For example, this morning, I was cleaning out the bathroom sink drain. It hadn’t been cleaned for, God knows, five years maybe, and water had started backing up every time I washed my hands. I was digging down in it with a bread knife, pulling up huge swampy clumps, thinking, all of this was once me—hair, dead skin, not to get too dramatic here, but in a sense this is a picture of what my own death will look like. And death, what it looks like? Gross. But then my knife got tangled in something, a thin chain, and it turned out it was the St. Anthony icon I’d once owned. My mother had brought it back for me after a business trip in Italy. I’d been planning to visit a girl in Poland I was in love with, and my mother gave it to me for Christmas, in anticipation of the trip. But I never made it to Poland—me and this girl, our plans kept getting crossed, and somehow it never came together. Then a year or so afterwards I lost the icon, when I took it off while making out with a girl I’d met at a tattoo parlor in Greenville. We spent the night in her basement apartment, drunk and infatuated, and fell asleep, finally, with sun coming through the small slit of a window high above her bed. I woke up not long after to the sound of shoes on the sidewalk above us, people on their way to work, occasionally mistaking her basement window for a gutter and tossing down cigarette butts or crumpled sheets of paper. It was like getting messages from God, she told me, half-awake.

The St. Anthony icon, which for years I thought I’d forgotten somewhere in her room, is covered with dreck, but it comes clean fairly easily in a solution of water, vinegar and baking soda. A small oval of beaten silver shows the saint, staff in hand, making his way through a forest filled with what I, non-Catholic, can only assume are symbols of the faith—a fat bird that leers upon him from the branches above; trees and flowers in bloom, but covered in thorns; a lion, who seems to look the other way. St. Anthony’s face is flat, without detail, like a mask. The thin silver chain connected to the icon is undamaged after all these years, free of rust or blemish. Even the delicate clasp that fixes it around my neck still works, just fine.

Mortimer fingered through all the catalogs and placed his order for a New World.

In 6 to 8 weeks a large box marked “Fragile” arrived in the mail, with instructions manual outlining what little assembly’s required.

Mortimer tore it open, arranged the pieces as he found them — he filled the rivers, lakes and oceans in the kitchen sink, glued the Styrofoam glaciers on at the poles, herded the little sheep in their pastures, horses in mid-leap over fences, tiny packs of cigarettes on the shelves of convenient stores.

But Mortimer noticed pieces were missing, and he shook the empty box around, stared into it, spanking its bottom holding it open-end down.

Pieces were missing: There were no humans.

Not even those little Fisher-Price people to place behind the cash registers, at the ends of long conference tables, no hands signing agreements to deaf colleagues across the stock exchange rooms of Wall Street, the trading floors silent.

Mortimer called the 800 number to complain about his defective product, but no one answered — just this voice recording optioning off his frustrations numerically.

Mortimer hung up…

Looking back through the catalog, he wasn’t sure he’d been ripped off, since this appeared to be exactly what he paid for.

Shifted into high gear about three hours in.  I played off-beat most of the time until then.  Forced Calvin to restart the mixing board, shot me dirty looks with droopy eyes.  He slurred me into compliance and then tossed up into the carpet, mostly Haven Hill, $4.25 at Bill C’s, but a few bits and pieces of food stuff scattered here and there.  Like something Pollock might have painted in a windstorm if Pollock painted with $4.25 vodka and french onion dip.

After that the instruments became smoothed out carbuncles shaped like women, all curves and slick lacquer hanging off our bellies, humming and vibrating growths, added weight.  Calvin and Jeff were the first ones to call off.  I was left with my guitar rocking me to sleep, catching beer-thick throat drool, me alone missing out on whatever action took place in the living room before I made it down the hallway one crawl at a time.

If you crush pills in a ringed kitchen plate there is less waste.

If you crush pills by candlelight it seems mysterious and you can almost forget that you can’t sing anymore, forget that this probably has something to do with your septum.

By candlelight it doesn’t matter if the fucking isn’t fucking anymore.  When I first met Deanna, everything else in the world interrupted fucking.  We made it during sessions, during breaks, while swimming, while visiting friends for Thanksgiving dinner.  We had no shame.  Shame was darkness, silence, void, simply not there.  We lived in the moments before the fruit was clipped, when my music might have been Morningstar’s pre-fall symphony.

If you crush yourself into someone else for long enough there’s nothing left to waste.

From a rat nest of carpet I lift myself beneath her and see the blur of jutting hip bones like a laser show.  I wonder if she feels cold.  I wonder if I moved to touch her my fingertips would become raw from sliding across the strings again and over again, searching for the notes until she smiles her toothless smile.

Always night, always a listless moon as we drive into the prairie’s thistled heart.  Around us, knotweed.  Its twisted foliage, the anxious spark.  His body still rooms opening within a room, the staircase burning in a locked house.  Reassure me, ravenous grassland. With your endless droughts.  With each of your soot meadows, their heaps of dead aster.  He has yet to return the hymn to my merciful throat.

[in which the song is a field, white with snow]

When the music begins, I stand at the ground’s knotted edge.
I think of the cello with its smoke filled rooms,
its one dark red note.  The threshold
all stars and dead poppies. Wind
turning like a phonograph within the field’s
tangled heart. O icicled pasture, meadow
in this minor key, could the cello’s dim etude unsettle you yet?
A yellow moon limps between nerve wracked clouds.
The song pressing on like a rundown house.
The clearing’s blank stare reflected in every unlit window.

He’s too rough.  She has other complaints as well.  She doesn’t like his friends. He doesn’t make enough money.  There is a bruise of many colors on the soft skin of her arm.

The red of the Coca-Cola signs is the same all over the world.

This face is completely different, yet its expression is the same. The change has come too quickly to see.  It isn’t physical.

Men with shovels are digging in the soil, making room for a length of clean gray pipe.  The men are clad in dull-hued clothing.  Coal gray.  Khaki.  Gunmetal blue.  They have on scuffed day-glo orange hard hats.

The clouds are gleaming white on top, where the sunlight strikes; the lower halves are shaded white merging into gray, difficult to distinguish from the neighboring blue of the sky.  We do not see where clouds end and sky begins.  The boundaries between blue and gray have disappeared.

Mark comes out of his office, deep within the brokerage.  He wears a lemon-yellow shirt, a blue knit tie, gray slacks, brown oxfords and dark blue socks.  He sees a young woman talking to Carol, the receptionist, evidently applying for a job. The young woman is blonde, with the kind of vaguely Slavic features Mark has previously imagined as sexually ideal.  He lingers to get a better look.  She has on black tights.  Mark imagines the flesh of her thighs.  She’d never understand him.  It would never work.

The belief in luck is in substance a habit of more ancient date than the surviving predatory culture.   To the archaic man all the obtrusive and obviously consequential objects and facts in his environment have a quasi-personal individuality.  They are conceived to be possessed of volition, or rather of propensities, which enter into the complex of cause and effect and move events in an inscrutable manner.

The car is ivory-coloured, with shining chrome.  Wire wheels.  Wine-red leather seats.  Note the distinctive hood ornament.  The car’s left-turn signal comes on/goes off/comes on as the vehicle slows to a stop.

A song goes through her mind.  She can’t get to the end of it.  How does that little part go?  She hears singing, along with an amplified beat which threads its way, distant pulse from a faraway star.  It fades out and picks up again, with only a semi-momentary glitch once more at the start.

The children are digging, building riverbeds, setting up their little plastic figures. Thoroughly engrossed, they want everything to be perfect before the violent end of the world.

Empty buildings.  Concrete.  Suspended black wires.  Telephone poles.  Gravel and weeds.

Anna Mae Richmond, 83, has been evicted from a house 157 years old, so that a new on-ramp to the freeway may be built.  Anna Mae turns on her call-light but no one comes.  They’re not interested in walking down the hall.  They’re talking about the break-up of someone’s romance.

In all relations with the other, one’s behavior is at first exploratory, almost random… later contacts modifying and redefining variables until some kind of an interim crystallization can occur.

A cobalt-blue elevator, not part of the structure but a temporary external addition for the benefit of the workers, slides up the side of the building-in-construction.  A man in a hard hat is looking at something.  Hammering noises, then the giant echoing buzz of a machine.  Layers of sound.  Harmonics.  Cars, trucks, buses passing by.  Honk of a horn.  The wind is blowing.  The big noise stops.  It starts again.  Half-audible voices, words lost in the wind.

James takes Mary into a room and asks her to sit down on a wooden chair.  Mary suspects she is going to be criticized for her recent lack of enthusiasm.  “Do you realize,” he says, “that through your attitude you have allowed Satan to come into this house?”

The modern airport is beautiful and well-planned.  Listen to the music in the long shining corridors.  Look at the runway.  Look at the brand-new pieces of luggage. The tower, with its arrows and lights.  The runway.  Here comes another jumbo jet.

Sarah chooses the can of tomato sauce because of an attractive illustration on the label.  She pushes the silver shopping cart onward up the aisle, past an old woman who is staring, seemingly abstracted, at the vast selection of canned soups.  A man with a curly black beard walks past, humming to himself.  Sarah’s mind goes blank.  Should she buy some cheese?

She doesn’t like his friends.  He doesn’t make enough money.

A rat is placed in a box with two compartments, one of which has White walls and a grid floor, the other Black walls and a wooden floor.  The rat explores both parts and shows little preference between them.  Then it is placed in the White compartment and given a strong electric shock through the grid floor.  Most rats soon escape the shock by running into the Black compartment.  This sequence of shock in White and escape to Black is repeated.  Then the rat is placed in the White compartment without shock.  It runs into the Black.

There is an SUV parked in an almost empty, blacktop parking lot.  No one innocent will suffer, the men are assured.

Clouds.  Cars.  Colors.  Brick wall.  Trapezoid.

Wooden palettes, weather-beaten and gray.  Broken windows.  Suspended wires.  Some shards of broken glass.

Coca-Cola’s beach ads repeat the image of beautiful women in horizontal positions as men move in and out of the picture.  The word “fun” is mentioned as a blonde woman, lying on her stomach in a scant bikini, lifts up her head to look between the legs of a man as he hands her a vertical bottle of Coke.

The face is completely different, yet its expression is the same.  The change has come too swiftly to see.

Rrrrrr of a motor.

And then, before the customers have time to move, the next dancer appears.  “Hey, let’s have a big hand for Stormy!  Stormy!”  She rolls her pelvis as she moves on spiked heels, breasts wobbling while she smiles.  She seeks eye-contact with those in front.  The music pulsates.  Her labia are dry.

Someone is throwing garbage out of the fifth floor window down to the street below.  The brown paper bags explode on the gray cement: egg shells, coffee grounds, cat-food cans, banana peels, empty milk cartons, melon rinds, chicken bones and limp brown lettuce bounce up in the air before coming to rest.

In older men, full erection is often not attained until immediately prior to ejaculation.  Nipple erection, muscular tension, rectal sphincter contractions are all diminished.

There could be no present tense, no present, without forgetfulness.  A veil must fall over reality – in order to eradicate the poisonous past.  And yet the past never really dies, nor can it be killed.  Reality wears a mask, and behind the mask is but a mirrored face: the mirror always lies.

CODE 3:1

NATURE OF CARE: Assault – multiple head contusions/lacerations

TIME OUT: 0300  AT SCENE: 0305   DEPART SCENE: 0313  ARRIVE DESTINATION: 0319

SUBJECTIVE FINDINGS/HISTORY OF CURRENT ILLNESS:

Patient was assaulted with fists approximately ½ hour prior to our arrival by male acquaintance.  Negative loss of consciousness.  Complains of pain facial/skull area, generalized pain (L) rib cage and (R) lateral leg.  Denies neck pain or shortness of breath.  During assault, patient was dragged across floor, occasionally kicked.

OBJECTIVE FINDINGS:

26 year old white female, ambulatory to ambulance with assistance. Oriented X 3. Swelling ecchymosis about the eyes and face – eyes swollen shut, with bleeding from beneath the eyelids.  Broken teeth, blood from mouth/lip lacerations.  Ears clear.  Multiple hematomas about the skull.  Thorax symmetrical, lungs clear.

ASSESSMENT/IMPRESSION: Multiple facial/skull contusions, lacerations.

PLAN/TREATMENT: Transport without incident.

The creation of the universe is very painful: the separation into air, water, fire and earth causes loneliness and pain.  Everyone suffers.  Please, the elements cry, we want to be together again; we want to crawl up onto the bed and hide under the covers and go back into our mom.  We don’t want to be alone.

Unable to see each other’s face in the dark.  Breathing.  The flow of blood through bodies made warm through contact flesh to flesh.  Some… sounds.

And then the lights.

A cover of a story written by Gabriel García Márquez

The first children who saw the orange speck bobbing in the distance let themselves believe the sun had dropped from the sky, as their parents had warned would happen if the sun ever dared show itself in their cold northern clime. The children watched eagerly, waiting for flames. There were none and so they thought maybe the orange speck—which by now was closer and much smaller than they’d originally thought—was a paper sailboat fashioned from a junk mail flyer. Maybe a page ripped from the Sears Catalogue announcing their annual Back to School sale. But there were no pictures of just-so handsome people dressed in Wranglers and so the children let themselves believe the speck in the distance was nothing more than an Orange Crush soda can. When it finally washed up on the beach, they removed the oil, the trash and the castoff rubber from the nearby tire factory—only then did they see that it was a drowned man.

They had been playing with him all afternoon, taking turns holding him in their laps and imitating Kermit the Frog’s voice when someone happened upon them and then ran to town to tell everyone. The men who carried him to the nearest house noticed at once how little he weighed, less than any dead man they’d ever known.  When they laid him on the floor they said he’d been shorter than all other men because he took up less space than their own dogs; he appeared to be shrinking even now. His skin exuded the dead-fish stench of the lake and was covered with a thick crust of oil sludge. They did not even have to clean off his face to know that the dead man was a stranger.

The town consisted of only a handful of cookie cutter houses with asphalt yards, huddled together in an unremarkable but efficient clump that allowed the townspeople to visit with one another, share food and firewood during the thirteen months of winter. But they lived there because they remained so dazzled by the third coast, a place where dreams were safely held in check by a watery horizon holding only the promise of hope, and not hope itself. As such, they poured all their energy into making their surroundings beautiful and prosperous, planting blueberries and tulips in the snowbanks, sledding down cliffs and fishing in the lake when it froze over. They had managed, all things considered, to build a rather charming little town.

After the men left, heading up the lakeshore to see if anyone knew the identity of the drowned man, the women started scraping at the dry, hardened sludge caked on the man’s skin. They used brillo pads. As the layers started to come off, they noticed that the rubbish was unlike any they’d ever seen: a fast-food hamburger wrapper, a soggy pack of cigarettes, an empty whiskey bottle. They supposed the man had traveled from a sordid place before landing on their shore, cities they had only heard of but never seen: Houston, Atlanta. That filthy city Chicago, which someone had once said was just on the other side of the lake. That person had been laughed at to painful embarrassment for his obvious blunder and nothing more was said of it. There was simply nothing on the other side of the lake; everyone knew that.

When the women had finished cleaning off the dead man they reeled in horror—he was the most repugnant man they’d ever seen: bright orange hair that stuck straight in the air like a battle flag; thin lips sneer-curled as if he’d hurled an insult just before his death—at someone innocent, of course. The women then knew that his death had been justified.

He had, as they say, asked for it.

With washcloths the women swabbed at his closed ears, knowing now that the drowned man had refused to listen to anyone. The women grew even more repulsed, imagining the terrible things he’d said when he was alive, and all that he’d refused to hear. They recalled the times in their own lives they’d been scorned: bullies on the playground, a mother’s rebuke, a harsh word from their husbands. They found the man’s tiny arms and legs utterly laughable. Someone took to the corner and started sewing, and in a minute they’d dressed the corpse in tiny denim overalls. The women started giggling, hiccupping with laughter at the sight of him. Soon they had tears in their eyes and they began tossing the drowned man through the air.

Over here, one woman yelled. No, over here!

The women imagined what life the drowned man had lived, being so small: purchasing his clothes in the toy section of department stores; shouting at the supermarket cashier, “What are you, deaf? I said plastic, not paper, you asshole!” The women realized at once the hidden anger of the drowned man, the dark bitterness of his soul. They thought of their own husbands, who were not as small and mean as they had once supposed but strong, handsome men whose booming voices were a result of exuberant personalities. They were thinking of this and feeling such surges of love for their husbands that the oldest woman in the group suddenly grabbed the drowned man and spat,

“He has the face of someone named Stanley.”

The women agreed. A name befitting someone whose diminutive size matched his small heart. They started up their game of toss again, this time covering Stanley’s face with a handkerchief so they no longer had to shudder with disgust when their eyes met his. Before long the women’s husbands returned. They rushed into the room, shocked at the sight of their wives tossing the dead man between them. Since the men knew nothing yet of the man’s sneering lips and closed ears, they assumed him a man of honor and couldn’t believe the depth of callousness their wives possessed. What are you doing? they cried, snatching the corpse. Have you no respect?

The men were determined to give the drowned man a dignified burial and this meant a special sized coffin had to be constructed, as even the ones used for infants were far too large for such a small man. The men began constructing the coffin out of leftover kindling but the women kept getting in their way, interfering with their work so that the men grew annoyed, saying What are you doing, woman? Give me back that wood! Get out of the way. Why must you be such a pest? Angry at being surrounded by such uncaring people, the men yelled, how dare you defile the reputation of this poor man! and the woman who had bequeathed the name Stanley leapt up and removed the handkerchief from the dead man’s face.

The men gasped. He was a Stanley, all right.

It was unnecessary for the women to announce it, the men already knew by the arrogance of his tiny upturned nose, dark ominous eyes and impossible sneer. If they’d been told that he was a Troll and could be purchased for $1.99 at most toy stores, they would have been impressed. But there could only be one Stanley in the world and there he was, stretched out like a vienna sausage, wearing denim overalls with no shirt beneath, that bright orange hair sticking up in the air. The men had only to see the handkerchief removed from his face to see that he was arrogant, that he relished in bestowing bad luck and misery upon others, that it was his own fault he was so short and stupid and if he had known this was going to happen he would have hurled insults at them with his filthy little mouth, seriously, I hate you people, you backwards, meat and potato eating assholes who live here in this stupid town where the sun never shines and it snows all the time and most of all I hate that big dumb lake that has no salt water, no waves, no promise of escape. If I’d thought about it I would have drowned down there in the Bahamas, that’s right, the Bahamas. There was such spite in his manner that the men’s anger at their wives evaporated and they hastily covered up that hateful repugnant face with the sneering lips and angry eyes. And they ran through town, tossing the drowned man between them like a football, Go long! Go long! they chanted, aware as they passed through town how silly their tulips and blueberries looked, sticking up in snowdrifts, and how drab the sky overhead was with the permanent, low-hanging clouds blocking the sun. With a shout they tossed the drowned man back into the lake, watching as his orange hair bobbed in the distance like a question mark. They followed the orange speck until they saw for the first time the remarkable slim shadow of the Sears Tower, a long finger beckoning from across the lake. They knew everything would be different from now on, that they would leave this place in search of sun and salt, a place where dreams were not held captive by the empty promise of a third coast. And people who occasioned by after the townspeople had fled—sailboaters and kayakers skimming the cold lake water—would look to the abandoned shore, whispering, I hear it was quite a place until that bastard Stanley showed up.

Yes, quite a place.

Bobby was a man with a passionate temperament and very few of his original teeth. The two were closely related—his mouth had sustained extensive damage in bar fights. He was also extraordinarily taken with the technology that replaced what nature had given him and alcohol and fists had taken away. “Just take a look at that motherfucker,” he would lisp, cupping his top incisors in his hand. “That is a thing of beauty.”

His spectators would nod, silent and wide-eyed, as passive as wax dolls. “Yeah,” he would continue, “I never saw them sons-a-bitches go, just crack across the mouth with a goddamn baseball bat, and I’m spitting out blood and chunks of shit that I only realize later are my God-given teeth, which, much after the fact, some asshole told me I should have put in a glass of milk, because then maybe they would have stayed alive long enough to shove ‘em back in. And of course, that’s what I should have done, with that fat bastard kicking my liver out of my ass just for asking his girl if her tits were real, is get a goddamn glass of milk. If you hear what I’m saying. And Jesus, that was when I was eighteen, and I never learned a single lesson from that shit. Should have picked up and retired from my tom-catting and carrying on, but I had a mouthful of teeth and an unfortunate affection for other men’s women, and that’s what’s brought me here now.”

Here being the high-rise that houses Lewiston and West Financial Services, where Bobby pushes a broom around and horrifies the suits. They’ve tried to fire him repeatedly. It’s like a rite of passage for the newly-minted biz-boys, the first exercise of their custom-suit, Italian-shoe power. And to some extent, you can see their point. Bobby is foul-mouthed and dirty. He smells like gin. He can make women feel uncomfortable without even looking at them. But he has somehow developed a kind of immunity to the wiles of great corporations, a strange swamp voodoo that protects him from the opposing amulets of silk ties and slim, black briefcases. Complaints go unheard. Termination notices wilt like tropical flowers in a frost. And still Bobby pushes his broom around, making rhythmic noises that could be singing, or obscenities, or a re-enactment of the sex act. There are long periods of quiet, uneasy co-existence, but Bobby can’t leave well enough alone. That’s when he’ll corner a group of them in the elevator, slip through the doors just as they slide closed, and begin a story about his teeth.

“Yeah, I was never so glad to see them flashing lights. Normally I got no use for the pigs, but that son-of-a-bitch was like to kill me, and I was surely grateful that someone was planning on preventing that.” It’s a long elevator ride to the 35^th, and the well-trimmed and powerful men and women, so used to the casual acknowledgment of power, the humdrum obeisances that usher them through the world, shrink in horror from Bobby, his dirt, his smell, his story, his entirely modern teeth. They look upward at the green and white numbers at the top of the car, blinking impassively as they are whisked upward to the Valhalla of power. If they were of a more spiritual bent, perhaps they would close their eyes and pray for salvation. But they are pragmatists, manipulators, men and women at the controls of the world, and such gestures are not given to them.

“And you know what? You know what? What I didn’t plan on was that one of the goddamn cops…” Bobby is getting excited now. “One of the goddamn cops is a little filly that I’d been screwing up in Pensacola just a couple of months before. Pretty little thing, with a big ol’ ass, just like I like ‘em.” He beams his gums around at his audience. “You men know what I mean, and you ladies, well, I see you’re all working your way there. Maybe all the way up into Bobby territory someday, you play your cards right. But anyway, this little girl, who I had no idea was a damn cop, or maybe I would have done things different, she takes one look and she says ‘Goddamn if it ain’t Bobby McGraw. You son of a bitch. You gave me the worst damn case of jungle-boogie antibiotic-resistant death clap my doctor had ever seen.’ And far from settling things down, she hauls off and she gives me a huge boot right across the jaw, polished, steel-toed cop shoe right in my beautiful face. And my back molars fly out of my mouth like a moon shot, and I watch them tumble away across the parking lot, and before you can say ‘Carry me home Jesus,’ damned if she didn’t just walk right over and crush them under her heel like they was just a bunch of cockroaches, crunch, crunch, crunch.”

An emotion begins to spread—a quiet, repressed panic. It is a pandemic there in the express elevator, that gateway to magnificent wealth and power. They fidget and shift on their feet. They are afraid of each others eyes, afraid to betray weakness, or to see it revealed. Their eyes dart restlessly around, unable to find any safe place to alight.

“Took a lot of the romance out of what we had, I’ll tell you. Crossed her name right out of Bobby’s Big Black Book. But out of that unfortunate incident, her boot, my face, I got this.” He sticks a grimy thumb and forefinger into his mouth, way back, distending his cheeks, his hand rooting frenetically around in his mouth, until it emerges with his space-age molars, the ceramic tarnished and dull, as if scorched by the day-to-day stress of being with Bobby. He holds them out for inspection, triumphs of technology over bar fights and enraged cops, over the inferno of Bobby himself. “I thought it was going to be nothing but bananas and avocados for me after that night, but Big George’s brother, he’s a dentist, and he said he could get a deal, some kind of stuff from China or something. Probably poisonous as shit, but you know what? I’m good as new. Better than new. Indestructible. Look at those babies. Indestructible. Like me. Like Bobby McGraw.”

They can feel his power, his prehistoric strength, how he and men like him will outlast them and their silk suits and their money, how they lurk, submerged in the swamp, looking for weakness, waiting for that single faltering step.

The elevator doors slide open behind him, but nobody moves. Bobby puts his teeth back in and gives them a carnivorous smile. They stand silently, waiting to be released.

]]> http://www.pankmagazine.com/?feed=rss2&p=1207 1 http://www.pankmagazine.com/?p=1204 http://www.pankmagazine.com/?p=1204#comments Tue, 08 Dec 2009 07:50:10 +0000 Roxane Gay http://www.pankmagazine.com/?p=1204 Be Your Own Boss Before getting fired I’d never measured how much empty time makes a day. I’d spent years writing blogs on the company’s dime, leading dozens of made-up lives with their own careers and diseases and hobbies, and all those voices I had to keep speaking carried me through [...]]]> Be Your Own Boss

Before getting fired I’d never measured how much empty time makes a day. I’d spent years writing blogs on the company’s dime, leading dozens of made-up lives with their own careers and diseases and hobbies, and all those voices I had to keep speaking carried me through each eight hours of work and through five days of the week in which enough tasks and chores piled up at home to last me the weekend. And now, with seven of seven days free? Without those extra lives to occupy mine and at home every day to keep up with the house? I’d always worked at one job or another and though I’d never enjoyed it, that’s what I knew. As often as I might have imagined winning the lotto and quitting my job, now that I’d come closer than ever all that shapeless, idealized freedom had lost its appeal.

Working at Second Nature was boring and I didn’t do very much while I was there, but I knew what I was meant to be doing whether I did it or not. I had a title and a boxful of cards to confirm it. I knew exactly how much time I had in each day for projects other than those I was paid for and I could rely on not being bothered for as long as I sat at my desk. Now, with no desk to sit at and all the time in the world to myself, I was overwhelmed by my options –who could I steal time from now?

I spent days and then weeks sprawled on the couch or on the white carpet floor of my white living room, following the stuccoed swirls of the ceiling around and around with my eyes until its pale blur assembled into a daydream. The tie I’d pulled off upon coming home that last day coiled on the floor between coffee table and sofa, and I imagined it rising snakelike to dance on its tail, or trailing into the air like a long slender ribbon or one of those prayer flags I’d seen on TV.

I stopped wearing shoes and I let my beard grow and was shocked at the gray it contained. I’d never gone more than a few days without shaving, and didn’t expect the pale stripe that emerged like a ski slope on a forested mountain. (And if it was a snowy stripe then, it’s a whole frozen forest all these years later, hanging like a bib to my belly.) In the dormant screen of the TV set, with the living room lights out around me, my reflection was reduced to only that stripe and if I moved my head back and forth I was smoke passing against the night sky of the screen. My hair grew shaggy and the more time I spent on the couch and the longer I went without washing the more pronounced and persistent my bed-head became. I looked like I’d been caught in three or four gusts of wind blowing in different directions at once.

I watched animal shows with the sound turned up loud but the brightness down low, and I pretended my couch was in a faraway jungle as some baritone narrator described my place in the world. I hadn’t watched those shows very often before, and I’d never spent much time outside except walking from the front door to my car or across parking lots, and I discovered that the world of lions and zebras, of penguins and baobab trees and deadly piranhas, was more exciting than I’d ever known. I wondered if I’d missed the boat on nature, and if it was too late to do something about it.

As time passed and I went without washing, without changing out of the foul shorts and T-shirt I’d had on forever, I started to stink then I went beyond stinking to something new, a sharp tang I’d never imagined my own body capable of producing. It was almost an accomplishment, I almost felt proud, like my commitment to inertia was coming out through my pores. And I thought I smelled a little bit wild, like the jungles I was listening to on TV would have smelled if broadcast technology were more advanced.

I daydreamed without interruption by the ping of an incoming email, and spent unbroken hours following unguided thoughts through my head. My bills were all paid by automatic withdrawal so I had no idea how much money was going out or had come in as my severance pay from Second Nature. I ate when the idea of a meal crossed my mind but I never shopped for more food. Soon there were only forgotten canned goods at the back of the pantry and a refrigerator door full of condiments orphaned there over the years. One night it was creamed corn with instant gravy, the next cranberry sauce with parmesan-flavored flakes. I was driven to eat by curiosity as much as by hunger, wondering how one thing might taste with another. When I finally exhausted the two jars of bacon bits I couldn’t recall ever buying, I was disappointed because they went so well with everything; that was the first genuine, recognizable feeling I’d had in a while.

When I was working I wished for free time and daydreamed of how I might spend it. Traveling abroad or wandering the streets of my city, learning to paint or to sail or to decorate cakes. Now, with nothing but time on my hands, I didn’t know where to start and it was simpler to not start at all. I had no more interest in finding a job than I had in anything else, and the couch molded itself to my body as my mind molded itself to the time.

When the landlord began to leave messages, I knew my money was gone or at least that the rent had stopped getting withdrawn from my bank account. The phone company called, and the electric company, too, but I never answered; I let all their warnings and threats spew into the room from my answering machine’s tiny speaker. It was only a matter of time, I knew, until the lights and the TV went dark and until the landlord came knocking. I should have done something about it, but I preferred not to. I watched and I waited in part because I didn’t know what exactly to do, how to respond apart from getting a job to get some more money to get the bills all paid again, but also because I was curious what really happened to someone who stopped paying rent. Would my utilities actually be turned off, and after how long? I’d seen these kinds of things on TV but never in my own life — I took the consequences of being a deadbeat on faith just like the existence of snowballs and blue whales, and the surface of the moon not being green cheese, and because of that faith I’d always paid my bills and my rent and invested for my retirement like everyone else. But now that I was up against it, against eviction and severed phone service, it wasn’t as scary as I’d thought it would be. After weeks on the couch doing nothing, it was even exciting to worry if the landlord’s appearance would break up the routine of my days.

And he did come, I think, in the dark while I tried to remember the myriad ways in which the swirled ceiling caught light and shadows when there were light and shadows to catch. When I moved into my unit in the apartment complex, I was annoyed by those bland textured whorls and longed for smooth plaster, only to discover their vast complications when I gave them the time they deserved. There was a knock at the door, and another, the scraping and clanking of keys but none sliding into the lock. I heard a guttural curse then heavy battering both high and low like someone punching and kicking the wood. The door rattled and the front window shook but I didn’t get up. If they were coming in, they were coming; what difference would it make if I stayed on the floor or sat on the couch or opened the door to greet them as my liberators? Then the noise stopped and the quiet came back. I returned to recalling my ceiling by daylight, then daylight returned and my ceiling became its old self again and I tried to remember where night’s shadows had fallen across it and eventually I fell asleep.

Days and nights I wandered the web, reading a few words on this site and a few words on that, watching videos I’d forgotten as soon as they ended. The only email address I’d ever had was for work and I found that I missed getting email — not reading the email, not the requests they delivered or the work they demanded, but the simple pleasure of a new message arriving and the promise-filled moment before it was read. So I made myself an account with a free online service and I signed up for mailing lists and listservs and weekly coupons and anything else I could find that promised to fill my inbox. I spent hours with the computer warm as a cat in my lap while I watched movies and infomercials and all the nature shows I could find, and I read every email that came in. I read the spam, about growing my penis and firing my boss and saving Nigerian princes; offers of drugs just approved for the market and invitations to test those that weren’t; genuine college diplomas and ads for DVDs that would teach me how to quickly get rich selling get rich quick DVDs. I read all of it. I looked for patterns and secrets and codes. I read between the lines, I looked beneath the strategic typos and awkward word choices for signs of human intention — I tried to locate the person behind the machine that randomly assembled those texts, the personality behind the promotion. Sometimes they seemed to be written for me, when the arbitrary, half-sensical subjects referred to events in my life or came from names I recognized, and I wrote back as if we were friends. I told Nigerian princes to hang in there, their family’s fortune would be safe soon, I was sure, they could trust me, I had a good feeling for them. I told lonely, horny young women their princes would come in due time, perhaps from Nigeria, and I gave them each other’s email addresses to help the connections occur. I wrote quick notes and long letters but none of my correspondents ever replied. Until one night who knows how many weeks into unemployment and how many hours away from eviction, an email arrived in the deep part of morning, an email sent out to the whole nocturnal world but aimed directly at me:

Are you a quiet, contemplative nature enthusiast available for full time employment? This is the opportunity you have been waiting for and thought would never arrive. We offer a competitive salary and excellent benefits, including all lodging and meals. Daydreamers and introverts encouraged to apply. May we assume you are interested?

So I replied only with “Yes,” a single word email cast into the night like a desperate bottle tossed asea from an island, with just as much hope of reply. And then I read some more spam and wrote to more princes and fell asleep as the dust-crusted blinds of my dreary apartment began to glow orange again.

When I first discovered
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch,

Twice the size of Texas
And currently on the move

I thought, “Star Trek, Star Date 4202.9”
As the Doomsday Machine

Ate every planet in sight
And it blew my mind!

How do we dispose
Of so much shit

That it is now mutating at horse latitude,
Migrating tenfold every ten years?

Tofu tubs trapped
In tropical gyres,

Bottle caps
Choking the birds.

Nurdles in the food chain,
Mermaid tears

Eaten by plankton,
Eaten by fish,

Eaten by our voracity
Passed on by our lust.

1.

Don’t panic.

Pilots can smell panic, and it makes them jumpy
like horses before a storm,
or the way an ape might cradle an egg.

2.

Count the times you said you were sorry.
Subtract out the times you meant it.
Multiply by a numerical representation
of the way your favorite wine slides
down your throat,
and divide by the square root
of your father’s middle name.
This number means nothing, it’s worthless.
Throw it away.

3.

Stop taking cryptic advice from omniscient narrators.
We don’t know shit about shit, seriously.

4.

Panic!

You are going to die.

If the sky-wolves don’t gobble you up,
the clouds will choke and smother you.
If the cabin pressure drops suddenly,
your skull will pop like a tart.
In the event of a water landing,
you will not float.
Go ahead and clutch your seat cushion
like your grandmother’s bones
if it makes you feel better:
you will not float.

5.

For Pete’s sake,
clean up after yourself.
Do you think your mother works here?
Well, she doesn’t–
Not since they caught her
pilfering honey roasts
and fraternizing with the criminal-types
they keep locked in the necessary room.

6.

As you lie in the wreckage,
try to take your mind off the flaking sensation behind your eyes
by working on that sudoku you packed,
or cracking the latest Zadie Smith.

7.

It can take a long time
for the rescue crews to arrive,
and I know how tired you must be.
Just take a short nap;
I promise to wake you before the sun goes out.

8.

Try desperately to remember what 8 is for,
because no matter how many poets and musicians
think it’s clever to make like they forgot what 8 is for
the Violent Femmes can’t help you now, bucko.
Go on: try to remember. I’ll wait.

9.

I’m done waiting. Did you figure it out?
Good. Now you can stop panicking.

10.

If you wake in what appears
to be a 3-star hotel in Spain,
congratulations are in order:
you made it into Heaven.

11.

If you are in Hell,
it will still manifest to you
as a hotel in Spain,
but you will find the staff insolent,
and all the ice machines
out of order.

12.

The only way to survive the crash
is to not board the plane,
but look around:
you’re already on it
and there is no pilot.

The woman awakens when it is not quite yet dawn. She reaches out to take a cigarette from the nightstand. And it is then, as she lights it and raises it to her lips, that she notices the hole in her hand.

It is a small hole, not even the size of a quarter, in the very center of her palm. It’s black, like a void–not clear like a porthole–and the woman can’t see anything inside it.

The woman sits there, staring at the hole, smoking her cigarette in silence.

And then she takes it and moves it toward the hole. She pauses, and then dips it inside.

The burning end of the cigarette disappears into the dark. It disappears suddenly–without fading or dimming.

The woman turns her hand–there’s nothing emerging.

The hole in her palm doesn’t lead to the other side.

The woman withdraws the cigarette and stares at the tip. It’s still burning, as it was, no different. She puts it to her lips and takes another drag.

The cigarette tastes just the same.

The woman blows a plume of smoke across the empty room.

She wishes someone else were here to see this.

The woman goes into the other room and rummages around. She finds some string and returns to the bed. She ties the string around the filter of the cigarette, ties it tightly, then slides it in the hole.

She lets the string out slowly, until the cigarette is gone.

Then she lowers it down and away.

The string goes and goes, as if taken by gravity. Inch by inch, the woman plays out the spool. Finally, when the last of the string is almost all gone, she stops.

She wonders what could possibly be below.

The woman ransacks her apartment, looking for more string. She finds two spools like the first one, some dental floss, some twine. And then–the big find–a box of fishing line. It’s buried in the closet.

Her husband must have left it behind.

The woman sits on the bed, slowly playing out the cigarette, tying each string to the next as they go. She lowers the cigarette for hours and hours. She keeps lowering it even after sundown.

And then, in the very, very, very dead of night, the woman comes to the end of the last piece of string.

The woman sits there, terrified. Her hands are shaking. She can’t imagine the depth of this hole. She can’t imagine where it is, can’t imagine where it goes; she feels sick just to think that it’s inside her.

The woman pictures herself with an infinite amount of string, lowering the cigarette away forever. Lowering it away, down into the dark.

And just then her fingers slip, and the string leaps away.

No! the woman screams, grabbing after the end.

But the end is already gone into the hole.

The woman can hardly sleep that night, and when she does, she has nightmares. She dreams she’s in Hell, crying out, amidst flame.

But when she wakes she finds her nightmare is not a dream at all.

Her room is full of smoke.

And everything is on fire.

The woman crawls through the smoke toward the door. She is wheezing–gasping–for breath. The door is hot; she knows better than to try to open it up. She looks to the window on the other side of the room.

The woman’s apartment is on the top floor of the building, and she knows the window is no escape. But still she goes to it, crawling, somehow hoping.

When she gets there, she opens it.

There are fire trucks below.

The firemen are standing in a circle on the sidewalk, holding their round net open. They are looking up and waving–waving at the woman–and calling for her to jump.

The woman lifts a foot and places it on the sill. She steps up and stands there, balancing.

At this point she knows her hair is on fire–her hair, her arms, and her clothes.

But when she steps out, the people below see this: they see a comet, descending from the sky. A lost thing returning from the cold and empty night; a refugee from darkness, burning for the light.

In the hospital, the woman sits watching the sun rise. She sits there and watches from her bed. A nurse comes in to check on things and straighten all the pillows.

Then she stays.

The woman needs a friend.

The Woman and the Basement

The woman has never been to France before, and neither does she want to go now. Same goes for England, Scotland, Egypt, Russia, Africa, Japan. The only place the woman wants to go is down into the basement. That’s the only place she’s interested in. And that’s exactly where she’s headed.

The woman packs a little picnic basket. She brings sandwiches and cookies and a thermos full of coffee. She also brings a flashlight; she figures she may need it.

At the last moment, she drinks a glass of water.

She’s not sure how long she’ll be gone.

The woman opens the door to the basement. There is a light switch; she flicks it on. The stairs are wood and make a pleasant sound–clop clop clop–as she goes down.

When she gets to the bottom, the woman looks around.

So this is the basement, she says.

It doesn’t look like much–a big room, some shelves, a few cardboard boxes.

The woman walks around a little bit.

This is much smaller than I imagined, she says.

Then she notices the hidden door.

Oh, she says, and opens it.

The woman wanders down the passageway.

This is more like it, she says.

The passageway is narrow and very dark. The woman turns on the flashlight.

There are spiderwebs all over the place, and it is eerily quiet. The woman’s heels make a clicking sound.

I wonder where this goes, she says.

Just then the passageway takes another turn.

Oh, says the woman, stopping short.

In front of the woman is a wall.

The passageway has come to an end.

The woman turns and looks around.

Maybe I missed a turn-off, she says.

She heads back the way she came. After a while she starts to frown.

Is this where I was before? she thinks to herself. This doesn’t look the same as it did.

She wanders and wanders and wanders and wanders.

She doesn’t seem to get anywhere.

By now the woman is very hungry.

I guess it is lunchtime, she says.

She spreads a napkin on the floor, sits down and opens the basket. She takes out the sandwich and the cookies and the little thermos of coffee.

Mmm, she says. This coffee is good.

Just then the flashlight starts to die.

Oh, says the woman, taking a bite of her sandwich. I knew I should have brought extra batteries.

She eats the rest of her meal in the dark.

Well, she says, time to move on.

She puts the remains of her lunch in the basket–the thermos, the napkin, etc.–and then she stands and picks a direction.

Eenie meenie miney moe, the woman says.

The woman wanders along in the dark.

This sure is exciting, she says.

Every now and then she bumps into a wall.

Woops, she says. Guess it’s not that way.

Finally, after many hours of wandering, the woman comes to a door.

Ah, she says, and opens it up.

Oh God, she says, and slams it closed.

The woman stands there in the dark. She doesn’t know what to do. She takes a step back, but–as always–she’s up against a wall. Same with the sides–both sides, just walls. It’s the door, or nothing at all.

Fine, the woman thinks, let it be nothing.

And she just stands there in the dark.

After a while, the woman grows tired, and finally she closes her eyes.

I’ll just take a nap, she says to herself, and leans up against the wall.

But when the woman opens her eyes, she finds she’s lying in bed.

Not her bed, but somebody else’s.

Why does this always happen? she says.

Outside the window, it is a beautiful day. She can see all the buildings standing there. So many of them, so clean, so bright, rising into the air.

The woman sits and puts her feet on the floor. She tries to find the strength to stand. She takes another look out the window.

Like it’s hard to build up, she says.

In the kitchen, the fridge is full, and there’s a kettle of water on the stove.

When the kettle whistles, the woman picks it up.

In the cabinet will be a thermos.

The woman knows.

Hanna expected a romantic chalet at the foot of the Laurentian Mountains, not this simple cabin for three seasons buried deep in the shag of an airless green monster, pines for hair, a black lake its one evil eye — the fishing here was out of this world. If only she’d known, and understood; this was a cabin for heartier people than she, for men like these, her boyfriend, his uncle and cousins — her father when he was still getting away from it all once a year — who dropped their smelly fishing gear onto the braided rug that had surely been meant as a cozy welcome – keep this shit in one place, they said – men like these who unpacked a couple two-liter plastic bottles, once filled with soda, now vodka likely, and placed them as a colorless center-piece on the banged up and yet still hearty kitchen table crawling with cigarette burns. Theirs? They’d been here before.

This was a place, a cabin, for men like these, who’d rushed back to their rented Suburban to unload a stack of beer in cans, three layers deep, plastic ringlets keeping them square. Covered over in the rear storage space, she’d thought there was a box of groceries under there. The beers, for chasing the vodka most likely, remained out on the rotten porch, the elder of the four with the big belly and slits for eyes telling the boys where to drop them. “Set ‘em as close to the door as possible, but not too close. I don’t want to be tripping if I need to take my business outside,” he’d said, and then looked to her, his nephew’s girlfriend — what’s her name. She’d have to take her business outside, as well. It was in his eyes — You’ll pee outside like the rest of us, only you aren’t like the rest of us. This will be torture for you.

It was a cabin for macaroni and cheese and hot dogs and ketchup — a meal easily prepared drunk. It was a cabin with a blackened and greasy fire pit out front, still full of the stuff that wouldn’t burn right from the last season. It was a place for a girl to wake too early in the morning and sit alone like an ugly, poisonous growth on a stump one of the boys had pissed on the night before — one of his cousins, maybe, but it could have just as easily be him.

***

Hannah knew the smell of dead fish would have her thinking of her mother and father, her father coming back on a Saturday morning from his week-long fishing trip, a distant look in his eyes, even for her. She’d always assumed he’d gone just a little bit savage on the lake, in the woods, but it was a temporary thing. After Sunday’s backyard party grilling fish, she could expect to have him back, daddy’s girl by bedtime; his hand sweeping the hair from her forehead still smelling of perch as he’d kiss the tip of her nose goodnight.

Hannah snuck out of bed one Sunday evening to watch her parents, her mother, as they came together—the three of them were exhausted, the annoyance of her father’s yearly get-a-way, done with. He had her mother pinned at one end of the sofa, his hands all over her, the friction of his hands over her breasts filling Hanna’s nose with the smell of dead fish even as she slinked along the floor. Her mother was still on fire, black smoke pouring out of her eyes.  Her mother had smouldered all week-end, as she’d struggled to scale the fish in the kitchen sink, the scales sticking to everything, and then as she gutted the fish, heaving like she might puke. But her mother smelled just as badly as her father did. Hanna flipped over onto her back, stared up at the ceiling as the smoke began to clear, as she waited for the clean air of their family home, as she gulped, as she imagined her mother’s face, the sweetness returning as she realized this had been a temporary thing, something her husband had to do.

***

Her boyfriend burst out of the cabin, the heavy springs slamming the screen door shut behind him, the laces of his sneakers untied and jerking around violently as he moved toward her, his runners leaving beastly prints in the dirt to devour her own — tracked early in the morning as the men still slept in their bags. She tried seeing her boyfriend as a school boy in a football jacket always late for his next class, but the image wouldn’t gel for her.

Chalet — she’d assumed the word meant they’d be curling up under a shared blanket before a roaring fire. Tipsy with wine, his tough outer shell already melted away, he’d tell her he was in love with her. A man transformed by the ceiling timbers, the smell of musk and flames. She’d be seeing him at his best, as that someone special. She’d ignored the words fishing, my cousins, we do it every year, or he never said them, or he did and she figured she’d deal with those words when it was time. She wasn’t sure anymore.

The uncle and his two sons were still inside the cabin, done whispering loudly; using words like bitch repeatedly, and dumb cunt. She would ruin their vacation, they’d said; their voices everywhere, coming down from the surrounding trees. “Hannah. My name’s Hannah,” she’d whispered back every time she heard the b-word and the c-word, but her whispers were in her tiniest voice. There was no privacy here, nowhere to run if things got out of hand, no one to help her. She’d waited for her boyfriend’s clear voice among their hisses, but it never came, and she decided he must have been nodding his head as they’d railed against her.

***

Hannah never thought to ask her mother why she didn’t go along on the yearly fishing trip, but then Hannah had no clue as a child that there was such a thing as a romantic get away in the lives of people. There’d been dolls, and sometimes the girl dolls kissed the girl dolls playing the part of the boys, but never such things as muscles and strong arms, beard stubble, a strong character peppered with the occasional kindness to keep a girl wanting more. Those things belonged to her father, they were fatherly things. His fishing trips had nothing to do with what Hannah hoped this one was about.

She could blame her mother, but how could her mother have known? Hannah had already tried speaking with her as is she was already dead, in heaven looking down on her. What do I do? But the answer was pointless. You draw the knife towards you so the scales fly in the opposite direction.

***

Her boyfriend had been sent outside to put things right. They had until Sunday to catch fish, and Monday mornings was a real bitch. Hannah was scared, too scared to look up at his face, too scared to do anything but sit and wait and stare at the hands of the young man standing in front of her, so charming once, especially when he’d used that other c-word — chalet. And it occurred to her just then, that he was a man in training, that the mistake had been all his, not hers.

He pointed his fat, gnawed up finger at her — fat because he liked to work on cars in his spare time, and gnawed up because chewing the calluses of his fingers always helped him think better. “Stop it,” she’d say, swatting his hand away from his mouth, feeling useful because of all the hazards in the dirt under his fingernails. At the moment, his finger was trembling. That was trouble brewing; black smoke. You, come, he was about to insist. She could sense this. It was in his body language. She looked up; it was in his eyes, too. His mind wanted to chew the callus on the side of that index he was pointing. She stood up before he might grab her by the hair.

They should maybe walk in the woods, he said finally — the chalet, his uncle and his cousins, the beer, the grilled hot dogs, the good times — that shit was on hold. This was more important.

“Come with me.”

***

He turned to her when they were too deep in the woods to be heard, though the cabin would have been a fine place for her to die, she thought, gutted like a perch while his brethren watched, gutted because she’d been too needy and stupid, just a girl. She wanted to flash him a half-smile then, to let him know she understood she was so far from home. She wouldn’t put up a fight. There was no point. But she couldn’t smile, so she waited as he continued to do nothing. He seemed uncomfortable. His eyes were all over the woods, searching for the ghosts of the words he’d rehearsed on the long drive up here, when he’d realized he was on a trip to becoming a man, in that dreadful silence except for her breathing and their fidgeting, the five of them packed in tight with all the fishing gear, the booze, or he was searching for game, something to eat. He was a hunter in a Packers jacket, but he was too uncomfortable to be a hunter. Maybe he was trying to remember his uncle’s advice — slap her, kick her, punch her, and then we’ll bury her where no one will ever find her. Maybe she could blame his cousins, his uncle; he’s such an asshole, try and console this boy because this couldn’t be easy for him. She could tell him the blame was hers — she should have stayed home. She shouldn’t have been looking so hard for a guy who maybe was never hers to find, especially here where he was meant to lose himself.

***

Childish and full of love still, warmed by thoughts of her father in the months when the yearly trip was supposed to be out of mind, she’d had a dream. It was unexpected, smelled of dead fish, the sounds of the wild swarming her like a cloud of flies over her bed. She seen him, and knew it was him, but he was moving swiftly through the woods on all fours. Father? He slowed briefly, but only to look back at her with eyes that seemed more frightened than fierce. In her dream, she’d been brave enough, and settled in her love enough, to stay put, to let him know they shared the same mind, that she would meet with him at home, she and mother both.

***

“I… I…,” he said.

He’d said something, but it hadn’t been about her. Panicked and feeling rushed for time, she thought how good a person she was. She wanted him to know that. Tell him. She’d made a mistake, was all that this was. Her mistake, thoughts of her mother, the determined look on her face as she’d scale the fish, as she’d kept herself from heaving into the sink.

“I… I…,” she said, still thinking of her mother.

She could cry instead, keep this from happening, but Hannah hated the woods as much as the trees couldn’t help looming over and into her, their branches piercing her skin because she had no business being here. But if she cried he might hold her in his arms, try and smother the hurt he’d caused. She tried seeing him the way she’d always imagined he truly was deep down inside, but in the picture of him, he pushed his forearm against her open mouth, her head tocking against the trunk of a tree, the smell of pollution hitting her nose because he liked to drive with one arm hanging out of the window in the city, showing his fat middle finger to whomever would look. Her head pinned, she heard the music between his ears, the screeching she hated, and she tried to bobble her head one last time because it had become second nature fawning over him as he played his air guitar.

She’d made a mistake, but she’d also become her mother.

The canopy gave a shudder then, the whoosh of the leaves sounding angry, out of patience with her, as if they couldn’t guarantee she’d make it out of the woods, let alone find her way home, but anything was better than this.

Come on, girl! That was her father’s voice in her head, half-savage, but she was his little girl still, never prey.

“It’s okay,” Hannah offered finally, “just go back to the chalet.” That last word snapping like the tail of a perch being yanked out of black water. And he did, the smile she flashed lost to him as he disappeared beyond too many tree trunks.

When he was finally out of sight, she cursed herself, him, a boy-man still, her father would never have left her here, an angry rustling of leaves masking her whimper as she turned to walker deeper into the woods. She’d search him out, believing her father would recognize her no matter what, believing it was better to lose herself in these woods, then to wake up crimped and cold sitting on a stump like a poisonous growth all night as the men rolled in their bags.

When I was in middle school, I tried to be a cutter.

I couldn’t press the blade down hard enough to draw a drop of blood.

But give me a butcher’s knife and a pregnant belly and I am practically a gynecological surgeon.

Danny, I know what you are thinking…

It’s an old story. There is that point in life when every weekend is spent at a wedding reception or a baby shower. You find yourself staring down at your left hand, wondering if a wedding band will ever accompany your engagement ring or if you are doomed to spend the rest of your life in that shitty two bedroom with Danny, being one of those couples that get engaged but never get married, year after year. I was watching everyone I knew pack into a train car and pull away at full speed, leaving just me and Danny and our rental video on Tuesdays and Chinese food on Fridays. It just so happened that the nights I mentioned starting a family were the nights Danny insisted on using a condom instead of pulling out like normal. And still. Even with all of this, I probably wouldn’t have done anything if I hadn’t known that the last time my friend Rebecca had a kid she nearly offed herself because her baby blues were so bad. She clearly didn’t appreciate what a gift a baby was. I did.

Danny, if you had just wanted kids too, then it never would have come to this…

We were sitting in my apartment. The sight of her crossing her hands on top of her enormous belly got to me. I stared and stared as she talked going on and on about who was breaking off the engagement, who was having trouble conceiving, and whose boyfriend got caught trolling Craigslist for blow jobs. I got to thinking about all the things I never got in life, all the times I was passed up, every opportunity that went to someone else, never me. I’ll never understand how Rebecca didn’t hear my teeth grinding, wearing down the enamel with remarkable efficiency.

I can’t say it was one of those blind rages or a crime of passion or anything because I clearly remember sitting there, nodding and uh-huhing, thinking she didn’t deserve that baby. I remember making the decision to go to my kitchen and taking the most imposing knife from the utensil drawer. I walked up behind her slowly, and when my arm reached around she didn’t yell or anything. She didn’t make a sound until she saw me holding the tiny, silent baby. Even then it wasn’t much of a noise, just a feeble grunt.

Danny, I’ve been noticing the far off look in your eyes lately, like there is something just out of your line of vision that you are desperate to see. Don’t you understand? That’s what it was like for me too.

Later, when I was in handcuffs and in the backseat of a squad car, my t-shirt soaked in blood and the screams of ambulances flooding my ears, I would think first of how Rebecca’s insides were all pink and red and purple, like Valentine’s Day hearts. I thought about how awkward it would be for Danny to bump into the neighbors in our building’s lobby or how he would explain to his future girlfriends how once upon a time his couch became the site of a double homicide.

Danny, I stole the baby to fix us.

I’m sorry that when I tried to deliver your pizza to you, you were in a coma. My co-workers and I tried to figure it out. We were amazed that you called and ordered yourself a pepperoni thin crust. We wondered if maybe it was a miracle of sorts, though we were puzzled at the single can of Coke. Something about the Coke made it seem more everyday, less revelatory. But then again, the Virgin Mary comes often to the plainest of women when they least expect it.

The nurses told me about your coma when I got to your room. They told me that you’d been in one for days and were taking your dinners through a tube. I’m sorry about that. I wondered if you could smell the pepperoni, and if so, if that would be enough. The nurses offered to buy the pizza and I thought, well that’s some metaphor, but to this day I can’t tell you what it means.

So I sold it to them along with the damp can of Coke. I hope they ate it some place far from you. How did you manage to work the phone, get yourself an outside line? I apologize for not holding up my end of the plan. Standing at the foot of your bed I wasn’t sure what I should do. I’m sorry that I had to leave so soon. Other people were waiting for their pizzas.

Has your family come yet to sit beside you, or are you still making do with the stars?

Sincerely,

Michelle

Chris

Chris is the father of three teenagers. He lives in a corrugated tin blue trailer he had to buy twice: once when he and his wife moved into it as newlyweds, the second time when she left years later, but won it in the divorce settlement. He still lets the wooden nameplate hang from its chain over the door–The Lutka Family, and all their names burned into it, including hers. And I guess it’s still true, in a way, the way once you’ve lived in a place a part of you is forever there. Tonight it’s raining. I open the store’s front door for Chris and watch his thin frame stumble toward his light blue Mazda, his arms loaded with pizza and Coca-Cola. His windshield wipers scrape dryly back and forth over the glass. He climbs in, slams the door. Country music, sung by a throaty young woman, plays inside his car. After a while, after midnight, the rain will turn to snow. When Chris gets home his trailer will be bathed in white while his children sleep inside, sprawled every which way like fierce arrows. Only the cat will wake to greet him as he stands in the fake paneled kitchen. It yawns and flashes its milk-white mouth. No hurry, it thrums. No hurry.

Mrs. Havisham

Mrs. Havisham scares the hell out of me. She lives in the old part of town where most of the blocks have as many vacant lots as they do Victorian, wood-frame homes. Her house is painted steel grey with white trim and a blood-red door, though its style isn’t Victorian, rather French with its arched portico and tall, shuttered windows. The whole thing needs a coat of paint, badly.

She only orders after dark. Seen during the day, the house looks lifeless. In the evenings a dull light glows from deep within. The curtains remain drawn. In my mind, she paces in her living room in a faded bridal dress, but in reality she orders a sausage pizza once a week. She does not turn the porch light on, and after ringing the bell there is an uncomfortably long pause before she opens the door. Clad most often in a white robe, she opens the door only far enough to get the pizza in, tipped sideways, and to hand out a check for the exact amount. Her handwriting resembles the nibbling of rats. Her teeth frighten me.

Something terrible happened here.

Objects

Now he prefers solid objects. Televisions, one leather glove, shattered trellises. He carries it all home, after dark, walking dangerously along the four-lane road past my ridiculous place of employment.

It’s not the same since the advent of plastic. He misses the old tin garbage cans, when the wind tipped them down, empty, and they rolled in crazy arcs rippling out the sounds of rusted accordions or the loose corner of a corrugated roof.

Rumor has it he was once a professor of history accumulating facts of human nature, the inexplicable gaps in judgment. One night he passes by, the door from a house in his arms. Aha! says the wind, making his job more difficult. This is just what my heart was lacking.

Take Flight

Roll down the window. Let the evening summer warmth float in. Turn off the radio.  Become the absence of dusk. Lean back in the car seat and tip your head a little bit to the right. Let your hands hang limp on the steering wheel. Smile when you look and see the fox standing upright in the ditch measuring the distance across the road. Wish him safe passage. Say something funny to the children who scream at you and point while jumping up and down in their driveways. Wave to the child later on who makes his fingers into a gun and pulls the trigger. Be kind. Take flight. Coast through all the lights which have turned green, one after another, just for you.

We never spoke, which made him perfect,
this blond haired boy in my choir class.
It was the first winter my father stayed in bed.
On the school bus older girls stuck chewed cherry
Bubble Yum in my hair and poked me with tampons.
At home my father called, Rachel, come lay by me.
I said I had homework and sat in my small pink room
where I wrote in lumpy cursive
my daily Todd Report.  What he wore: a white tee-shirt
with a smiley face, a green parka.  What he ate: tuna
on white bread, banana chips.  I sketched
his bowl cut and planned our wedding.
We would exchange vows in a cemetery
on the Ides of March or Alexandria in October.
Our children would be named Sophia and Ivan.
He would be a writer and I a poet.
I called his number, held the cold
black receiver against my ear to see
if he would answer.  If it was his mother or sister
I said wrong number but if it was his own husky voice
cracking on the other end, I just breathed.  My heart
pounded until my father called: Rachel, come talk to me.

Poets in the Schools

This is Jeremy.  This is the apartment
where I lay naked on the quilt
left over from his ex-wife’s first marriage
and stained with my menstrual blood,
where Jeremy played this song.
But today I sit in a room full of 8th graders.
One lies on her belly, a pink
pillow against her new breasts.
I wonder if she is sleeping.
There are thumbtacks in the walls
and yesterday’s torn Valentines on the carpet.
We are writing to music, making
sensible choices.  I have not had sex
in three months and I have started wearing lip gloss.
Do I miss those raw days,
Jeremy drinking until he pissed
the bed, me tripping
home from Horsehead, breaking my teeth?
These girls wear braces.  Their mothers
worry about them drinking.  I am the queen
of positive decisions.  I smile until my jaw aches.

They’d missed each other, had passed each other by with precision. Minutes were windows to escape through and nothing was wrong until verbalized.

They communicated via Post-its, stuck them on the mirror in the hallway. Cancellations mostly, but reminders, too – the tax return, a signature. The notes grew shorter, elliptical; the handwriting poor. His resembled Morse; hers, Miro. Her final note is blank; and he knows that she is gone.

Her note on the mirror. Its blankness reminds him of her absence. It falls to the floor six, maybe seven weeks later and he knows she isn’t coming back. Her letter falls through the door the next day.

He’d assumed she was with friends. Or her mother. The stamp suggests not.

He rereads the letter—trawls through it in a different light, a different room. Slants, loops, dots; he searches, feels the indentations through the page. He thinks about her choice of words. He empties the glass and goes out for air. Back home, he retrieves the letter from the bin. He rereads, trawls through it in a different room, a different light.

He drafts a reply in his head. He drafts at dinner, and later in the bath. The drafts grow shorter. A page, then less. He drafts as he lies in bed. Shorter each time. He sets the clock for seven, drafts. It’s clear now, everything he has ever wanted to tell her; one sublime sentence, scratched across his mind.

He sleeps, parts of him sleep. His mind works on the draft. By two a.m., all that remains is four words. By five

Tracy didn’t like working nights at the gas station, too many crazies and stupid kids, although she was essentially her own boss for the eight hour shift and had little to do.

She reminded herself of those perks when the burly guy in the gray hoodie walked in shortly before midnight, setting her heart racing. He barged into the store with dark stains on the front of his sweatshirt and a lit cigarette hanging from his meaty mouth, right next to his three silver lip piercings, his white-washed jeans belted around his fat thighs. His face had a blue tinge, and she didn’t think it was from the shadow of his hood either. She felt a flicker of recognition, and foreboding.

Tracy asked him to kill the cigarette, her voice humiliatingly meek. He ignored her, moving through the aisles like a rhinoceros. She warned him he would set off the smoke alarm, if not one of the gas pumps.

He whirled around. “Don’t you tell me what to do, girl.”

The way he said “girl” she felt smacked. He’d been in here before, that night a week back with the other scumbag that had spit chewing gum in her face. They’d ran out right after, laughing. She gripped the edge of the counter, trying to stop her trembling, and checked the security cameras, confirming they were on. In the three months she’d worked at the station, she had already hit the alarm five times. After the last incident, the whole “I swear it looked like a gun in his pants,” fiasco, her boss told her in no uncertain terms that unless someone had a knife to her throat he didn’t want her hitting any “motherfucking alarm,” and messing-up his insurance or pissing off the local cops. “Nobody likes paperwork, you hear?”

The guy grabbed a six-pack of beer from the fridge, and managed to knock over some cans. The cans thudded, thud, thud, thud, rolling back and forth on the floor. He called her over. She stood rooted to the spot. He shouted again, making her flinch. She moved to the fridge, feeling like her ankles were chained together, like a little girl again going to her bully-father.

He pointed at the scatter of beers on the dull, once green, linoleum. “Pick them up.”

She held his fiery gaze. “That’s not my mess.”

He raised his fist. She drew back, yelping.

“Get,” he said between bared, nicotine-stained teeth.

She bent, lifting the cans quickly, steeling herself against the blow to the back of her head she felt sure was coming.

“That’s it, that’s the girl.”

She straightened, holding the cans to her like babies, encouraged by his praise.

He ordered her to put the cans back in the fridge, and moved behind her. She obliged, her insides turning to sludge.

He shuffled to the counter, placing the six-pack of beer on top of the stack of newspapers. She returned behind the counter, liking the distance between them. Her eyes scanned out front. She prayed the driver at Pump One would notice something and come inside or call the police.

Her hand reached for the cash register, telling herself it’d all be over soon. He would leave or help would come and she’d get to tell her roommates an exciting story tomorrow.

“Not so fast.”

Her fingers froze on the cash register’s cool plastic buttons.

“I’m not finished yet.” He dropped his cigarette butt, and stubbed it out with his blackened sneaker.

The car at Pump One pulled away, making her want to cry. She tried to work some saliva back into her mouth, managing to croak. “What else?”

He reached inside his back pocket, pulling out cigarette skins and a roll of foil.

Tracy forced a smile. “You can’t do that here.”

He pulled his hood tighter around his bloated face. “Can’t I?”

She tried to sound conspiratorial. “I think you’d better go. The cops are always patrolling here.”

He dragged on his joint, and gestured it toward her. She shook her head.

His smile had an edge like she’d never seen. “You are a good girl, aren’t you? A real good girl.”

She pinned her smile to her face. “Just keep humoring him,” she thought. “He’ll leave, and I’ll start looking for another job first thing the next morning.” She would waitress—better money in that line of work anyways. It was just that she’d never been much of a people-person, and wasn’t quick on her feet, or all that good at thinking of too many things at once. She wasn’t good at much of anything really.

He slapped the counter, making her jump. “You going to join me or what?”

“I can’t, I have real bad asthma.” Her mother hadn’t wanted her to move out here to San Francisco, saying the sea air wouldn’t be good for her. Her mother hadn’t wanted her working the gas station either, said something just like this would happen.

He laughed, making a “whee” sound. “You got one of those inhaler things?”

She nodded.

His face hardened, his eyes like something dead. “Let me see it.”

She reached inside her purse, searching for several minutes before she found it, all the while trying to hide her wallet from him. He grabbed the inhaler, startling her, and pushed its tip inside his mouth. She felt like he was putting her in there.

She hid her disgust, thinking she’d die before she’d ever put the inhaler in her mouth again.

He pumped the inhaler, twice, three times, four.

“I don’t think you should—”

He pulled the inhaler from his lips, silver strings of his saliva strung to it like the threads of a cobweb, whooping. He danced about in a circle, shouting about how his chest felt open, how he felt huge, how nothing had ever set him going like this.

He ripped open the cardboard beer container, offering her one, tears of condensation sliding down the bottle, making tracks.

She knew not to refuse. They twisted off the beer caps, and dropped them to the floor. They made a tinkling, sad sound. He drank, chugging, and talked about music and movies, but she couldn’t understand what he was saying, like he wasn’t using real words, like this was all a game. He grabbed her shirt, and pulled her to him, making her cry out, that same sound her roommate’s cat made whenever he hurt. She willed somebody to come into the store, anybody.

He made to kiss her, but then pushed her away. “You got a mustache.”

Her hand rushed to her upper lip.

His eyes raked the shelves about them, finding the razors, grabbing a packet.

She jumped for the alarm, fuck paperwork, but he caught her arm, twisting it up and behind her back. He marched her to the restroom, and pushed her inside.

“Don’t please—”

He threw the packet of razors, hitting her face. “Shave that mess off.”

She covered her face with the crook of her arm, gagging at the stink in the small space, trying not to cry. “Please—”

He shouted again.

Her hands shaking, she freed the razor from its covering, and splashed water on her face. The soap slipped out of her hands, and she had to chase it around the filthy sink.

“Get on with it, girl.”

“My name’s Tracy.”

“I don’t give a fuck.”

Something spread inside her like a black spill, a sense that this was the confrontation she’d been working toward her whole life, this the one show-down she wasn’t going to walk away from, or bow her head to, or smile and swallow down everything she really wanted to say and do.

“My name’s Tracy.”

He pushed his face close to hers, his beer-cannabis breath fouling her skin. “Excuse me?”

“Call me Tracy.”

He grabbed the razor, touching it to her face. “I know what I’ll trace.”

She closed her eyes, whimpering.

He threw the razor in the sink; it sounded like something breaking. “Now shave.”

She soaped and shaved her upper lip, looking into the mirror for the least amount of time necessary, the fluorescent ceiling light warm on her head. On the last stroke, she nicked herself.

“Stupid girl,” he said, hooking his hand under her chin and pulling her toward him. He stuck out his thick red tongue, its back caked in dirty white, and licked across her mouth and up under her nose. Then he kissed her hard, his lip piercings bruising her mouth. She tasted salt from his sweat, from her blood.

He pulled back his lips, showing more of his brown teeth and pale gums, his eyes crazy-wide. “I’m a vampire.”

He pushed her against the wall. She hit the back of her head, sending a jolt of pain through her. He moved toward her. She gritted her teeth, shaking, and charged at him, kneeing his groin hard, and ramming her three fingers into his left eye. He spun about, his hands at his eye. He roared.

She raced past him, out of the restroom, out of the store, into the dark street. Someone shouted, not him she didn’t think. He was still inside. She ran, coughing, struggling to breathe. Her chest tightened. Her skin stuck to her ribs. Wheezing, sweating, she pictured her lungs flapping like the wings of a frightened bird, her airways shrinking, shutting down. Even as her legs gave way and she sank onto the sidewalk, she felt the thrum of triumph. She’d gotten away. It would feel so good to tell her mama, to make her proud. All she needed now was to breathe, breathe big.

Not using protection, that’s why I first noticed him. From upstairs where I was working out. He was in the street. The street is always getting dug up.

I brought him around to the patio to show him the scat. He said it was ravens. I said I’d never seen ravens on the patio.

I didn’t use to look at guys that way before, comparing, not until I started working out. Working out was all I could manage in the afternoons. Mornings were tolerable, but in the afternoons I got the jitters. I was detoxing. Jittery and cold all the time. I worked out in my insulating layers all afternoon and didn’t break a sweat.

I saw it as an opportunity: he was off by himself. His bosses conferred. He sat on the curb and ate a sandwich. I went downstairs, my plan to stop and say one sentence, no sound.

Outside, I looked at myself in the door. I’d been detoxing for sixteen weeks and hadn’t bulked up at all. My arms hung loose in the sleeves of my tee.

First, though, I practiced. I paced around the apartment speaking without a sound coming out of my mouth. Saying, This is what your future will be if you don’t use protection. I tried it in front of the bathroom mirror. This is what your future will be… it was convincing.

Inside the apartment I kept the a.c. off and still I shivered though I wore two insulating layers, expedition weight, plus two heavy wool sweaters, frayed from the heavy usage of the last sixteen weeks.

On my mattress on the floor I held my left arm straight up toward the ceiling. He lay on top of the down quilt. I held my arm tight and still and asked him if he was impressed. My hand shook. I commanded my hand to be still and it shook impressively. I told him that my detox physician wasn’t impressed.

He took my hand and put it on his cock and asked me if I was impressed.

I answered him without a sound coming out of my mouth. This had become our little running joke. It was getting old.

He wanted to try a sample of what I was getting myself off of. Just to know what I’d gone through. I told him that if he wanted to know what I’d gone through he would have to ruin himself first. I said, I take the risk of hitting on you in the middle of the street, and you want to turn around and ruin yourself? He was already ruining himself by not using protection. He still wasn’t using protection. For the last time I said, without making a sound, this is what your future will be if you don’t use protection.

The pharmacy that packaged the goods was sloppy. One time they didn’t have enough blue so they filled the vial with as much blue as they had and put cotton on top. On top of the cotton they crammed in the rest, yellow. When I opened the top with my shaky hand, yellow went flying everywhere. I was down on my knees picking yellow out of the dust, sweeping with a wooden spoon under the refrigerator for yellow.

After a few weeks I lost interest, short attention span, the usual. He kept stopping by to check up on me. He brought me insulating layers that he couldn’t fit into because he’d bulked up so much.

I was careful, I counted every two weeks when the sloppy pharmacy refilled. I made sure that the number inside matched the number on the outside.

I got a little sloppy myself as I neared the starting line. This was what they warned you about, the last weeks, when you’re stoked about the detox coming to an end, or just after, post-detox. You get sloppy. I doubled up. I made a bad call. I had someone over and when he left I looked up someone I knew I shouldn’t be looking up.

When I awoke the first thing I did was count.

I opened the vial and spread out the blue on a sheet of paper towel. I made days. I could tell I was short before I counted but I counted and recounted. Then I reconfigured the days to see what I was up against, what I would have to do without. I was at the stage where I couldn’t go to an appointment and give some lame excuse. I hurt, I was cold, and now I’d shorted myself just when I needed all the help I could get.

I spoke to the mirror without making a sound: You’ve made your bed and now you have to lie in it. In my insulating layers and two sweaters I looked gaunt, my face shrunken, deep hollows around my eyes.

I stretch out on the bathmat with my arms as far as they’ll reach, shaking just the way I did as a little girl.

On our first date we bought a plant.

We watered the plant every week. The compost was so fresh we tasted it with our tongues just because. Then we made out. Fingers to skin, finding new ways to feel with human hands the strange glow of a body in the night, we baked mud cakes in our mouths. We did what our bodies told us to do. Didn’t put up a fight. Whether or not we understood the limits of anatomy, there was no stopping our desire to know one another completely – as if one thing, I guess.

We hung the plant in the sunlight and went our separate ways in the daytime. In the evening I took down the plant and whispered into its stems about how easy it would be if only she and I could live together in a clay pot somewhere. Our roots would wrap round one another and become at some point indistinguishable from the shit in which we stood like flowers waiting for sunshine. I wanted that more than anything, I told the plant. More than anything I wanted that.

After three weeks the plant grew brown at the edges. Our skin grew accustomed to the other’s touch. But we kept on watering the plant. We searched for new ways to feel with our hands. Both fell short of their goal, which was, I guess, to reinvent the feeling of those first few nights together – a few weeks of bliss, piss in the pot. We resolved to water the plant more often and to make out more often and to listen to our bodies more often and to leave the plant in the sunlight all day long, from then on, forever and for-whatever-reason.

She moved in with me. We slept with the plant between our bodies, glowing. We watered the plant every night and hung it in the sunlight during the day. Fresh compost every week, it glowed. Within a month the plant was dead. All the leaves fell off and we tried to sew them back to the stems but they crumbled in our fingers becoming black and smelling badly of death. So we sewed our skins together, in order that we might construct a patch quilt, the story of our lives lived as one thing, together. Both fell short of their goal, which was, I guess, to be in love and to be happy, as one plant, one body, forever. We ripped the plant out the pot. We ripped out the roots, and with it our skin. Our patch quilt wrapped the ripped roots to ready them for transport. We buried both in the night and found a new way to feel with our bones the glow in the dark of something we didn’t understand and never will.

The sun rose on a fresh mound.

My wedding dress is stale in the closet.
You crumble drunk on the stairs,
still plagiarizing your vows,

while elsewhere, girls are getting married.
The tablecloth wilts beneath the roast
and the cats lap up the melting butter

before it hardens in the china dish.
The buried box, full of all your gifts—
regret, tattoos, razorblades, a limping pit bull.

I am the archeologist, digging through this city,
scrubbing your shit stains from the toilet,
unearthing the hidden town below us,

where my dress was clean and you were happy.
I rewrite myself while you lie about dancing so close,
dreaming of me, and putting your whole hand inside her.

I saw her car in the parking lot.
I saw your lips on her neck
and her cock in your hand.

Insomnia with Solomon

My mother calls. I should get a flu shot.
I should brush my hair and start saving
more money. I should tell who my soul
loveth, and why I am called the fastest
among women. The neighbor’s dog
continues to bark all night. I should use
CFL bulbs, stop eating red meat, take
the train to work more often. I should
call the keeper of my vineyards and ask,
red or white with edamame? I should
adorn my neck with chains of gold, let
my lover lie all night betwixt my breasts.
But she snores! I should vacuum, take
the trash to the chute, get my car washed,
have my eggs harvested, find a sperm
donor, because the sun hath looked upon
me and mine own vineyard I haven’t kept.
The book I left at the office, was it under
a stack of papers, or had it fallen to the floor?
Why did I forget the book I forgot? Is it
worth fighting football traffic on Saturday
to read the venerated essay on why I should
never end a line in a poem on the word the?
I should not stir up nor awake my love
til she please. Lord knows she works hard
for the money while I pet the cat and google
sperm donors. The tender grape gives a good
smell. But the little foxes spoil the vines.
I should pay more attention to fertility,
the importance of female orgasm in conception,
how analogous heterosexual positions are
to lesbian ones. By night on my bed, I sought
sleep. I sought him, but I found him not.
If every man hath his sword upon his thigh,
where should a lesbian keep her sword?
We keep ours in the bedside table drawer.
I should unload the dishwasher tomorrow,
buy birdseed and bread. I should stop gazing
at houses I cannot afford, houses with fountains
of gardens and a well of living waters. I wish
my lover would blow upon my garden more.
This blanket is too light for the growing chill;
I should find the down quilt in the basement.
I should wash these sheets tomorrow, fold last
week’s laundry. I should really get some sleep.
I should spend more time calling my mother.

July

It rains. Slick grass sticks
to my ankles. I run.
Drops decorate the pond
as stitches pattern quilts.
I have not been to Paris
for ten seasons. I hear
the canals are flooding.

Forty years ago, moon dust
stuck to boots. We watch
a documentary on the landing.
Children dressed in astronaut
pajamas jumped like bunnies
in aged living rooms.
I love your affection for Space.
I tell you so.
Your lips meet mine.

You trim fat from the meat.
I practice calisthenics.
Babies germinate in your womb,
but nothing blooms.

This is no season for harvest.

Love Poem in Three Parts

1.
I knew you only by your clothes for the longest time,
a soft cotton shirt, worn thin, ribs whaleboned, framed.
One day you emerged in different vestments and I
walked on confused. Your skin burned my palm
when I dared touch you; your nipples pointed north.

2.
In Florida, it rains like God hates you. I walk alone
and bitten by harsh plashes. The coffee is watered
down. Everything diluted. Your voice, hollow
across the country, pinging across cables, digitized
and empty. You say let lips do what hands do, tracing
my nipples with your tongue, drawing the syllables
out, wrapping your voice around me as I giggle.
I want your fist inside me.

3.
You’re so pretty. It’s what my mother can’t stop
saying. She’s thinking about those glossy girls
in magazines I kissed until the pages were limp
and newsprint showed through the faces. You
are twisting dreaded locks between two fingers
and watching my father slowly sip his coffee.
He’s trying not to regard your nipples. We
were caught in the rain. Your thin cotton shirt
is soggy and transparent. You’ve spelled love
on my neck. A bruise is a bruise. The phone
rings and rescues my parents with details
to attend. The party is tomorrow. We are wearing
white and clasping hands. We sleep like silverware
in my childhood bed. Through thin walls we hear
my parents talk and fuck. You dip your face
into me like a kitten drinking milk, your whole face
disappearing into the shallow bowl.