. Bare, conjoined under the quilt testing limits ‘til I’ve teased out the knots. You’re skinning potatoes over the kitchen sink, slice by slice, they simmer on the stove while I salivate from the bedroom.
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Medicine, a small offering, sweet nothing. Blood oath: we destroy until it’s in pieces when it was forged as a pair. The puppeteer lets us run our course, ‘cause this love is telepathic and apartment 4F could’ve been a magazine cover before we knew New York, before it flooded, of course. Without you as my mirror, my open wounds hang agape in another wrinkle in time. The tree grows on its side as point-of-reference, slippage is preferred. I don’t know how we got here. The black crow gives birth to the finality, front door fascinated by the dead bolt. I never begin to look for you yet never stop, either, and in the same vein, the static appears and the blue goes blank. Cry with me, stranger, isn’t it strange to be unaffected? Ungodly, the dim light? Teach me your restrain.
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Ohio
In true Ohio fashion, dandelions get the job done, rocks skip themselves across a bacteria-infested lake, and through the night the rain drips from the gutter. Oh dear, the water damage - we could not have known what we were getting into. Oh my god, I am overgrown, I am hardly here. Sent spiraling after that certain smell of soap, caught up in cursing the porch swing, your boxers, the way I was liquid for you. Long-legged and made for kicking. For our combined temperament. Swinging my arms wildly, sore for all to see, X marking the spot we laid crooked knocking our scraped knees together. Beauty, can we rewrite our birth? Take turns tracing one another with older, steadier hands? How we raised our arms up to shield our faces from the light. How I still do this in the dark. That June you were spending money you didn’t have at Circle K and I was being lied to, and I was scared to ask, and you were scared for me to ask. My dearest friend, our summers are seldom so belligerent, you’re going to want to sit for this. To pass along the message I rely on the messenger. To forgive I’ve got to give you yet another part. The reaching I do is my most difficult secret, and it’s been a while since I’ve looked at you or at me. I feel incandescent. I feel like a bulb. Like seeing, like cypress, craving while short of breath. So the smoke settles, foolish, filling potholes on a tree-lined street. The open mouth of fields and gap between bodies droop over the blackened sky. Our hometown sighs in defeat. Downstairs, my mother is drifting in and out of sleep in her living room chair. When she wakes, her footsteps move gently for mine to mimic. With both our worries as keepsakes, I am left wondering how I could not have been born from her stomach. The kettle boils over. Everyone else hears the pin drop and I’m the last to know it’s over.
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Under the Weather
Choosing this over drought, having trouble remembering if I showered last night, the discrepancy troubling never mind the watermarks. Repeating sentences under oath, underwater. Our catching-up echoes from one can tin can to another. Counting backwards from ten to consign the miles to oblivion. Seasick. Solid ground never meeting feet for too long. Littered, rusted, beating against the current. The riddle where something is coming but is never arriving. Shouting at the equilibrium, the eye-for-an-eye, the cutting board and the knife’s every last move. Seducing the brick into perforated binding, instructing it to soften after daybreak, using all my might on an ominous epilogue. The tension hardens the space between my hands and what they should be holding. How I hate you, how I am obliterated by your terms and conditions. How I beg you to articulate, to be a real person for once. Hung out to dry, I withstand the tightrope walk. On the highway’s cold shoulder, my blind spot, I lay down right here. All this time left to kill. For old time’s sake, I follow your lead, nonchalantly off the flat earth. Fixating on the pale blue, on the wretched thing. Paying off reparations, you hurt, I hurt, you -
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W 135th St, New York, NY
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.
Mornings that last all day Take me home and spare me from anything else Heaven half-finished Home improvement, self-help, one of these times we’ll get it right Nicotine patches, things to cover up other things, things to discard after single use Perfect peace to kill for Burgers for breakfast, what were we thinking? What were we thinking? A mattress topper to fit “one-and-a-half-people” Things that fit Lavender sheets, the one good pillow, the universe within Your art Your nana’s dresser Your homemade paper dress Green coat (mine, now) Brown leather jacket (yours, now) Infection from exposure Broad City’s final season I’m accusing you and I’m right I’m accusing you and I’m wrong Not leaving but likely to Leave, almost Leaving, Leaving 2-in-1-skin Moana for the tenth time Immunity, mortality, apology Imminent danger, liability, the loss looming above Latuda, Lexapro, Attarax (and Tranzedone, snores and all) Worship and martyrdom Old flame, light at the end of the tunnel, scouring into Blue heat headfirst (just in case) Blue lantern lights, Blue folding chair, Blue weighted blanket, Blue longsleeved shirt (favorite for in-patients) From beg to plead 28
30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.
From toss to turn to spill to spill I will be haunted, I will not avoid the haunting I will jolt awake periodically, I will never be able to live without Running out the door, running to the roof Socks lost under the bed Tying our head hair together Unthinkable erasure Who loves you more than me? Does love rely on unconditionality? If it does I am here, if it does I’m not here I haven’t been anywhere since
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Howl
In the wonderment and wild tenderness, and in driving like a mad-man, we’re better for it. Here unfurls the inextricable link between love and theft. I knew nothing before you. There is no chronology. What happened had always been. What almost didn’t happen happened, barely. But when it did it, took my life. The lack of sequence: I am permanently with and permanently without. Wickedly, the subconscious discerns no difference between leaving and being left. Therefore, like a wolf I cry abandonment, therefore reserve the right to miss like this. Sacrificially, the missing is mine. I avoid the closure, air out the wound indefinitely. You don’t even visit me in dreams anymore, so this time it must be real. My point of contention is that everyday repeats in present time. Too large for even amnesia, I start talking myself out of living, again, I move across the country. At least I’m trying. It’s so cold over here. I know you know (but I can’t be sure).
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One Long Longing
I had never seen such soft edges, had never swung around the planets on wires so strong. Hadn’t known limbic language or had ever met a godsend. I don’t know why I wronged and stole and wrecked. We were children annihilating a fragile thing without understanding annihilation. In the time spent in Old Eden I ran and ran. I grew longer legs. Molded my shape to the blue and mastered devotion. Because you loved me I was not like anyone else. And now, the falling into prayer. The counting of my teeth to make sure they’re all still here. The healing, I suppose. If I have the stomach for it. Most hostile is the nothingness. And being a guest in my body. And the sky of black crows in such an astounding quantity that there’s no sky at all. I’m sorry for the younger years. And for the older ones, too. For as long as I live, I don’t know what day it is.
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When I Thought Bradley Cooper in that Movie was Going to be Okay
I I am here to tell both sides of the same story: “better safe” and “than sorry.” Blistering heat drops stones onto my chest at a gas station. There, the third-degree burns. The worry warts. Northeast Ohio summers send me notoriously westbound, hugging the interstate’s run down curves. The telephone lines race the clouds to the other side. With every loss, someone loses. Loyalty is tragic, and I am blue in the face of heartache to cherish the proximity. You work long days at the screw factory and your honest sweat almost suffices. Empty and soundless, you say you’re going away for a while. I allow your leftovers a place in the fridge. Untouched, somehow ravaged. II The throat of radio presets helps the suppression as storefronts illuminate every letter except for the one that would’ve made the word whole. Best case scenario, we breakeven. Winding down in a body without a womb, tugging at wires glued to your skull and burying my nose in greasy magnolia hair. The I.C.U. becomes an end-all-be-all and you shiver because I do, I see you. Every window has a pane when the frame is being forced open, and the monkey chooses the warm monkey with no food. The shower is running. This is the price we pay. Life is never long enough when we love someone. III At night I comb through slip knots and age like stale bread. Make plans with an acquaintance and forget. The daily briefing, the simple grief. My knuckles are bruised from knocking and voices from afar bend my ear. Keep score, they say, but the count continues to surpass. We dance on the subway platform to our infantile chorus as the local line passes us by, still defending the score. How joy lingers, if only more than pain. 32
IV Wherever you are, this is for the glass in our palms, your paintbrush on my hips, for divinity and the bottom of the ocean. For outer space, for band-aids, for your face in every face. Maybe one day I won’t have to use all this metaphor, and making sense of the world was hard enough before you stopped being in it. This should’ve never reached paper. This is too personal to be great literature.
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The Afterlife
YOUNG GIRL Why must the moon be blue only once? GOD What moon? And what blue? YOUNG GIRL (Startled by the immediate response) I’m feeling disoriented. (Steps toward the doorway) GOD (Retreats to the opposite side of the room) You are free to leave. Touch and go. Take care. YOUNG GIRL (Standing still in the doorway) (Softly) Hidden in plain sight, never in human form, you surround and surround. (Reaches for GOD) I love you. GOD (Bitter) You come to me unsatisfied. Your boredom, your electric impulse. (Angered) You only love me when I give you nothing.
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(Long pause) Go on! Go on, with your self-righteous, moth to flame syndrome. YOUNG GIRL (As if regarding a long-lost friend) Do you hate me? GOD (As if regarding a stranger) You created the hate I hate you with. YOUNG GIRL (Crying over the bathroom sink) Can I stay here with you? GOD Restrooms are for customers only. YOUNG GIRL (Crying over the bedroom dresser, and into a glass of wine) I’ll buy your goods. Can I buy your goods? GOD (Vulnerable) (Voice lowering) You are already good. YOUNG GIRL I want your goods. Can I please buy your goods? GOD We don’t accept that form of payment. YOUNG GIRL Can I stay here with you? With you I will be free.
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GOD You were already free. YOUNG GIRL I reject this freedom. GOD (Spitting with disdain) You rejected your own freedom and now it is neither here nor there. I am not perfect. Because you believe I am perfect I fail you. YOUNG GIRL My wanting is uninterrupted. Letting go is immoral. When I try to do so, I sin anonymously. (Sewing her eyes shut) O holy God, I GOD Desire is stronger than morality. No one desires me the way you do. (Looks at YOUNG GIRL fondly, and then turns cold) Yet you shed me like snake skin. I am your vice. YOUNG GIRL (Well-rehearsed shrug) (Collapsing) (Strained, labored breathing) I cannot fabricate your deepest shades of blue. My sorrow is immeasurable. GOD (Almost entirely evil)
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In another life, I’d be moved by your testimony. YOUNG GIRL How many worlds are inside this one? Which one did I lose you in? GOD (Uncertain silence) YOUNG GIRL Did you know this was final? GOD (Certain silence) YOUNG GIRL Is certainty a lie if it changes its mind? How many lies have we told if we didn’t know they were lies? (Panicked) (Hysteric) Forgive me, holy sky, holy sea! Never again will I undermine you! GOD My forgiveness is conditional. To have it, you must walk away. Go! Back into the moonless world you made for yourself! YOUNG GIRL (Amends to let go completely, despite feeling everlastingly evil) Goodnight blue. (Permanent silence) Wait, are you still there?
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‘Til Heaven Calls
Several centuries have passed since the last bit of blue ribbon tied itself around two pinkies of which parted ways. This evening there is laundry to fold and supermarket errands to run, and gaping holes to hide between this world and the other one. Feed the parking meter, make too much small talk, use too much past tense. The famine may end, perhaps. The improbability sleeps at my feet. Cook dinner, fold into myself, dress as a semblance of a body. Wash and stitch my patchwork skin. With nostalgia as the crook of grief, I know it’s only a matter of time. I don’t know if I exist. Reckoning with a wordless dialect, with the human condition and our collective heaviness, we submit to the agony and somehow refrain from throwing our belongings off the balcony. The likelihood of forgetting is too great. I’m terrified of a memory lapse. Engrossed in the ceiling’s chipping tile, in love with the void, an eyesore that’s all mine. I decay on stand-by. I lust as an excuse. I unravel as accident. Until I exist fully, I stockpile artifacts. I adjust to the interim, to the point of no return. Learn and re-learn the vast deserts of your ugliness. Exist as your least favorite, most unlovable limb. You exist and I exist but I do not exist on my own. I don’t know if I exist where I am since I exist where you are. Behaving, I put the dishes away three times a day. Body waits for the blue. Body loves blue for the rest of its life.
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