Paige Johnson

The Look

You think you can read minds
when you can’t even read faces, 
assigned readings, or job applications.
Not that I’m bold enough to be as forthwith,
as forthcoming when you waste away weeks 
building forts in fantasy games and 
shedding physical tears 
over magic guild politics.

Sometimes I wonder if I’ve left the VR headset 
sweat-stuck to my forehead,
fallen into a dream
and crossed wires,
over worlds
to live this
diametric
to you.

Our last “good time” was our worst,
even though it kept me clean a year.
I thought your friend was joking, 
packed away too many other potions, 
when he said that pill was made of crystal
and puke-splattered our firepit.

Whatever was in that brown sugar
you swatched my gums with,
it wasn’t pure anything,
and least of all ecstasy.

I watched you seize on purple sheets,
blond caterpillar brows sopping like mop pads.
You kicked inside your mom’s curlicue comforter
like you were diseased from a Sudanese mosquito,
too caught in convulsions to mouth “malaria.”

Yet, three hours later, all you could say was “More.”

That’s when mine kicked in.
My perception of you and the world folded in and over, 
double-helixing in freefall.

Forget all the chills and purging and 
paranoia of the floorboards breathing 
and lifting me like the Gravitron at all 
the fairs you wouldn’t attend with me.
Forget the Yellow Feverish comedown 
that wouldn’t let me sleep for days,
and the serotonin-sap that wouldn’t
allow me to smile for almost a month.

What sticks with me the most is me crawling 
to the sitting room to seek solace in the 
rhythmic waterfall and rainbow fish of our aquarium,
and watching them all slowly die, enflamed with
pusy white bumps and transparent clamped fins 
with an ailment too childishly/cruelly named “the ick.”
Our first home purchase, my dream tank,
dissolving in sudsy flesh, sinking into jagged caves, 
not to be seen again until I unclogged the corpses
with bare hands, wishing I had the wherewithal to cry,
as you laughed from the other room.

I never thought much on or mentioned this until a year later,
a whole one sober but somehow sadder,
when we were broken up and I tried to give you 
the only surviving fish before you moved, 
and you said, “Why should I care about a life
that’s just a fish’s?”

That’s when I finally cried,
clutching zebra-zagged little Milo,
hands cupped in the new tank one-tenth the size
even though he’d grown twice the inch he started. 
Milo’s sponge-brown eyes flicked between me and my ex.
His spiney tail splashed against
my weak palms and I thought 
I deserved to be slashed
for ever entertaining this was 
someone to share a life with,
someone strung lower than algae-eaters 
and the detritus they suckle from.

Not long after, you said the same about an actual baby,
busy sucking up more “MDMA” pills, fat green bars, 
and whatever could rattle inside an Rx case.

That’s all that gave you the courage to tell me
you couldn’t get over the way I looked that night 
in the streaming blue tank light,
disgusted and sick and tired 
and how you were to blame
—but not enough to change
like the mulm-molting
creature in my hand,
not enough to love
like the pleco fish
appling my eye.