Bukowski on Speed

Brendan Rowland

She’s so strung out she’s mowing the living room carpet – I kick up my feet as if she’s vacuuming. She doesn’t like the taste of bread or veal, so she doesn’t eat. Springsteen caterwauls “cover me” and I howl along; the American Dream is staving off the flatline, so I mounted a TV on the dashboard of my Firebird. I’ll never be bored again. Burning with fever but not consumed, I stand on the driveway and watch the garage door go up and down. I pour a red wine oblation onto the tarmac, watch it tidepool into kneeskin hollows. She wanders outside, yanks the tail of my hair: her means of affection. The sun careening off the clearcoat reminds me of the middleschool gallows where they hung our only daughter, but we’re here where sex coalesces like bacon grease in the drain, like my fingers in her hairtie. The carpet is worn where we roll, and I can’t be ashamed, for we are hooks trawling to snag, hookers selling souls and saliva, hawkers swapping hamartia. There is nothing outside the text of her body.

Geneva Laur