creeping over concrete trails to the clink of phantom draughts – the shadow of red velvet nights staining my teeth and throat the altar of empty bottles—tributes to the blur and stretch of a girl whose name I will forget to the assurance that death is a lie to the knife-edge brightness of Orion to waking up, to minute-stopping throbs ticking down the day against the walls, my skull; a […]
The sun lowered itself into our six o’clock armchair, blushing cream walls to the tune of Dionysus’s blood, your faith between my ribs chanting thanks to God for the static under fingernails and when the same sun has gone tortoise-slow and quiet through the ground beneath us the breeze that didn’t blow today transforms a moonless night into myth—a remark thrown into shape: it’s summer, these things happen I know […]
‘Show a leg, sailor,’ I nudge her ribs, wreathed in petals of sunlight as the creak-cry of gulls splits her gummed eyes. It’s always a summer morning here, even in November; her perfume of sweat and gunpowder pulls the tide below my belly. Last night, I shooed away a final customer – he pouted but he paid, attempted to remark before her eyebrow cocked under her hat – then she […]
He left her, you know – though he loved her from the first and loved her still, he said he wasn’t fit for marriage. He tried to explain, console her. She married another. That was centuries before us, but because of you I wonder: how did Regine get through it? Maybe the adrenalin rushed through her chest each time her lover’s words reached out for the unnamed world to […]
You were the footnote to afternoons in high summer and I thought of you as a limp breeze bumped sponges of air through the window screen, coating my skin with heat. You were the asterisk to my youth (*deceased), whispered asides, never direct conversations (*they’re too young to understand). I wrote you a letter on an old computer in DOS, as if eight years hadn’t passed since we sat in […]
you know it isn’t the pictures that hurt. it’s the second you remember realisation washing over you like far-flung west coast squalls: you wouldn’t be one of those girls, with the highlights in their hair, glowing auras, faces lacquered with availability. you sprayed peroxide & lemon juice over your dark brown curls; brassy, light at last– streaks to coat with kool-aid rainbows. your sudden curves a pale burden to […]
All day I curl up against the wall with black coffee, reading your old copy of Dorian Gray. I wait for December dusk, the top side of the feather duvet frosting my fingertips. Hiding away, I carve this trench in your room, persistent as rain. I push past gossip murmured by these walls, of who else slept in this bed that now holds my body’s shape. […]
Old Cemetery, Owensville, Ohio I said good morning to her every day on my way to school. The rain-flattened engraving kept a century’s secret, on a headstone leaning after too many Midwestern winters. I pretended to know her: “wife of ______”, though she’d long since sifted down to dust and bones beneath the roots of our village. I invented her tragic death, looked for signs, willed her to haunt me. […]
Melancholy Hyperbole 