It was a wild one.
That much I know.
Now, first light of morning,
unclear how we arrived
in these unfamiliar surroundings,
clear on what happened though,
clearer still on the consequences
that await,
trying to be quiet,
I say out loud,
“You fucking slut,”
as I wash my face,
avoiding the mirror.
She was desperate,
on the edge,
she was crazy,
she was beautiful,
she was doomed,
abused,
neglected,
cast aside
by family
and friends,
she was lonely
and vulnerable,
perhaps, naïve,
she was honest,
she was lost,
abandoned,
cast into a
desperation
and into
drugs and
prostitution
and beatings
and
homelessness,
she was strong
and graceful
and held it
together
before she
fled the scene
into suicide
from the roof
of a
multi-storey
carpark.
her long legs
stretched out
over the couch
like 2 big snakes
ready to coil,
choke me good
just looking at her
I already can’t breathe
This old house—
a rattle of bones—
settles in
for the night—
the lights
of its eyes
dimmed.
Graying roof tiles
kiss, tentatively,
twilight’s gloved hand
in silent communion.
Her pale eye
peeks
past kaleidoscopes
of scattered sun
and browns
of rustling leaves,
indifferent
to the subtle advances
of worn rooftops
and old men.
***
(Originally published at The Milk House)
I want to write a poem about losing my virginity, not the erotic awkward momentousness of the act, but the one second where I’m on the mattress of a creaky fold-out couch in this tiny, dingy studio with the radiators hissing and I’ve already come once before even entering this young woman who is nine years my senior but who somehow thinks—I know how, I lied to her—that I’m actually four years older than her—and yet I’m nineteen, I’m still raring to go and go and go and her tits are nice though I’m not even really sure I like her but she likes me and that’s more than enough and she tells me soft-like, sexy, in a purring tone I’ve never heard before outside of pornos and once through a motel room’s thin walls, to put my dark little dick between her white, white tits and she has these big green eyes, her second nicest feature, the first being that she wants to fuck me, and I shake my head like Jerry refusing to eat the food Poppie made, you know the episode, because Poppie is sloppy, because Poppie didn’t wash his hands after he took a shit, but I don’t know what this refusal means or suggests or reveals, because I’m hard and she’s wet and I’m nineteen. I want to write a poem about that but I don’t know where to start.
When your wife has been ill for 2 years
and no doctor in the land can put a name to it
when she cries in bed each night
and flinches when you touch her
and all you can do is remember
how young and happy she once was
it is difficult to give a shit
that they’re fighting over sky-fairies in Tal Afar
or that demonstrators are up in arms in Barcelona
or that somebody made hot cakes on Facebook
or that glassy-eyed poets are passing mouth-gas on Spotify
bitching about Nietzsche
with their backdrop bookshelves testifying
to their talent and mental acuity
or that the motorcycle rally is next weekend
or that the car is filthy
from the spit that fell from the clouds
or that jam has bits of fruit in it unlike jelly
or that a pubescent loop-job dropped artillery
in a Missoula classroom
killing eleven
or that the monarchs are fluttering again
on the motherfucking wind.
He sucked on my AlloDerm lips and pounded my concentration-camp hips, trying in vain to fill my belly. I’d suspected, when he told me he’d given both his dogs – a German Shepherd and some kind of coyote – variations of his own first name, that the sex wouldn’t be selfless enough to be good enough; that he couldn’t pick pleasure out of a line-up. And I was right. Even in a part of the country as flat as this, an orgasm was never on the horizon.
It started with his fingers – the middle three, large, like a bunch of fucking mutant bananas and with knuckles like moldy walnuts – somewhere inside me, fumbling so deep they might be clawing at marrow. Fuck. It felt like a lion was chewing my spleen. Then – my body willing but my mind detached from the consensual unreality of what was being done to me – his tongue slurped at where he thought my still-hooded clit might be the way a trapped rat attacks a metal bucket. Then he was on top of me. I tightened my legs around him, ankles crossed and hands clasped behind his neck, as he rutted away at me.
But I could deal. Not a problem, and not unprecedented: pro-choice and promiscuous, I’ve had more scrapes than a three-year-old’s knees. So, with him panting over me like a whisky-breath Santa stoned on puberty, his clammy skin the color of boiled milk, I drifted away, as oblivious to his touch as he was to my indifference, compiling a grocery list and a who-to-try-next list.
‘Lucille,’ he shuddered as that cloying sperm smell told me it was over.
My throat constricted. Desire, the most painful of all the abstracts, was no longer with us. It died with his utterance of that name; an undeniable presence that felt as heavy as an iron lung.
He was soon asleep and I lay there, motionless in that bed of ghosts, my cheeks the only wet part of me.
You ask me to tell you a story.
Instead I will blow up a balloon,
Puffing my words into it
Until it is full.
I will not tie up the end.
I will hold that part
Between my fingers,
Up against your ear.
Slowly relaxing my grip.
The air will come rushing out
Along with all the sounds,
Vowels and consonants
Forming syllables
And phrases.
Listen closely
As the wind whispers
All the tales
I could ever wish to tell.
Don’t mind the scent
Of rubber and latex.
The stink is part
Of the price you have to pay
For being entertained this way.
So here I am wandering strange streets
In another strange town. Lost the tour bus,
So I started drinking. Got a bottle of what?
From some beverage shop full of foreigners.
No, locals. Here, for sure, I’m the foreigner.
Whatever this is, it’s kickin’ my ass big time.
Where is Rick Steves when you need him?
Now dark night and drizzling. Stepped? No,
Staggered into a cathedral. Yeah, mega
House of God. Big enough for basketball.
I’d give Him a drink but, no tellin’ what all
He’d do liquored up. Fire from the sky,
Another plague, zero out all bank accounts,
Make black white and white black, move
Our assholes to the middle of the forehead.
Whoa, better stop before He gets ideas.
the bottle rockets
landed on the neighbor’s roof
over and over
that summer.
It was the summer the Pearson Girls
still climbed trees
and the men
who worked with our father
gathered in the backyard
on Saturdays
to throw horseshoes
and drink beer
talk about the Union
and Management
and who was filing a grievance
and every Saturday as if on cue
the neighbor would come out
on his porch
pitch ringers
about the drinking
and the foul language
and the goddamn bottle rockets
that landed on his roof like memories
of a summer long ago
Horror Sleaze Trash 