Moro Reflex

Today, I am no longer

a relic wrapped in furs.

Leaving you, mother and

leaving you, father, oh!

I feel as mean as a harlequin baby.

But now,

I am human again, able

to extract fingernails

from my palms.

Again

my body asks for things:

I see my love move,

india ink eyebrows

on ghosty vellum and

I press and press and press

his calligraphy to me

How heavy, to carry a whole apple in one's eye.
My stomach holds,
maybe, some broth
if I am especially nice today.
Feet, a bit of smudged paint (but
only for a while) stems, an etching
of black,
only shades,
misbehaving deer eyes,
they above all will not cut it out.
How did this body become a drooping sunflower?
An oozing sapling? Who are all these shades, with loud buckets,
and what do they want with such young amber?
Syrup-maker, wedding baker, you succulent
succulent protector: tell me how you hold so
many sugar stones. Things are so tender am I
too tender to

I hover

Somewhere the phone starts ringing, loud,
it is early morning, we are in a Swedish room on a hard perhaps-good-for-you Swedish mattress, those goddamn Swedes, and
the phone starts ringing. It hurts the annals between my ears.
To be able to encase these records, hundreds, thousands, goddamn thousands, in tobacco and love-making and moldmust sleep, I need this. When I am awake, my thoughts poke at the bark of my eyes,
my eyes are always barking,
as the corners of books, incisors and pages, the encyclopedia of ugly and girlish suburban trauma.
You, asleep in cotton and the dirt of  mid-state, wrap
your square big boy hands around my ears. You do this and you are still asleep. You do this to keep me from hearing the morning news.

Suppose one could say I have spent my life looking up up up and up a bell tower. White kisses from pigeon ass, God's dandruff, the spit of an altar boy who licked church walls and found them lacking. These careen wildly downward into my hair. And maybe, for a long time, that phone would have meant that: news, bells, new news of coming bells, coming men, a coming cavalry I would tire of completely and spit in another's eye, I am so used to holding bad flavors under my tongue. And maybe I would have blamed you for robbing me of that, when you covered my ears. The frabjous day! But you knew something deeper, you knew I needed not to hear it, you knew and you were hardly you, asleep so square and thin with bitumite greek hair on a damp hard mattress. You continue, today I leaned against those prodigious man thighs of lightning while you slept. You continue to block out false bells, you opened that bow mouth and let loose some arrows: "You're my girl. Swear it?" The bells of rutting time.

Conquest of the Persian Empire

Prince,
I sleep on a bed of centipedes and sharp wood corners.

I sew meager pillows

from all the colors you leave trail to,

(from your sinews and frame of olive bone corners)

you trail burgundy,

and white and the nighttime fog that
is your breath you cover me, all titian. A titan.

What holds these colors is something like
mean cotton, 5-thread-count, it ages my face,

and in return you give me nothing.

You stomp in, Alexander, and say: "I accept you as a gift from the Gods!"

and all my centipedes scuttle away. Prince, your tongue laps at the salt
under my eyes and so the soldiers cannot be paid. Prince,
everything before you seems ashes. The Gordion Knot is
nothing, you say,
and rubbing your olive skin, I reach the pit of nothing--
an antediluvian domain.

My grief is mine my grief is mine my grief is MINE my grief is MINE my grief is MINE MY grief is MINE MY grief is mine MY grief is mine MY grief IS mine MY GRIEF IS MINE MINE MINE MINE

I am the Fat Man. He is starving for sugar
and opens his artery
and drinks and tastes honey
in his blood,
thank god,
it is so sweet.

Maudlin Madeline lies in the backseat
of an auto. As the auto bowls through
an ace bandage high way Madeline opens
the door. Plains rush by and her head is upside down.
She thinks, I need a haircut. She knows,
I have no money. As maudlin Madeline
lies in the backseat she sticks her out of the door and her hair drags along the road.
When the auto hits a pothole and
her head comes clean off her neck,
we DON'T say, "What a tragedy,"
we do say, "What a fool."
It is stupid, stupid, stupid to
trust the road to behave itself.

Magicicada

Year thirteen. An orchestra of Pharoahs
means nothing to me,
I am woman-child anomaly, striding
past umbrella carriers.

Aboveground, boys dream
of plums. Wax blooms split
down the groove of yellow stone fruits
(My legs
spreading like melting butter
over the toast of morning waking).

Year seventeen. The vaultkeeper,
the image-maker, the water-teemer
and soil-sower bandage all palms
with fig leaf.

Soil can only clap soft. I miss my call.
Hushing us is natural. Without it,
Lady cicada only eats French bread,
she dips baguettes in colors for
some weeks.

I can no longer inspire ecstasy in you. I am familiar, you feel almost avuncular. Perhaps your hand does not find my cheekbones like your car finds its way home, perhaps your mind has not relegated my body's roadmap to that automatized part of your brain, but it is getting there, it is getting there. the thought of marrying me should be more like wet apples.

I cite the repackaging of a quote:

"I’m ready to sell my mother into slavery just to fuck you for ever” "I’m ready to sell my mother into slavery just to fuck you for ever” "I’m ready to sell my mother into slavery just to fuck you for ever” "I’m ready to sell my mother into slavery just to fuck you for ever” "I’m ready to sell my mother into slavery just to fuck you for ever” "I’m ready to sell my mother into slavery just to fuck you for ever” "I’m ready to sell my mother into slavery just to fuck you for ever” "I’m ready to sell my mother into slavery just to fuck you for ever” "I’m ready to sell my mother into slavery just to fuck you for ever” "I’m ready to sell my mother into slavery just to fuck you for ever” "I’m ready to sell my mother into slavery just to fuck you for ever” "I’m ready to sell my mother into slavery just to fuck you for ever” "I’m ready to sell my mother into slavery just to fuck you for ever” "I’m ready to sell my mother into slavery just to fuck you for ever” "I’m ready to sell my mother into slavery just to fuck you for ever” "I’m ready to sell my mother into slavery just to fuck you for ever” "I’m ready to sell my mother into slavery just to fuck you for ever” "I’m ready to sell my mother into slavery just to fuck you for ever” "I’m ready to sell my mother into slavery just to fuck you for ever” "I’m ready to sell my mother into slavery just to fuck you for ever” "I’m ready to sell my mother into slavery just to fuck you for ever” "I’m ready to sell my mother into slavery just to fuck you for ever” "I’m ready to sell my mother into slavery just to fuck you for ever” "I’m ready to sell my mother into slavery just to fuck you for ever” "I’m ready to sell my mother into slavery just to fuck you for ever” "I’m ready to sell my mother into slavery just to fuck you for ever” "I’m ready to sell my mother into slavery just to fuck you for ever” "I’m ready to sell my mother into slavery just to fuck you for ever” "I’m ready to sell my mother into slavery just to fuck you for ever” "I’m ready to sell my mother into slavery just to fuck you for ever” "I’m ready to sell my mother into slavery just to fuck you for ever” "I’m ready to sell my mother into slavery just to fuck you for ever” "I’m ready to sell my mother into slavery just to fuck you for ever” "I’m ready to sell my mother into slavery just to fuck you for ever” "I’m ready to sell my mother into slavery just to fuck you for ever” "I’m ready to sell my mother into slavery just to fuck you for ever” "I’m ready to sell my mother into slavery just to fuck you for ever” "I’m ready to sell my mother into slavery just to fuck you for ever”

Left Index Finger

She knew the long knife would slip even before using it. The parmesan felt cold and dusty in her right hand. She pushed the cheap blade against the block of cheese slowly, both hands on top of the handle. Pushing her weight toward the counter, she breathed a warm frustration. When scarlet jumped out her skin like scarves from a magician’s hat god damn knife slowly on the counter paper towels where are they where are they where are oh and arm over bathroom skin some yellow thick dotted fatty tissue flap the skin back over doesn’t need stitches and if it does too bad I don’t have the cash right now paper towels will have to suffice the blossoms of blood kept blooming it’s springtime in my hands.

The blood stopped and she wondered how she was going to wash her hair the next morning. Her little hands with bonier fingers. She lifted the paper towel and the red twisted in between her hands again, diving onto her thighs. She had stayed in bed all weekend, her oily hair now bituminous at the roots. The footsteps of rain on her balcony mimicked the footsteps that used to come to her room, joining her on those scratchy plum sheets. On rainy days, she forgot all about the delicate moments of a woman’s solitude.

___

He was her lover before they even spoke.

She immediately knew he was an American, like her. To the untrained eye, or perhaps someone less desperate for contact, he could have been a Spanish intellectual, an Anglophile, one of those post-Almodovar hipsters with a thirst for all things American (an affliction which touches all countries, not just China, or Japan, come to find out). The stature of this man seemed decidedly Spanish, all compactness and several inches above femininity, and his hair could have been Spanish, tight unruly brown curls, and not an inch of his skin whispered WASP. But the clothes gave it away, and the sprawl in the expat bookstore's biggest leather armchair. Only an American would happily, so comfortably, claim such a perch on foreign ground. He was reading an anthology of short stories. The next time, another, but in Spanish. Then in Basque, then in Spanish, then Neruda poems in English. And she watched him and he sometimes followed her outside, when she took a break from reading, and bummed smokes. He was a man who believed that everything had been written. Her choice of Spain over Bolivia. His being from Wisconsin, the state of her father’s childhood farm. Her weakness for curly hair. Their repulsion for one another. They fought often. His cruel sense of humor summoned hers. And she was glad the people who passed by the shop, as they stood outside, could not understand English.

But he fucked her in her mind. And fucked her. And fucked her. And she said nothing to initiate an affair and neither did he. One afternoon she burst out, “Why haven’t you asked me to dinner yet?”  In that moment sounds blended like watercolors. Her hands shook so she put them down on something anything oh, against the building, cheeks scarlet pulsed with her now short and sharp breaths in out in out in why isn’t out he in responding out in out his eyes are so big and God look at that curly curly hair in out fuck why did in I out say anything at all and he told her, roughly, “You’re used to being catered to. You won’t get any of that from me.”

___

She somehow ended up spending the night on his couch. A group of her friends had wandered around until she missed the metro going to her apartment. She stood at the bottom of his street, looking at the Spanish plaza behind her, and then up his street. Down, and up. She told herself to walk down to Charles III, toward his fleet of humorless taxi cab drivers, and her feet carried her up Montera, toward him. Her favorite street in Madrid. Tiny prostitutes, old prostitutes, black prostitutes. The police stood at the very top and watched these girls be bought and sold like cheese. She stopped to light a cigarette and leaned against a doorway. A drunk, jaundiced eyes rolling back into his skull, started snaking his way toward her. She froze, only for a moment, and then continued to walk up the street. A stocky young girl with platinum hair grabbed a young man walking in front of her. “¿Quieres follar?” She asked mockingly, “¿Quieres follarrrrr?” The man asked her how much and they began to squabble. She walked behind them slowly, forgotten cigarette between her lips. Her feet reached his door. She stepped onto the stoop, in between three prostitutes. Two ignored her and the youngest, maybe thirteen, pursed her cracked lips and cackled something in Serbian to the others. She flushed and rang his bell. Come on, come on.

They sat on his hard white couch. She tucked her knees into her chest and her chin into her knees while he spoke. They got up and leaned out his window, smoking cigarettes. He told her that the place selling gold across the alley was a front for a whorehouse. He quoted, “Love is kinda like, you know when you see a fog in the morning, when you wake up, before the sun comes out for just a little while, and then it burns away. Quickly.” He told her that he thought she was a beautiful woman. He offered his bed and she refused. Offered and refused. He told her to suit herself and started up the stairs.

“I still belong to someone else,” she said to his back.

“What am I supposed to do with that information?” He disappeared over the landing. In the morning, he told her she could stay while he went to the doctor. She left with him. He held her on Gran Via before turning away and walking toward the bus.

Their skin collided one night. They followed some friends into a salsa bar in the center. The walls were a gleaming white and the Spanish women gleamed too, in tacky sequined dresses and garish lipstick. He leaned against a pillar, his drunken curls pressed flat. She shifted from leg to leg and asked him to dance with her. His gaze cascaded down his Roman nose as he watched her speak to him, his eyelashes feathery fans. The trio of lights pink blue green and jazzy quick salsa pink blue green faded into tinkling chandeliers, a cough through thin apartment walls, when he grabbed her waist and spoke into her hair, kissed her cheekbone. Spoke into her hair. Kissed her other cheekbone. Pressed his forehead against hers. Pink. Pushed her away from him. Pulled her back. Kissed her eyelid. Blue. Murmured on her nails. You have beautiful curls. Cheekbone. Forehead. Air like footsteps on her hair. His mouth covered hers. “Let’s get out of here.” Green. Trumpets. Sequins. White. Green.

They simply slept. She awoke around 6 am, feet cold and back aching. His mattress was hard. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t breathe because his head was buried in her breasts.

____

After an hour she had used an entire roll of paper towels. She peeled the duct tape off her window that covered the inch-long crack in the glass. It had some adhesive left, beneath some hairs and a matte black bug. She wadded some of the tissues against her wound, that yelling flap of skin, and held them in place with the silver tape. She slept on her side, arm carefully erect. Elevated above her heart, like suggested. In the morning she swept her hair into a bun and walked to the peluqueria two blocks away. Twenty euro for a wash. She lit a cigarette and sat on the bench in front of the salon. Twenty euro for a fucking wash. She took a drag, imagining that the wizened Spanish man next to her could smell her greasy hair. Drag. Her finger pulsed. A bruise was mysteriously forming on the web between her index and middle fingers. Drag. Twenty euro. Jesus. Drag. Toss.

___

The city got to be too much so she disappeared for a few days, a week, no one could really say. She found a shopping bag crumpled in the corner of her tiny room and threw in some torn lace panties, a hard baguette, her passport. The bus station was full of sweating Spaniards. She followed a man speaking Basque onto his bus and ended up in Bilbao. The only available pension was on the river, far from the center and next to a factory. The old woman who lived above the room cooked her squid in its ink when she came home from wandering around in the humid downpour. In the middle of the night, she curled up in the corner of the room and called the man in Madrid.

She said, “I can’t find an accurate map of this town.”

He asked her, “Where are you?”

She hung up and waited until the bus left for Santander, at dawn. She met an Italian surfer with an unwashed dick and a girlfriend in England. When his heart ran out of rooms, he told her, he built more. “The human heart can do this. It can surely do this.” He took her to meet his friend in another pension. She followed him up the stairs and found herself in an apartment, alone, with the Italians. The rooms were completely bare, except a dentist’s chair in the corner and some tattoo ink in little bottles on a small table. Large photographs of porn stars, orange-skinned and wide-cunted, shouted from the white walls. After some time, they left and went to a bar. The bartender was another surfer, also Italian. Mario.

She left for San Sebastian at dawn. The unwashed Italian followed her there. They spent the day on Zurriola, chaperoned by Jesus on the hill. Watched him drink crimson aperitifs until midnight, supported his rippling trunk back to the hostel, where he stripped her of clothes on the balcony and put his hand inside her, lifting her body above the railing. He told her she was beautiful and deserved the world. She smirked, she left for Madrid in the morning.

She found the man in a club owned by his cousin, all moist air and perfumed men. Cabaret dancers wearing nautical lingerie lined the walls, dancing in elevated cages. He was sitting on a pleather purple couch drinking Mahou, trashed, hands in a Spanish girl’s crispy dry hair. When the young thing wandered away, he stood up and approached her, interrupting as she leaned on the bar and flirted with one of the dancers. He grabbed her by the arm and hauled her up the stairs, livid. He had worried, he said. She lit a cigarette on the sidewalk and thought of the Italian, thought of how bored she looked. He shoved her against a car and, when she straightened herself coolly, shoved her into a closed storefront, covered with sheet metal. She sucked in her breath.

She told him, “You don’t mean enough to make me angry. Tiny man. You’re nothing to me.” He disappeared inside the club for a moment, returning with her purse. He hailed a cab and ushered her inside, arranging himself after her while she gave directions to his apartment.

He said, “Tell me you don’t want it. Fucking say it.”

She smirked into the sheets, “I don’t want it.”

He twisted her neck back, fingers gripping her ballerina chin.

“Tell me you’ve never thought about it.”

“I can’t. I can’t.”

“Tell me it’s the smallest dick you’ve ever seen.”

And when it was over, he said, “Now I have to wash my fucking sheets. Get up.”

In the morning, they began to fight at the breakfast table. Politics, probably. His roommate and the roommate’s girlfriend ate mechanically, timidly, until his roommate stood up angrily. “You guys have the baggage of five years in two months. Please. Leave.” She took off his sweater and gently shut the heavy apartment door behind her, sleepy feet bicycling down the steep stairwell as she fumbled for a cigarette in her coat. She threw her cell phone in the trash and entered the metro stop on Montera, heading to her apartment.

____

She smoked another cigarette and stood up from the bench, trying to smooth her rumpled hair. The greasy strands stood in stubborn salute, the slight pressure of her hair bringing a sharp ache to her finger. Although trying not to swing her arms while walking, the bandage was seeped with dregs of blood by the time she got home. More wads of paper towels, another strip of duct tape, a nap and some painkillers, arm above the heart. She woke up when it was dark, dismissing the possibility of paying for a hair washing.

She wondered if he would wash her hair. Wondered if she could bear to let anyone else see her naked. Wondered which would feel more like being shoved against metal sheeting of a store front. Fumbling with her covers, she leaned over the bed and looked underneath it, searching for her cigarettes. She lit one and ran quickly from her room to the balcony on the other side of the apartment. The streetlights lit the night a sickly orange. Drunken Spanish boys walked under her and called up to the girl above them, smoking, legs and cunt visible despite the height and iron bars she stood on. She waved back and then yelled, “FUCK YOU!” The boys laughed and then stumbled away, singing “Fack you fack you fack you.” She finished her cigarette and turned, opening the balcony doors into the living room. Instead of walking inside, she placed her bleeding hand on one of the French doors, the left side, and then slammed the right against her hand. Again. Again. Three times and all she did was breathe dark and deep and long. Kicking off her slip, she held the black satin under the purple swollen digits and walked into the bathroom. She turned on the shower and, before the hot water could run out, quickly shampooed her hair.   

The Lady Doth Protest

Crickets run ghostly through the valleys of
a mother's rug, and
they break my heart (Lucky insects are
a privilege of the superstitious).

Chests creak wooden under the weight
of my body domestic. I am
bored by holly, ever green
never queen never thornier than
rose, cranberry,
gilded, stern-faced men.

Shame-tarps drape us (like the
envelope warming wedding invitations--
Humbert and Lo? Claudius and Gertie?
Unintimate woman with so-and-so?). My
care only knows low blows.

These words, thought after-thought,
trap and toss crickets.

At least Y isn't Z.

Dear Baby,

dear baby, come home baby. I miss you only maybe because you aren't home,

baby.

I search trees in hopes of you. I found some in Dante, Gilgamesh,

my night was cedar and jewels, tobacco smoke and a fool who

bought me breakfast food and seems somewhat cruel

with blonde hair and blue eyes too. I know this means nothing to

you, baby. True words were said, maybe, but not as true as

truer drier

poems you read to me, lately. And then I find you've been

home, baby. And I realize I'm just a toy reflecting

some love stories you've been wanting to play-act,

lately. Like when we play house and make-believe,

stately in sand boxes and cardboard boxes,

under mother's date tree. You ask too much of me.

I am little seeds, dry cranberries, tasteless

until you consume three of me. You're hurting this lady,

baby. I think you want a little girl who seems crazy.

I flat-out refuse to be a bird in that tree, baby. I was that way

across the sea, only months ago, back in January. It almost

killed me. I swore up and down I saw Hades. Solomon's sin

crept into you too, baby. Cause we're torn in two, clearly. And

now it's messier than it can be for this lady. Animal tracks lead to

briar, you see. I need sweet lullabies but I call you

baby?

That doesn't seem false or mixed to me. And I hate how bad I wish

you came home and crept into my bed, baby.

Today I read my best friend poems. They hurt her heart and widened it and made her think there are others like her. White men, black men, women with names of men, yellow men, jazz and dialect and the pastoral, all in tender little moments as she lay at my feet in tender little daisies. Some of which I stuck in my hardened toes. She unhardens my heart. She softens my soft core until it is malleable as poetry, until it can bend to include her and her bigness, ready to receive poetry and daisies and my seedy needs. The woman is pierceable and I will not pierce her like I do to others maybe, maybe she will pierce me maybe,

we don't need radicals, we need shoemakers who love making shoes and make love like Marx. We don't need union organizers, we need pharmacists who love filling pills and would dance to Engels, if he had played a swing jazz piano. Smokers who puff the rich confetti cigars filled by Fourier.

onan (II)

You, slate gray,

honest ways and motioning hands

slow slow circles--

cupping sailor knots from my back

rubbing them dissolvingly

into an ash, into an ink, into the

coloring of your red blue green sailors' tattoos
with my

knots. Not blue-eyed, not tall,

not one to knot up my little gold chain gut.

onan

We lie entwined.

"I just had deja vu," You say.

"Are you an atheist?" I sit up.

"I think so. I guess that means it was just my brain, right? Which can mean two things. Either I can't trust my mind at all, or it's the only trustworthy thing. It's either misfiring, all sorts of vulnerable little synapses lying in wait, or it's picking up the way time unfolds and refolds, even if only for a moment."

I wake up. You are sitting by the bay window, reading Pynchon. It is raining. You have tried to keep quiet but I am cold. My body is not little like yours, and not compact, I am soft bruiseable women curves, you are hard angular ribcage and can handle sleeping on the floor. I cannot let you into my house and so we sleep on the floor. I cannot sleep alone and so we entwined sleep.

I walk downstairs and outside. You live in the high hills and so I smoke, and watch mist cover the bay like your scratchy wool quilt, the one your mother made you. Because she likes you, you said. I stand in the middle of the street and hope life for two weeks will be somewhat like deja vu, deja vu, deja vu, deja vu, I cannot see enough of you.

You come outside and you look tender at my hair all knotted. You always look at me tender. You look at me tender and agree when I ask you to tattoo me before I move away. Or you offer to pay for it. You do not mind, money is no object, you only ask me of me. I gave this before you asked and you know this and so really, you are asking nothing of me.

"It smells like Berlin," I say.

And it does. Wet wool and wet air wet cunt and your wet skin, all mixed on my sleeve, I always make love to men who smell the same, I am only slightly sorry to say, and I have deja vu of a wet morning, 6 am, on a balcony overlooking Kreuzberg. I stand over cities and do not feel small or too tall, it's just about trusting that all these structures will hold me. Sometimes it leads to a bitterness not tasted by a life measured out in coffee spoons.

You want the posthorn and I want the muted posthorn. This is so fitting, I think. You drive me home. Thank God, I think.

Dear Allison.

Tonight I did not understand (as


I lay with the careening nightskyness


a roof, house of grass with walls of fear,


possible approach surrounding me)


how maps painted a flat brown

inky Earth. The maps lied and I saw


it in the arabesque globe, globules of god,


I was lying alone in a park you see.


And I thought womanly thoughts, how no one
would appreciate this gesture of eggshell bravery,
this gesture of abandoning for abandon! this gesture
of whipping flagellation across its lashing teeth.


And you, you with your breakable tea bohemians, I


am too a breakable bohemian, cupped you have collected me
blown off dust from china stems steaming with chatter
chatter to everyone else, poetry to you (my poetry,

you--

to you). I trusted this schizophrenic city
tonight not to rush upon me from behind as
I turned cartwheels (I never told you because I never
remembered to, but once when I was a girl I spent the
summer learning, rope burn on the backs of knees. It wasn't sexy
it didn't need to be).

Letters are a curse. My photographic memory

a slimy receptacle, I balance as a ballerina wandering

home and tip my mind onto china bohemian fingers (and

I know you wonder the same, despite your love for poetry, the why,

the why, the why, the why, the why)

the illusion imposed upon me by mediator toward love object, you are the mediator,

the world is my love object, so some French asshole says.

I could sleep here-- you jump in lakes bare backed. I accuse you of being theatrical, you beg me to take it easy and you're trying and I now say stop trying. You are so lovely. 

You will choose your body as bait, in hopes that of course some delectable little fish will bite. Keep in mind the ocean's drought. When food is scarce enough, sharks come out to play. Such is this town, such is this town. I am pretty plankton and only one of thousands. Between my legs, across the sheets, where you can't quite see, are clumpy little pearls in a hopeful Freudian undulating carnival. They smear makeup across their mouths and prepare to be mothers and wonder where their dicks went. Remember we are human with an economy. Sharks don't care about pearls, only little girl planktons playing dress-up, puffing out their breasty chests. I wait with my bait, I wait with my bait.

Polyphony

The name on the board is yours, until the letters come into focus and I realize my eyes were unfocused, the word was "human."
Let's rose today, let's daffodil yellow today.
I dictate to you as one of
us tumbles,
down stairs,
in the dead of night,
in an eviction night dress.
Let's rose today!

Pretty pictures of someone smoking are supposed to change when you see their ashtray, overflowing, you realize others would think this is disgusting, but it doesn't make you stop loving smoking. Love is a little like that. Love is a little like picking a color and saying, let's
rose
today.

What if we started
talking about love as a
humiliation?

Or maybe taking
not now then not ever's as
gun imperatives

Or using that word
as Norwegians do, for
wives, not entire lives

I oppose you, T
S Eliot. L'art can
not be erasure.

Not because it'd kill
you or me or any one
in between, just...

My body requires
photos, in snow, disrobed, all
which needs an artist.

kshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

If you ever think, "If not now, not ever," then it's probably worth happening never. I stole for the first time in five years two days ago. I stole medicine because the greatest medicine to ever happen to my work, and i think that means me, couldn't afford her own medicine, because she bought me medication. We've been living poor but not impoverished for three years now. It may become both because we're both leaving, unabashedly. The bay is poisoning me, mom.

Are you coming back to Madrid soon? If you don't want to, maybe we can meet in Berlin and live there a while. Would you want me there? Did you like my new piece? I'm going to write you back soon. The new screenplay is about you. Especially the part about never looking in a girl's purse. Thank you for the critiques-- I'm rewriting it right now. Are you coming back to Madrid soon? Are you coming back? Are you coming? Are you?

"I know that it is not necessary to love like this. There are people who do not love like this. He does not love like this. Most people do not love like this. But I love like this, and Shiva loves like this, so I know that I am not entirely alone in my lot, we are just some tribe, some weird archaic tribe, the people who love too much, and save nothing, but nothing, for themselves."

Did you read Sean's new screenplay? Did you like it? Is the part with the girl, with the sensual legs, in bed, about you? What parts are about you? Did he let you read it? Do you miss Madrid? Are you coming back? I thought you couldn't wait to leave. Come back soon. Come back. Are you coming?

I'll let you know. I don't know. I'll see you soon. I'll see you. We'll see.

"Puking up collard greens." "Alabaster." "Problem." "Unwilling." "Making the stone stony." "A good impression" "Don't get up for running"""Run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go gogogogo chorus

Being on Medication is Disgusting

You first realize this upon loving someone pragmatic, ideally someone more put together than you. Not more beautiful, of course, because these cosmos are fond of the ironic: the beautiful are always rotten fruit, damaged goods, moldy wool left in a monsoon, by careless parents, maybe. No, this pragmatic lover will not be as beautiful as you... but more worthy? Always. They will have this way-- this way of cooking neatly, writing neatly, reading neatly, and fucking like Mussolini intervened in their love life. He made their damn train run on time. They may perform art but they are never artists, never stricken with the impetuous feverish urge to cut open their tongue with a pen, slide a quill along their veins and bleed out on vellum so quiet and picturesque, a mimesis of crying trees. They are skilled and they are brilliant but they are not good, they are not great. But function wins over form, these days.

And you realize that you are not functional, not like them. And they can maybe teach you to be functional. So you watch, and you imitate, and you suppress the urge to gobble down the sticky bits of beauty, hoping to keep your shirtsleeves clean. They take you to a fancy restaurant and tell you to stop yelling fuck, it's embarrassing. And god forbid you should ever fling those skinny arms around their neck and bellow, "I LOVE YOU! I LOVE THE WORLD AROUND YOU! KISS ME! FILL MY WOMB!" And you never thought you yelled with a yearning full of blisters until they stopped letting you. You thought yourself to be regal until encountering them.

The thought will sneak up on you one day, thank god, that you need fixing. A pragmatic lover will never submit to aiding in this endeavor-- it is, after all, an inefficient undertaking-- and so you shall begin alone, with an endless excitement for the day that you can meet them on their own terms. One day, you think, I will be okay with mediocre love. And who does not want this? After all, this tempered romance is the fate of all affairs. Count how many impassioned marriages you know and I'll give you a few bucks for each. Buy yourself something nice. A donut, perhaps. And so off you go, optimistic that the pragmatic in your life will one day love you, because you can finally stop making them so uncomfortable with your goddamn desire, your inappropriate affection, your constant lust, those early morning tears from reading Durrell or remembering how you starved yourself at age 15. Once you're better, the little cuts on your thighs will disappear, shit, you'll even stop having to blow your nose.

The first step, of course, is to get off medication. It always made you uncomfortable, having to sneak off into the bathroom before bedtime, while they're changing into pajamas (the pragmatic do not sleep naked, although you surely do. When sex is over, if it even happened, they shower and put on some sort of cloth barrier. It's bedtime, not touching time). Go underground a few days, detox, sleep for 30 hours straight, shake shake shake it out baaaabyyy, and emerge wan and smiling. A new you! A newly stable and organic you. And you will be better for a few months, because your mind is wrapped in cotton, and the two of you can pretend that their having no heart, and yours being caught in misfiring synapses and then shutting off, is the same thing.

And then they leave and you miss being shit on every day, because damn that smelled nice, and then realize that you can have that without them, because you haven't left bed in days, not even to go to the bathroom. But at least you're off the medication. Fuck the man! Fuck the medical institution! Fuck your parents for not caring, for fucking you up, for shipping you off to a psychiatrist and not dealing themselves! FUCK PROZAC NATION! Pragmatic lover may be gone but at least they left an organic, self-sustaining you in their place. You are their collared chimera but no longer will your love be chimerical.

And then you develop annoying habits. Sure, you'll always be a little neurotic, so these are to be expected: having friends turn the car around so you can check the stove. Never mind that you didn't cook that day. You start to pinch your side-- again, of course you're beautiful, but a little less fat around the middle couldn't hurt. While you're at it, start running and working out once in a while. After all, you're single now, out and upon the meat market ice you go! Better make that a few times a week, or maybe twice a day. For two hours a day, perhaps, until your knees and joints ache and you start tripping, your mother walks like you do, and it's weird because she's 58 and you're 22, but fuck it, right? Nothing tastes as good as thin feels. And you start counting calories and throwing food out and checking your locks several times before bed and smoking a pack a day and eating in a blind howling tunnel at night until your stomach rips with shameful engorgement and you never menstruate and wish you were pregnant because at least there'd be a reason for all this and fuck leaving the bed except if you don't your life will come to a screeching halt and all you've ever ever wanted is that degree from the big pretty school on the hill and ex-pragmatic lover who never thought of you in the first place will find out you failed and you hate all your friends, god they're fucking noisy jabber jabber jabber, and you're not good enough for God and you can even say that you never asked to believe anyway and even more whisperingly, ducking your head under the bathwater, just sometimes you wonder,

is this all there is?

But, again, at least you won over that pill bottle. Mazel tov! You showed them, those money-grubbing fucks.

Deprivation Dinner

I keep our deprivation dinner a secret. I walk home in the rain. I call my mother. I talk to my raving girl. I smoke five cigarettes. I keep our dinner a secret. I restrain my fingers, I throw my phone against the wall. It is raining. My bed is empty. This is nothing new. I miss what I thought you were. I pretend you are a man. I keep my deprivation a secret. A lullaby sung to the betrayal in Spain. Hush.

I look across the table. You are no longer beautiful to me,
but God your wrists have stayed so skinny.
You know I like that.
Closure is so conventional. Here we are, at our restaurant,
I gag it's so trite.
You tear as I'm talking.
It makes sense, because I am saying things like:
"We can talk about things now, like adults. I don't care anymore, after all."
"When you call, and I don't answer at all,
it's because I can't be not cruel. I have so many mean mean things
to say."
"I was so very unhappy with you."
"Why didn't you leave me when I needed you to?"

"My girl, my girl. I wanted to fix things. I loved you."

You answer to that effect.

LOVING IS A VERB LOVING IS A VERB LOVING IS A VERB YOU'VE GOT SOME NERVE LOVING IS A VERB living without you is made of sweet sweet
sweet
verve.

To Poland

When she died, she wanted to look like the city: a sun-bathed mausoleum wrapped in furs, glorious, neck craned at the upside-down bowl of Berlin’s sky, mortal milky clouds and all. The train window framed Kreuzberg in a curator’s dream. Daylight left quickly. She saw some government buildings; someone had told her that, in a symbolic gesture of reassurance and transparency, all buildings related to any part of the government had glass walls. Nice enough for the administration to peer out of, she supposed, but the point was that the public felt like they could peer in and observe at any given moment. These were the things that made her love the Germans. The train cabin, on the other hand, was an American’s bad joke, a kitsch sitcom of some Eastern block train ride. The man across from her ate smelly greenish cheese from a lace handkerchief, staring lustily at the triangular tits of the girl beside her. His face was a leering unbaked pie. Two women jabbered in what she guessed was Polish, laughing often in a sharply hysterical fashion. One of the woman’s hair jutted from her head sharply, stiff tangerine strands.

Her lungs coughed, creating the sound of boots stomping on snail shells. She let herself cough, a voluntary cheese grater, bringing forth mucus she had demurely swallowed while with him. She spit gobs into her jacket sleeve. The blood hid in the crimson wool pattern of her coat; the sweet metallic stench began to mix with that of the goat cheese. Vomit rising to her throat, she slid open the door of the cabin and stepped across the hallway, struggling with and then opening a train window. She closed her eyes and plunged her head out, loose cheeks now peeling back from her skull and mining her closed esophagus. She screamed long. Snot clapped her throat shut and flew onto what she guessed was the cabin window beside hers, because a gaunt man came into the hallway and began to lecture her, irate and incomprehensible. She listened for a few moments and then stepped back, cocking her head coldly, and spit on the floor between them. The man paused, only unfreezing to laugh nasally. Ha. Ha. Ha. Pulling her own cabin door open, she stepped clumsily over the legs of pie-face and collapsed in her chair. Ha.

She slept. The train stopped every couple of hours, sometimes jarring her awake, but her body seemed merciful, seemed to understand that its survival was more insured by keeping her mind cradled in cotton. In Poznan, she considered turning back. Kutno. Warsaw. Especially in Warsaw, with three hours to pass until the connecting train. She had been asleep when they arrived at the station, just running off before the last whistle sounded, only making it because the girl with the triangular tits had poked her head with her stiff chest. A bullet bra? She fuzzily wondered, pulling her backpack from the overhead compartment and running through the hallways. Tripping down the stairs of the train, she landed on the cement platform, catching herself by the wrists. The suspended electronic sign read -5 C. She entered a nearby stairwell and walked down the short flight, entering the long cement tunnel that led to the other platforms. A newspaper stand lined half the cold passageway. The air was hard to breathe, frozen and hardly worth it. She saw pie-face buying a Polish smut magazine, a lollipop stick jutting from the left side of his mouth. Ducking her head, she skirted past him shakily and found the platform for the commuter train to Krakow, climbing the stairs and then tossing her backpack onto the ground. Her stillborn fingers were neglected pomegranates, blue with the cold, little streaks of blood from hangnails running excitedly over the knuckles. A purple palette of winter.

___

He said, “No purple prose.” Admonishing himself.

She looked up from her own writing.

“I do that. Purple prose. When I’m nervous or under deadline.”

He leaned back from the table and threw his pen down on the floor theatrically. She picked up the rusting tin where he kept his tobacco, covered in enthusiastic white advertisements from the 1950’s, and handed it to him. Arching his right eyebrow, he began to roll a seamlessly thin cigarette, looking at her mockingly. She lit it with a match, only slyly watching his movements as he strode to the stove and finished cooking their dinner. When he started pulling plates from the cupboards, she stood up and walked to the full bookshelf, a distraction from staring. Benjamin. Adorno. Some anthology about the Greek and Roman gods. Occult. Occult. A ukulele. A shelf of whiskeys and bourbon. Fleurs du Mal. He had Baudelaire.

He said, “Will you come and eat?” Gallant.

She ate with a leg pulled into her body, head leaning on her right knee, arm weaving around her thigh and gripping the fork. He could cook; he told her that he had worked in a restaurant for months to afford the ticket to Berlin, to live in this little studio, a squashed grandchild of the DDR.

She said, “Thank you for inviting me to dinner. I’m glad to see you again, after Sunday, before tomorrow.”

“What’s tomorrow?”

She said, “I fly back to Madrid. I’m not sure where I’ll be living, of course, but I’m expected nonetheless. And this weather isn’t helping my bronchitis.” Tightly.

“Why don’t you stay? Vagabond around town here, in Berlin?”

Pause. She said, “With you?”

“Well… yes, why not? There’s a certain devil-may-care tinge to it I like.”

“Fuck. I don’t know why I thought you meant I could stay with you. I’m sorry to impose. I’ve made things rather awkward now, haven’t I? I have a return ticket already anyway.”

“No. I have an air mattress. I charge by the towel, of course. I may try to seduce you again. These are the charges for staying in my hostel.”

“Alright. I’ll bring my things tomorrow.”

And they finished dinner and she shyly stood to go, slipping her fingers into creamy suede gloves, quiet and unsure, only looking up when he said,

“Stay. Give me your sickness.”

___

All the loose tobacco kept flying out of the thin white paper, the wind and her swollen fingers resisting dexterity. She left her backpack, quickly reentering the cement passageway and walking toward the newspaper stand. Five zloty for smokes. She resolved to pass the time like a queen in Krakow, an internal dry laugh accompanying this thought. As she dug into the fetid woolen coat pocket, her phone chimed, MoviStar reminding her to buy more saldo. This message reminded her how he hadn’t checked on her, hadn’t asked if she had made it alright. And it was like a slow cruel boot to the chest, realizing that he wouldn’t. She dropped the zloty on the magazines in front of the vendor, her face laced up tight, until she reached her backpack in the stairwell.

The next moments were hideous. Breaths came hard, pulls on arsenic ice cream through a straw, but quiet as a waltz. A ribcage opened with dynamite. She chain-smoked in the stairwell until the train came, sometimes coughing blood into her hand and drawing little pictures with it on the wall next to the stairs. These moments, the bereavement of it all, struck her as eerie.

The commuter train was almost empty when she got on. She half-stood for many minutes, unconsciously deciding whether to run up and down between the chairs, imposing the rotten radish rage she felt upon unsuspecting Poles. A beautiful blonde girl sat down in the aisle across from her, thin and cruel and undeniably Slavic. The Pole stared at her, bemused and seemingly disgusted, until she finally sat down and arranged the dirty backpack next to her, hoping the pretty Polish girl would look away. I looked like that in the States. Clean, maybe even hawkish, she thought. Scrambling for distraction, she pulled out the first book the backpack yielded. Herzog.

That funny etching, an angular man hiding behind brambles, on the yellowing cover. She began to read, an eccentric respite, until she reached the ninth page, when the last paragraph slapped her eye. Tucking the book away in her bag, she curled into the fetal position in her chair and began to pray.

How the fuck does it go? Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy and she couldn’t finish, because she couldn’t remember, and because the skipping record player that was her worn down scratched mind wouldn’t let any moments of peace get through, and she started again, Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by Thy name, Thy kingdom come, fuck, please come please come, please God help me please God help me please God please God please God please God please God please God please God where are you? Please please please please please until it all blended with the train wheels and her quieting coughs until her body let her sleep Thank you God.

­____

She picked her way through the pebbled paths of Dorotheenstädtischer, the crumpled map flapping in her hand, coffee-stained and typed in crude English. Hegel, Mann, Fichte. And she finally found it, Brecht. The headstone sat, almost lackadaisical, near one of the skinniest skeleton trees in the graveyard. She looked over the high brick wall into the wan sun, almost gone although it was 2:30 pm. The brothy light shone against the windows of his old study next door. She had gone there yesterday, taking an informal little tour of his dusty and regal final quarters. Although she had gone in loving the playwright, she emerged with an aching love for his torn dedicated wife. Particularly striking was the photograph of the actress beside her bed, standing in the couple’s garden. The guide said Helene was about 45 when the picture was taken— but she looked to be in her eighties, wrinkled and dark, with hardened black eyes of rotting glass. The woman had left her husband’s study untouched after he had died, referring to his rooms as “Brecht’s” until she passed away. Helene Weigel was now buried under the headstone next to her wayward lover, now and always to lie next to the man who told her, in later years, that she was losing her touch on the stage. Insult to a streaming procession of younger ingénue injury.

She left upon twilight, hesitating through the cemetery's heavy iron gates, then making her way to meet him in Kreuzberg. Taking her time getting to the thrift store, she stepped into an antique shop across from the metro exit, black nails fingering old minks and chipped Bohemian tea cups. The mirror across an aisle told her she looked beautiful that day, despite her dancing knotted hair and chapped face. The Turkish owner started to close in with hospitable but claustrophobic offers, so she hastily went back onto Bergmannstraße and turned left, walking toward Colours, where they sold clothes priced by the kilo. A meat market where vintage went into convalescence. He found her there, circling in front of a mirror wearing oversized wool trousers, embarrassed by his sudden appearance.

He said, “Let’s go to some bookstores. You’ll need reading for the train ride."

The first one was for expatriates, stacked to the ceiling and filling two rooms with English books. She found many worth buying, only to find a spidery script reading, “Not For Sale” where the price should have been on the inside cover. Frustrated, she made her way through a kitchen separating the two rooms and found him sitting in a floral armchair in the back room, smoking a cigarette.

He said, “I found a book on the history of Cornish smugglers. Can you believe it?”

Digging some coins out of his trousers, he made his way to the cashier, a burly man donning an unenthusiastic toupee who was watching what seemed to be the German version of American idol. She went outside and waited, clumsily rolling a cigarette and coughing into her sleeve, straightening as he busily left the bookshop.

He said, “You didn’t find anything? There’s another one, more worthwhile, close by.”

She debated touching him as they walked in the street, finally looping her left arm through his crooked elbow, his hand jammed into his coat pocket. It was a constant question she had, his affinity for her, why he chose to call her Meine Leibling. He had taken no other lovers in Berlin, so their friends told her, and his rough animal beauty made this romantic absence altogether baffling. She had outgrown, younger than most women, the over-valorization of being a unique presence in a man’s life. So this knowledge about his isolation meant nothing essential. She wondered how much she had forced herself upon this man, who had joked that he happily barricaded himself in Berlin, choosing to suffer internally the way a good Jewish expat ought to.

The next bookstore had an English section in the back. They grew competitive, informal intellectuals asking whether the other had read this book, knew the background of that author, sometimes detailing the story behind their first encounter with some novel. On the back wall, while looking for Durrell, she found a ratty copy of Herzog by Saul Bellows, a paperback she had seen the day before shoved in among the thousands of Brecht’s books. She scanned it and, showing him the delicate little copy, read:

“He went on taking stock, lying face down on the sofa. Was he a clever man or an idiot? Well, he could not at this time claim to be clever. He might once have had the makings of a clever character, but he had chosen to be dreamy instead, and the sharpies cleaned him out. What more? He was losing his hair.”

She smiled widely and hid her hands in his curly hair, fingers hidden in an unruly field waxed with pomade. He kissed the side of her neck and said,

“I’d like to read that when you’re done. You should get it.”

And she did.

Pre-Poland

It was his apartment but she unlocked the door, leading them inside. While she began to undress he went to the oven, turning the knob to the highest heat and pulling the door open, hoping to warm the little room. He sat down and watched her pull off each layer, staying in his coat and scarf, too trashed to do anything but watch. She stripped off the absurd black wool pants they had bought her yesterday, now only in ripped black tights and a thin lace camisole. He knew she came from money and so her vagabond presence, the neediness of it all, every tear in her clothes, baffled him anew. The Europe winter had bleached her; he had the sense that her skin should be olive but it was an unenthusiastic yellow, a dried lemon, covering her small wrists and bloated stomach. She was a caricature of baroque neglect. Her nails were little black discs she painted every night, with jagged red strips of skin surrounding them like detail on pottery. She would sit with fingers in her mouth and write at the table, unconscious of the blood from the finger in her mouth blossoming through her lips. Avoiding his eyes, she went to the stove and put apple juice in a pot, a makeshift offering of cider she felt made up for her presence. The air was laden with the purposeful attempt to move casually, to dredge up the sensual, to crowd out the sentimental. She filled the two little 1970s tea cups, thin German bone, and brought them to the table where he sat, all heavy glass and dirty smoky breaths.

She spoke more quietly in the apartment, he noticed. Her words creaked with the weight of ornamentation. An impressive woman, he imagined, the sort with an endoskeleton of disappointment. Men do not love the impressive. They tinker with it until the Cartier of a woman resembles a shabby steampunk watch. She was otherwise regal, he was sure. There were glimpses of this quick bitter bite, ringing her spirit like a rind, but only when they weren’t in this little room. Lifting the teacup to his face, he stared at her, hunched over, examining the train ticket. She stared at the thick white slip and only saw red, the crimson walls of the East Berlin nightclub. A silly German man named Johann had pulled her aside in the smoking room, telling her about his trip to Los Angeles. He had seen the Hollywood sign, he had thrown up at magic mountain. Pulling away from Johann eventually, she went back to their group of friends. He was standing there, waiting for her.

He said, “Did you have a nice conversation?”

She smirked, “Jealousy doesn’t look good on you, darling.”

His face contorted into something like injury. They finished their smokes and he led her inside, twirling her in a playful spin. She pulled away and walked ahead, an unnatural construction of cruelty, adrenalizing venom. It didn’t last. Turning around, she grabbed his waist and pulled him against a crimson wall. The following moments were heat. Mouth in the deep grooves of her collarbones, tiny bone hands twisting his black curls, a grating jean zipper. Skinny austere German boys walked by and stared and she laughed at them. He was busy in her hair as she stuck her tongue out at an anorexic industrial girl wandering by. These moments were the shriek of a raped tea kettle. He pulled away and they went back on the dance floor. His pulls on the flask of bourbon came harder after that. At the end of the night, while they waited for the U-Bahn, he jumped onto the tracks and began to walk back and forth. He called at them, “There are enormous rats down here. The government shoves real Berlin between the tracks.”

Now they sat at the table, hit with the smell of burning apples. He rolled her a cigarette and lit it, wanting to see her little hand erect and pinching the long rolled paper between her middle and ring fingers.

He asked, “What would you like to listen to?”

Smoke dribbled from her mouth, her answer made cotton by the thick air.

“Mountain Man.”

Their frames withered with each minute, the deflation of tired roses. She carelessly placed the burning cigarette on the wooden table and climbed into his lap, one leg on each side of his body, facing him. Pulling off her camisole, with a gaze of heavy water, she did the same to his coat, the roughly cut fabric acting as a scarf, the buttons of his cardigan, all of it. All of it.

She said, “I want our chests to be touching.”

A black nail traced it all, the stubble, the rough Neanderthal bones propping the eyes of lazy almonds, pouting witty lips.

She said, “Come with me. Come with me.” Imploring.

“Where?”

“You know. Poland. You know.”

He shook his head no. Wet eyes of lazy almonds. Wet rivulets tracking through black stubble.

“It’s not right to make love right now. It can wait til morning.”

“Okay. Okay.”

He took her to the train station. It was some hours past noon and the city already moved toward darkening. She regretted asking if he was coming, because in that moment she realized there would never be any way to know if he would have of his own accord. This difference seemed to matter. He rolled her a cigarette while she ran around the tracks, asking different personnel in broken German about the train schedule. She strode back him eventually, rage trembling beneath her pale face, tightly wound and yellowing like an old corset. The wet air, hard in the cold, treaded through her hair; the black strands always seemed to crash around her head like cymbals. Tugging on her knots, she lit the cigarette and smoked hurriedly, leaning over the tracks and looking for the train. He waited until she calmed down and told her, knowing she couldn’t read German, that the sign read a 45 minute delay.

She said, “You can leave.” She began to roll the overstuffed backpack between her boots, staring at him insistently.

He looked at his watch, then stepped forward and placed his chin onto her right collarbone. He sang her lullabies and Tom Waits, told her about visiting Munich. And the train came and she got on, and he went down the escalators. And she watched until he disappeared, and turned to find her seat as the train began to move. And he had run up the escalators stairs, backwards, and jumped onto the moving train and kissed her and jumped off and she slumped down in the train hallway arms splayed and withered as angry German mothers strode by with their fat ankles and swinging floral bags hitting her face, a corset completely undone.

She said, "But ______ didn't break you. It didn't fuckin' break you. And you should be proud."

___

I told another she, "It broke me. It broke me. And no one can tell. That's breaking me."

She said, "Well, how can we tell? How could anyone fuckin' tell. You are an onion,

wrapped in concrete,

with a little satin bow on top to boot."

___

She said, "You're so tiny. When I held you, I thought, 'Where is she? Where is she?'"

___

She said, "None of us could approach you. You looked cruel. We thought, 'She will think we're morons if we even try.' And then, you weren't. Cruel. And I thought, okay. And you're just this little sensitive thing, come to find out."

___

So no one will pull me into the bushes, or their car, I walk in the middle of the boulevard in the glowering shimmer of 1:30 am afterdark. Maybe the car that swerves just past my toes thinks I am drunk. And I think of my cruelty and I am glad.

Anatomy of a Writer





























Rightfully blurred

Exorcism at Lethe

At last, my love gave me that scene from a movie;
it was all ugly gasping and absurd fists
pounding on his chest.
Streaming ochre and talc. Screams down a Madrid street:
come back. come back. don't just leave me
standing
here.
don't leave me. just, please.
be just.
Please.

I said, "We are meant to be. This is our lives' great love."

He said, "Meant to be is a continual deciding."

He was not wrong, he was not wrong. What a relief that he was not wrong.

Confrontation Series

Father, I am so sorry your body is failing you.

Father, I am living the way you do.

Your nerve: my heart's fortitude

Shoulder muscle: septic organ.

Etc, etc.

To what extent this is of your choosing is clear and
to what extent I let this moat be built
by drunken architects,
sloppy friends,
teachers forging against
us like Napoleon
is dusty crystal.

Will you still be able to hold a handful
of snapping balloons, for
me,
on birthdays?
The moon is a balloon, the moon
is
the balloon.

I am writing home to tell you to pay the water bill, I am writing home to tell you the power's out.
I am writing home to tell you I'm scared because you raised a communist who thinks her heart is common ground.
I am the dregs in a jar
of breakfast marmalade,
diluted, mild and
bitter and sour milk and uneatable lemons.

Papa, did you stop having friends for the same reasons
? (See the beautiful form of that question, marked.)

Once, you became jealous of Bear's bike and stole it and biked away so fast down oak MN St.s and pothole became eye bone on sidewalk, mangled Bear's bike, and he drove by with his mom and peeled you off concrete and now you have a scar and he was a friend of yours still).

Once, friends promised that upon my european return they'd puzzle me back together again and I taking this to mean many more things than what's been implemented as factory policy came back all a dreaming and ready to be mended and pothole became my books, their lusty needs, and I am waiting for some balloons no one gave me for my birthday and now I have a scar and love humanity so much still).

The Year of Deprivation

Henceforth how your era shall be known.

Immoveable man, I would rage at you
if you were malleable as seacliffs.
Hell is a pebble
thrown at
the moon, occasionally,
until all its white chalk
breaks off and
floats away.
Powder white, power of
cyclical reflection
joining the dodo bird, the polar bear soon.

This year reduces that rubble
to rubble.

Once, I drank milk.
Mixed with honey,
crouching in your kitchen
until you took the empty carton.
I woke up that night with the vomit of shame
and genealogical punishment in my mouth.
Women don't consume that way,
humans aren't even made to drink milk.

You ran out and in and saved me
scooping my nausea into your hands
the sandy chalk of missing enzymes.
But my deficiency is still
the centerpiece of this story, isn't it? ISN'T IT?

No, it is, and
strange that so much lack
builds such a carnival of artifices.
Fuck you, language, you really fucked me
on this one. I guess I needed you to,
since I wasn't getting fucked in the morning.

Men always told me that the perfect woman
makes love in the morning,
our eyes still sealed
breath hot lashes gums wooly.
I am white satin panties, garters,
boned corsets,
little hands,
disappearing demurity who baked her bones into pie crusts,
the most essential flour for your tongue,
navel flower,
clingy fingernails which burrow into sheets
which you tuck in the sides before we sleep.

I spent half, or more,
of my year of deprivation
in fetal position.

That pull of cello strings is
my vertebrae
snapping into place.

Tugs

If loyalty is all,
I face, roundly,
your effacement of
my standard.

Songfulness enters
it, and love's uselessness
functions like slicing
a mango,
rivulets of a pressed pit
scurrying into my sleeves,

and I am forced to angle
my elbow downward, if
loyalty is all. I can
oh, pardon us.

The redemption of wonder,
for one, that your childish
nostalgia can offer us,
"a school",
seminal saturation,
square quotes proper,
earrings of bike tires.


But more proper
to say the respect for
a possibility! I may not
yell anymore,
my sweet work screams.
I'd like to leave pretty
and soon, even while
you stick around. But oh,

loyalty is all and
possibility, you damn
leathered red floozy.

I think you'd like my small hands, godless man. I would fold unto you like a china doll, and I think you'd read to me at night. And I don't know when I'd sleep again, because I already don't. I'll keep believing in god and strain out the stains in my narrative, I'm a drug addict, I'm so and so's niece, I was to be married once, he left me for spoons and cotton balls. You are Didion and I am Didion. I don't believe it's anything essential, I don't believe that's anything essential. You are a replacement, any man is a replacement, for god in my gut. China doll china doll but only if you ask me. To dinner, to protect my honor, to the front door with a shake and nothing more. My radiator is broken do you know how to fix it, it scares me at night. China doll china doll.

Dare I? I do dare:
Come to me, come to me in spring. Come to me stateside, my side of the states. You bring those lazy almond eyes and I, I will feed you and nourish you with all the rest.
Climb the stairs of my building, across the street from where Ginsberg wrote Howl, up to my room. Come only with the intention of kissing me, kissing me on the mouth and nowhere else, like I was to kiss you and no one else in Berlin. And then thumb through my books, find the one that seals the deal, and undress us because of it, because I have the right book and what that means about me.

Follow me, follow me here in the flesh and to my flesh because you already follow me. I open my schoolbook and the prologue is a quote from Herzog, by Saul Bellows, "For instance? Well, for instance, what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organised power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by..."

Teach me, teach me again to roll cigarettes, this time with the confetti raspy tomb tobacco stateside. Come to me, come to me in spring because I hardly remember you at all. I am sure I am writing to myself this time and not you. But I want, do I want.

What shall we do? What we shall do, darling. For instance, anything that has a devil may care tinge upon it, teeth marks on it, crushed pomegranate bruises on it, a whip of red horse hair across it, hot apple cider to soothe it.

I resolve, most resolutely, for this new year to never yell.

Your eyes are lazy almonds. I don't remember what your eyelashes are like but i remember the droop of those lazy, lazy almonds.