You Cant Barter With the Girl by Clare Michalak

Fall

You Canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t Barter With The Girl

Table of Contents 3

Turning Off The Lights Before Going to Bed

Slippery When Wet

Come Back

We Play Battleship At The Dinner Table

Ode To My Appendix

Ode To Vicky

32 Year Old Actor Portraying a 16 Year Old Heartthrob on This Week’s Latest Television Show Talks About Blood and Love

13 Voodoo Doll 14

Huntress

If I Could Shape Her Into Poetry

Hang Me Up To Dry

Just A Girl Thing

You Can’t Barter

He Drove Me To The Airport

Turning Off the Lights Before Going to Bed

I open the cabinet doors and do not close them when I leave so that it looks like there is a ghost in the room * chasing away the fear of loss is much easier to do with things that need chasers * my friends say come with us I only say maybe * being alone was never as terrifying as when I sat at the top of the stairs to make sure that mom didn’t leave me alone in this house * my drug of choice is the attention that they give me when you cross the room and say something about my eyes * if given the choice I would prefer to hide and not seek rather than to seek and find what has been hiding

* my fingers scratch and shred to pick and pick at the cuts and scabs until they bleed knowing that they will form prettier scars * I like my bed literally empty and figuratively full * if I fill every hole that’s left with bath tub plugs they will make me numb even if I flood * I don’t like feeling like an open window in a rainstorm but that’s the only way I can breathe * it is getting late and the shadows from my head crawl down my spine and make me feel uneasy

Slippery When Wet Mom, I mirror your silence that seems to double our mileage. Like mother like daughter as father rips the wheel through rising water. My books fly across the car floor and I contemplate what would happen if my grip were to slip. My brain is the bruised apple that smashed on the dash, its plight now to lie near the wrappers that shifted during flight in a 4 door automatic. I want you to look into my eyes and recognize the fear that lies in my pupils is genetic. Our chromosomes are whispered down from the family lies and family ties; they are double x’s in boxes across pages and pages of crimes. There are medical histories of clenched hands and ground teeth and tyrants, the impressions in our seats are all part of a science. Our manual has rules to have and to hold until death do us part but there was never anything about how holding your tongue is part of the art. Biting lips and curling fists, unable to be seen because of the eclipse of the man sitting in the front seat. I want to scream, “Tell him to slow down, why wont you tell him to slow down!” But if you speak the doors will begin to leak. And the look that will dart across his face will silence you again. As if to prove the strength of the silent threat, 5

he blows past the sign that says “slippery when wet”.

Come Back I wonder if eyes are not windows then are they doors that lead to hallways that lead to rooms painted blue with dusty boxes filled with old pictures where my mother’s words still hang in the air like a mobile above a crib that sings a song of bad news telling you to please come home and to find your black dress

We Play Battleship at The Dinner Table She starts with, “You shouldn’t be eating that” so I look at my board and put a red peg in F4 because it is a direct hit. I counter with, “It’s just bread” but she had ships on, “We need to stop eating,” and, “We do not deserve the space we occupy.” So she put in two white pegs and my board is saturated with red. My mouth is dry and my stomach sinks. My plate is left untouched.

Ode To My Appendix My dear vermiform organ, Between Gerlach’s valve And your tendency to overcompensate In your mammalian mucosal immune function Your tenacity is to be admired And adored. Can I ask you a favor? Certainly, I mean, Surely you could, In your seemingly indefinite residency, Take with you this ache that Has lodged between my third and fourth rib? Not that I haven’t enjoyed your company But just as a parting gift? No? Well, given the choice, they say You prefer both the elegance of fight And the refinement of extorted flight. The last moments of your life are spent Compiling your weapons in your vestigial hollow Aware of your own ultimate extinction. You’re so cool. So, If you cannot take this ache with you Can you teach me how to fight? Show me how I too can leave With fire in my wake

And poison in the blood When I too start collapsing Infected.

Ode to Vicky this is an ode to the girl who convinced me at the age of eight that she was Jesus Christ and said in verse six chapter twelve that I shouldn’t talk to anyone because they wouldn’t understand; the children around us would lead to our descent into sin in her monkeybar crusade with wood chips piercing her feet and palms she did better than the white church back home

where the sermons on Sundays were staler than her candy breath and the boy I sat next to at 17 singing hallelujah was my salvation especially on Saturday nights lit only by the TV screen and concealed moans Vicky in her 8/10ths of a decade was right because isolation was the only way to stay holy in our small town of blacktop sinners

32 Year Old Actor Portraying A 16 Year Old Heartthrob Vampire on This Weeks Latest Television Show Talks About Blood And Love It’s not really so bad, You know, Once you get used to the taste of it. I’m talking about loving The taste of the blood, of course. And by blood I mean the dyed stuff That they drip all over you. Especially in the sex scenes. It gets stuck in your belly button And in your hair. But there’s something about having The blood caked On your lips And on your hands That’s symbolic. Viewers want to believe that they’re special, That they’re wanted. And that their blood will sing To some supernatural being Who will seduce them With fangs That will pierce Imperfect flesh And imperfect ideas And imperfect fears And

They will still be Marked and Loved and Fucked And Chosen. If you’ve been following since Season 3, You can see that our onscreen relationship Has almost caused the apocalypse Every 17 episodes But, underneath all of that, There is a moment when you figure out You’ve got to give the viewers what they want And what they want Is to be Uninhibitedly Consumed By a love They Cannot Contain Or Comprehend.

Voodoo Doll Walk her forwards with your fingers, the cream colored canvas with trembling sewn legs and button eyes. Cut down her chest with scissors like your mother showed you how to when she taught you how to sew. Reveal the puckered cotton, have it spill across the table and take out the red heart. Use the brown thread from the rip in your jacket from the fence when you were running home to sew her shut again. Sit her back on the shelf in her place, with her back to the wall and her eyes on the ceiling. She looks like you.

Huntress My trophies are stacked on shelves and hung from the walls. They are freshly caught from the bow of my lips and the arrows between my thighs. Look at the oversized shirts with cologne shoulders, The books with first page love letters. The half empty bottle of rum, The 3 AM voicemails about missing the way the blue sheets feel with me in them, and, not to mention, the entire 6season collection of The Office in HD. I dust each one and place them accordingly, each shelf reserved for a different victim. There is a deck of cards from my first kill. All of the hearts are missing.

Hang Me Up To Dry If you love me Put a drain in the floor Chain me up By my ankles Lick open My wounds And watch My colors drip Down This Is What I Look Like On The Inside

Still Interested?

If I Could Shape Her Into Poetry She wouldn’t have punctuation because Words roll of her tongue like the Smoke that she breathes At 3 AM on the streets of this city When we are sitting on a park bench With our legs crossed under us And our knees are just barely touching And a semicolon is too optimistic but a Period is just too final She isn’t as graceful as iambic pentameter Or tetrameter or any of that other syllable stuff She isn’t that intentional with anything she does Last night she cut two inches of her hair and dyed it red Because she was feeling red today and She will deal with it tomorrow If she’s feeling like any other color

I feel orange when I am with her She’s not a haiku, or at least not a good one She might be one of the ones with two corresponding lines And then the last fivesyllable line at the end is just the word Serendipity Or something else like Refrigerator If I could shape her into poetry She would be fifty lines about the sky Or something about her cat named Hector That perches on her windowsill Or something about that look in her eye When she’s had a bit of whiskey Or that thing that she does with her hands When she’s meeting new people My god, she is poetry And I am not a poet.

Just A Girl Thing You are perched on your counter top, sitting crosslegged across from your roommate who is perched by the sink. These are your respective arena seats for the “girl talk” that happens at 1:52 AM on a Wednesday morning. Today’s discussion is about how no’s and yes’s are a game of chess. You talk about how sometimes the men you are with just can’t take a hint. Move his hand 9 times, it comes back for a tenth. Rook to E1. Roll over to stop his hands, Knight to H3. Say no five times before his mouth finally leaves yours, Pawn to C6. “We just need to say no more often,” you both agree. Check. Vocalizing it shouldn’t be that big of an issue. But as you both let that phrase sink in, you know that no is never taken as a complete sentence. Checkmate. After a few more seconds you both sigh and say, “We should just date each other.” You are walking with your two best friends up the street to the apartment. You and Jamie are in front comparing notes on the validity of water based solar panels because she is going to be an engineer even though she says that UConn thinks that she’s better suited to teach. Tori is walking slowly in back and looking over her shoulder. “Watermelon”. You three share a look before

clustering together, still talking as if nothing is wrong. Tori what do you see?" You ask. “He has been following us for 5 blocks,” she says. Now the three of you walk forward holding on to your bags and move faster up the cobblestones. You see Tori start to sprint and you notice the man now, eyeing your group to the left and picking up the pace. You begin to run. He is running now too. All of you run up the stairs and slam on the door handle. The manager scolds you for the noise at this hour but you squeeze past him into the lobby. The manager then asks “Who the hell are you” to the man who tried to follow you up. You three run up the remaining stairs two at a time before slamming the green door behind you and dead bolting it. You get ready for bed all together, escorting each other to the bathroom so no one has to be alone. You can’t stop shaking. You are at the doctor’s office. You fill out paperwork and wait for thirtyfive minutes in a cold metal chair. You are brought into a white room and ordered to wait on the red cushion chair for another fourteen minutes. The doctor comes in asking what seems to be the problem. You say that a few days ago you couldn’t breathe. You don’t know what was wrong. But your lungs filled with something and your skin crawled with heat. He looks you up and down. There doesn’t seem to be anything the matter now, he says. Maybe you just imagined it, he says. Women have a tendency of exaggerating, he says. There’s nothing we can do, he says. Before closing the door behind him. You are diagnosed with crying wolf. You are dancing with your friend in a 10$ club that puts x’s on your hands if you are under twentyone. Songs with gyrating beats fill the air and you feel hands grab your hips pulling you closer into Budweiser breath. This is okay you guess. You sway to the music and look back to your friend. She is locked in an embrace too but you give each other the look of approval. As the chorus hits his hands find themselves tracing down your thighs and under your dress. You grab his hands and put them back on to your hips but just as you let go they plunge back. One arm wraps around your chest. You cant breathe. You break his grip with your nails and push against him as hard as you can. He screams “Whore” in your face before trudging off back to the bar. You are left in the middle of the dance floor. Your friend gives you a look of apology from between arms wrapped around her waist. Someone from behind you grabs your hips. He slept over and let you hog the blankets. You get up to shower. You turn on the bathroom light and pull your wrinkled shirt above your head. You gasp. Bruises cover your neck and your collarbone. There are dark spots on your breasts and your ribs. They are deep purple against your skin. They make you uneasy. They feel like a branding mark. Like you’ve been branded with a hot poker. You tilt your head and make a note to cover everything with make up. Bruises are strange. The only thing that separates love bruises and anger bruises is intention. You look again in the mirror. You don’t like how thin that line appears to be.

You Can’t Barter you can’t barter with bathtub water the thoughts that pour out of your ears catch in the drain with your overcolored hair making a mess of unending threads that your plumber will hate

when the drain clogs with your neurons the water running in streams through the caverns of your collarbone, pools on the linoleum and smells faintly of iron and indigestion you can’t barter with bathtub water because the coils of steam that cover your scraped black painted toes reveal everything that you wanted to wash down the drain and now the grime in the tub looks a lot like home

He Drove Me To The Airport His name was Doraiswamy Jawar And he drove me Two hours north And though we were headed To a plane

He said that life Is like a train And you meet people at the station But that station is not your destination So some people ride with you And some don’t _ He told me I should buy An orchard When I am twentysix So that I remember my roots And to call him When I need To buy real estate _ He said art is dumb But that love is real And he had to take his hands off the wheel To lift up his sleeve To show me the puckered mark On his left wrist Where he tried to kill himself Because he couldn’t live without Marie in Minnesota But then he found Ann in New York who modeled for Ann Taylor _

He told me that He was so mad that a girl From Minnesota Fucking Minnesota Could make him think that There was nothing more to the world

And that he needed to convert to Fit into her suburbs _ He told me that he was Indian And his wife was French so They had to compromise But it was easier with her than with Danielle in Paris Or Ann In New York Or Diana in Quebec But he did tell me that While visiting Paris he was left With $50 in his pocket And within one day he had Found a job And someone to sleep with So everything is always Going to Be all right _ He told me the best drunk food Is strawberry cheesecake At a New York diner at 3 AM But you should be high too So you can enjoy it Fully – He told me there was a bar with black and white curling memories taped to walls And a stone that everyone pissed on But no one ever minded Because the 90yearold bus boy And bartender Would clean your glasses And tell you about the benefits of Whiskey sex but everyone knew

That his preferred drink was Tequila because it was $3 tequila Tuesday Everyday But when Mr. Jawar went back to that corner 5 years ago Slapping the back of his friend On the sidewalk All they found Was a skyscraper On a corner stone _ He pulled over And dropped me off on the curb And told me to order 6 shots And down them before my plane departed So that I could sleep better So I tipped him $20 And walked inside And downed 3 shots Because I liked Jawar But 6 is a lot And so 2 were for me But one was for him One was for the man With the name I couldn’t pronounce Who loved life and tequila And too many women And too many places