And Brendan chased me through the / Church with flowers from Jewel Osco / He caught me and I threw them in / The trash once he’d driven off, / With Bronson and his Mom, / Ghost people with chasm cavities / My throat hasps to think of.
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We both wish we had better taste
or less altogether for
oily comparison is killing the dog or
the house or delivery person without snow tires
and that’s not anyone’s fault but yours
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My head is a bulging oyster, and my hand rips blood from leaning plainly against glass. It’s all right, it’s all right, I think, shying from latent symbolism as I press palm to palm. Leaving is good and right, like oversleeping and brain freeze. Leaving is changing for the better, I think with my big oyster brains. Leaving is letting something remember you after you’re gone!
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I wish for myself a peaceful pass to the afterlife, gentle into, I wish for myself the kindest final change. But then I’m bendy again, and need to crack my sternum to breathe fully, the dementia wanderlust fades and I’m ages from age. My youth looms over, ribbing me in tease, it waits for me to outgrow it only to bend over a chair and wave hips to my face, you’ll never be young again, you fucking bitch!
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Tonight, I’m an obscured writer with shiny knees and elbows, shiny enough to distract from a quick eye, shiny enough to counter the spotlight on a distant stage. It’s enough to delay a more original tag, one I can work out in a one woman writer’s room, without the slack, nonplused audience, and legs ablaze with untouched eczema.
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I solve her Rubik’s cube, then peel off a blue and white square. The hallway leading to the stairs is bare of frames, just papery thin paint that can’t support a lean. I paste the blue, and then the white, and pray the paint slivers off and she loses a few dollars of her safety deposit. You’re an asshole. Yeah, I do know that much.
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A twang pops a hole in the stale air, a pitch just high enough, something Southern or open-plained. I picture my spine concrete, unmoving - I don’t turn toward the voice I naturally lean to. A corn field, with no residents, no machinery reaping. Still, tall stalks that should blister in the sun, but move softly enough to escape a constant ray.
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By the time my high cheeks had met the peach of June, bruises had already begun cascading down my shins like a 12-year-old boy’s summer of baseball.
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I had acquired my plants last spring, but pushed off hanging them until I owned a piece of furniture tall enough to act as a ladder. I got sick, or complacent, or apathetic, and I developed an allergy to cashews. When I stopped dreaming, I really kicked it into gear.
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I’m centered in a street that’s divided unevenly by yellow paint. I remember painting this street, for a moment, and then I don’t. It makes my chest feel heavy, and I think about thick-footed tree people and mad cow disease, and I want to throw up. I’m moving, they’re not, I’m moving, they’re not.
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A lover and another held little meaning in my chest until it gave me anger that failed to swallow and lingered like acid reflux for two Junes and five haircuts. One of those haircuts, I did beside him in a friend-of-a-friend’s bathroom in the middle of winter.
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At eight o’clock, my cheeks had been flushed for three hours, yet I’d only taken one sip of wine from my hand glass. I had smoked, yes, the bowl resting on the W-9 forms I had yet to fill out. By ten o’clock, I was crumpled and moaning. At one-fifteen, I checked the stove for the time as I walked blindly back to my bed from the bathroom floor.
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Christ, oh Christ, oh God, oh, oh it’s happening - Oh goddamn, oh goddamn, Jesus oh -
Nothing.
I’m shaking your hand now, and the pressure you’re using on my hand is like a nerve compression, and I want to let my eyes roll back into my head, but I won’t. You seem like one to be easily offended.
You let go, and I forget your name as soon as you say it. I tell you mine.
You pat my shoulder, and then I’m facing a wall. Literally. I turn around, I must look like an idiot. How long was I staring at that wall?
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Almost a Prairie revised
In one moment, I watched him watch me listening to his dad talk about a bloody historical something. I couldn’t tell if he was searching for amusement in my eyes, or if he was as toned out of the monologue as I was – I was pressing my arms against my sides, unable to focus on anything but the color green.
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In what should’ve been the middle of the summer but was really the tail-end, we were back together in the city; I measured how long it was with my hands, pinching the pages of the one-a-day journal. It didn’t feel like too much. Then again, the pinchful was only the slightest thicker between then and when we were in Kentucky, where everything was on a different level than now.
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My brother is lying dead in the snow!
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When I was sixteen, I lived on an isolated ranch in Southwest Utah, thumb-pressed into a wide valley situated within Kolob Canyon. I lived in a three-bedroom house with eleven other girls, sharing a teal-and-pink comforter set with three roommates. At night, Lucy would climb up from the bottom bunk and rest her chin at the foot of my bed.
‘I see Cole in the corner again.’
Jesus fuck.