Gloss

In this photograph I have of you
you're licking your finger, preparing
to turn the page of a magazine.

Except all of those glossy sheets are
outside of the frame, so
the whole thing becomes
an immortal monument, a
spotlight on a moment I
was thinking the dirtiest
things about you.

You were wearing that sleeveless dress,
darling,
what were you trying to do to me?

Making me vibrate inside
of my skin inside of
spacetime so I had to
go into the kitchen
and make myself a drink
just to slow the evening down.

I know that,when I remember
you, I will remember
your lips
and your fingers.

I will remember the way
the spades of your fingernails
would rake over the ghostly,chalk
fields of my skin. But mostly,
I will remember how
you would fall asleep,so suddenly,
and I would be left talking to myself
for five,
ten,
minutes without evening realizing.

Wow

To say,
"please,
not-God,
but the thing we pray to
anyway, never let us stop
being gentle.

To say, never
make it our turn
to become the monsters
we left on the other side
of the river.

With kissed-on lips,
to say, "oh
how strange this is"

how strange to watch
someone new turn into music
under record needle fingers, to have
the limits of this world slid off
of your back like the straps
of a dress,

to have hands
so suddenly
full

oh
how strange it is

to say,
"wow"

because
really living
and really dying
both just feel like exhaling forever

Bottle

More or less, in the spirit of Halloween.

In the living room, I struck him with the empty bottle of champagne I had in my hand. There was a flurry of green glass and a mist of blood, as if, for a moment, it was sleeting Christmas colors. They don't tell you the truth about what it is like to kill a man. When they warn you about the consequences, about the guilt and the grief, no one cares to mention how it gets there. It's the strangest thing; how along with all of that blood, a reel of film spools out from the back of the poor bastard's skull, and the sun swings on its axis to project their lives on the back wall for you to watch. The strangest thing. I watched as he skipped stones with his brother, raced him up and down a lake shore. He made love to a pretty girl with bangs in the backseat of his mother's station wagon and after he dropped her off that night cried, inexplicably, with his head on the steering wheel. He tore his knee freshman year of college playing soccer, replaced sports with literature, published a few descent stories over the course of his years. At thirty, he married and this was the first time I met his kids. They looked strong and tan, with their toothy smiles projected against the wall of my study as their father crumpled in slow motion at my feet. I nearly forgot myself, then. Something centrifugal began to turn inside of me. The neck of the champagne bottle, which I had been clutching white-knuckled through all of this, fell from my fingers. Vomit or tears contested for the right to shake through my body. I prepared to pitch myself to the carpet, to clutch at the corpse of this man who was now my friend, and beg to some God for his resurrection. But the film on the wall kept running. And there, pinned up like a calendar girl, amidst all of this man's best days, was the body of my wife. My wife, smiling at him with her head on his chest. My wife making love to him in our backyard, the chrysanthemums I planted for her clear in the background, and shrieking, but not stopping, when the sprinklers came on. My wife mouthing “I love you” over and over as he took her picture with a Polaroid camera. The hot gust of her breath in his ear when she said, “Of course I'll leave him. Of course.” The reel ran black. I looked at the cracked body at my feet and I remembered. I remembered.

Poem--Untitled

It's summer and the sky pushes down its pregnant
stomach until there is no room to breath.
You want to reach up your arms and cut the rain out.

thinking lately about how strange it is
that your neighbors never bother to shut the door
to have an argument
anymore. It's too hot for that,
you understand,
but the stuff of their conversations is fast
becoming the building material of your dreams
and when you wake up hung over,
it's as if you've been another person for four hours.

It's summer and the sun is a cauterizing flame.

They fight about this dog they own together
fight about how it bit the man-- oh it was so long ago-- but
he still can't look at the thing without thinking about the flash
of it moving at him and there's this stupid
phrase that's stuck in his
head about it:
animal enamel.

When you wake up thinking
you're this man, your stomach
hurts because you're so weak--
a weak man who hates a dog
because he's not smart enough to realize
that he actually hates a girl. How could he
hate a girl he's loved since high school?

But then your eyes adjust to the light
and you
remember that you don't give a fuck about dogs
and you
make yourself a cup of coffee
and you
feel better.

It's summer and the line of tombstones
on the freeway inches toward a terrible sun.

Sitting in the shade of the
stairs that lead up to your
place you wonder if it's a problem
specific to your generation
that you feel so much but can't
seem to think straight.

You set out to make lists of things
that could be the cause--
something in the water,
partisan politics,
the absence of authentic American cuisine--but then
you get distracted and it becomes a grocery list
which you lose later on,
emptying your pockets,
looking for your cigarettes.

Snippit, sequentially after the post below in larger work

Flat tire before I was even out of the state, can you believe it? I thought I was going to beat that letter to you, but now I have my doubts. Maybe if I just drove straight through: it's only 25 hours from here, and the mechanic said I'll be ready to go first thing in the morning. I could make it, but I'm about as good at fighting sleep as I am a boxer. It probably doesn't matter anyway. Chances are just as good that you shred the letter before reading it.

I called you this morning, before I put the last of the boxes in the car. I tried your parents place, hung up right before the fourth ring. How many times in your life have you been walking away from placing an unanswered phone call, and had the phone ring right back at you? It's like an orgasm, or someone bursting a paper bag right next to your ear. It was bill collectors, the same ones that called two months ago, still trying to sniff out the last tenets of, what has just become, our old place.

Work in progress, untitled, rough, part of larger epistolary work

(Excerpt of larger work in progress. No edits yet.)


Cynthia,

I read that book you were always telling me to read. Out of Boston, bound for NYC, I propped my knees on the back of that threadbare Fung-Wah bus seat and I just tore into it. It was the first book I'd read in months, the only Salinger I'd read at all, except for that one story about banana fish, and I guess I liked it all right. Only problem was, I wasn't even halfway through before I started to notice the things that you had pulled from the pages to line your life with. It became obvious to me all at once, like cracking a code, and the epiphany sent me flipping back through read pages, just to make sure I wasn't imagining things. After that, I wasn't reading a novel, I was trying to work off the dust of a mirror that held your reflection.

When I finished the book, I spent the rest of the ride staring at the ceiling, and seeing your face up there. There was a woman next to me, substantial proportions squeezed into a brown glove of a dress, who kept trying to get me to talk about what was wrong, fancied herself my mother, but I wasn't interested in talking. I was talked out. I was everythinged out. I had gone to Boston three days after you left, shacked up with one of my ex's from high school to try and get you off my mind (if you ever read this, I suppose hearing that will make you jealous, you raging hypocrite, you), and decided to come back because, after just a week, she started picking up my vocal mannerisms and, since I've been talking like you for years now, the whole thing just became too much to bear. When I got off the bus, I spent a full minute blinking in the spring sun.

I'm not staying long. Being one of the few people in New York insane enough to own an automobile, and, at that, a full sized van, has the singular advantage of facilitating hasty get aways. I'll be leaving in the morning. Today, I spent hours immersed in the ruminative monotony of packing boxes, making an exit plan and trying to figure out why you lent me the damn book in the first place. Sure, it's been your favorite thing your whole life. It was on your bedside table in the dormitories, when we were still in school, and when we got our own place after graduation it moved to the plastic crates we used as bedside tables 'cause we couldn't afford real ones. You probably bought a new copy to fill up whatever's serving as your beside table now. What I mean to say is, I guess I should have read it a long time ago, but the thing is that you never asked me to once, not in the whole two years we were together.

In fact, I remember a certain blizzard that locked us in our rattrap apartment for three days last year. I was going nuts for something to do, so I picked it up and set down to read it but you took it out of my hands before I even got past the dedication. I remember, you took it and said, “I know this is going to seem unreasonable, but now is not the time for you to read this.” Your reaction took me aback, at first, but I let it go, easy. Joked around, said, "Well, if that's how you feel about it," and then went and smoked a cigarette on our fire escape. It was something to see, the way the snow swallowed that iron ladder only two steps down from the landing I perched on, even though we lived on the second floor.

I didn't understand it then, but now I am far more confounded as to your intentions. Cynthia, darling, you abandon me and run to Texas, but you leave me the book. Why? In hopes that, once I found so many allusions to the text in your life, I would write you off as a charlatan and let you go? That I would suddenly find you disappointing and unoriginal? Darling, if your life is just some movie adaptation of a book, then it's a loose one. A reimagination, to give the accuracy of your interpretation the most credit it deserves. And that's no slight to you. You did a brilliant job with it. It's just that, however much you feel like you're indebted to your influences, your work is still unmistakably original.

Anyway, the point of this is to say I'm coming to Texas. I know that you told me not to, but I'm not listening. Even if it's only one more time, I need to see you. I'll explain why when I arrive. After all, if I could do otherwise, there would be no point in taking the journey to begin with. I'm mailing this letter to your parents' address, which is also the first place I'll come looking for you. I have some confidence that, with economic matters as they are, you haven't been able to find your own digs yet. But who knows: you have friends, you have ingenuity. Regardless, it's a place to start.

I hope I beat this letter to you for my sake. There is some concern that, upon its receipt, you will run from me.

Love, despite everything,

Michael

Easier

Easier

I.

The boy picked her up from her parents' place. He waited in the car for her to come, listening to music and drumming his fingers on the wheel. The Malibu looked dirty from the outside, coated in summer pollen and the grit from city rain, but on the inside it was spotless. His fingers smelled bitter from coins he had put in the vacuum machine at the service station only a few minutes before. If he thought the girl had loved him, he might have smoked. But the girl did not love him and so he put a stick of gum in his mouth and checked his chin where the razor had slipped. It wasn't the same. Another minute flicked past on the clock, and he cleared his throat, raised the volume of the stereo and drummed his fingers.

The girl left her parents' house precisely five minutes after they were supposed to meet, which was right on time. She came out the side gate and walked past the garden that was all weeds now, wearing a dress that made her skin look like cream. The fabric was blue, a little too dark for the shade of her eyes. Over the dress she wore a men's blazer that did not belong to the boy.

Giving him a weak wave from the lawn, she walked up to the car and around to the passenger door. She tried the handle, and when the door didn't open, the boy undid the locks so she could come inside.

“Hi,” said the girl, as she floated into the passenger's seat.

“It's good to see you. You look great.”

They drove out of town on a dusty ranch road that ran north. Limestone hillsides and patches of trees cleared away for quarries that stayed lit up like amusement parks all night. They were looking for an empty parking lot. The boy wanted it to be someplace he didn't know, where his memories wouldn't win out over experience.

“Do you care where we go?” he asked.

Staring into the window glass, looking at the scenery or maybe her reflection, she said that whatever was fine with her. Her face was mottled by the little moonlight that made its way to the interior of the car. Two weeks earlier, they had met up for the first time in over a year at some asian restaurant where they ate in a large outdoor seating area, overrun with birdbaths and ivy. The first ten minutes they had barely spoken, gawking at each other in contemplation of their changed looks, in wonder of what a year could do.

For the boy, it had been rough. He had come back into town after dropping out of school, after spending months at a state college, sleeping all the time and driving to fuck away weekends with an out of town girlfriend named Elizabeth, who he knew loved him, but also had been breaking his heart for as long as he could remember. He skin had grown stained and weathered, like the stretches of Texas terrain he had traversed on her behalf. The girl though, sitting beside him in the car, had erupted into something miraculous and dangerous since their last meeting. He was acutely aware of it as they drove: how she had been beautiful a year ago, but now she was older and wore it with abandon, almost with anger, as if it was her revenge on everything to look so good. She put her feet up on the dashboard, and played with the fraying ends of a run in her tights.

“Hey,” he said, “Are you alright?”

“Let's not talk about that, okay?”

He looked away from the road at her because he could not stop looking away from the road at her. She ran her finger along the tab for the automatic locks and after a while she said, “Can you believe we used to be so young?”

He said, “Are we old already?”

II.

The roads climbed, running thin and twisting like a black serpent choking the life out of the hillsides and the boy put a hand on the girl's thigh. She chewed on her lower lip while she contemplated the gesture. He probably didn't even know what he meant by it, he was so used to love. The moment hung in the air for a while, until the boy noticed that the girl was looking at him strangely.

“I'm sorry,” he said, stretching out his fingers across the fabric of her dress. “Is this not okay?”

“I don't know,” she said, and ran her hand over his knuckles. His skin was freezing.

Up ahead of them, a set of street lights appeared, washing out the night. Their metal stalks were planted in the parking lot of an abandoned bible school: an outpost for some suburb that had become a ghost town when the housing bubble burst. It was a possible stopping point. The boy didn't believe in sin, so the irony didn't matter to him. He didn't know what the girl believed in.

“Want to check it out?” he asked.

“Sure,” she said.

They pulled into the lot and parked. In front of them, at the end of the lot, the land dropped off and went running for ten miles down to the city they had left. Those lights glimmered like the embers of a dying fire and the boy rolled down the windows and inhaled the cool air. He killed the engine but left the power on because he didn't want the radio to shut off. His ribs distended and fell back into place as he breathed, and he thought of knots untying.

The girl watched this, and she said, “Can you turn the headlights off?”

He looked at her, and smiled. She smiled too, but quickly let her gaze drop down to her ankles. He flicked off the headlights. A moment wore down and then they were kissing. Her mouth was softer than anything, some violet static that washed over him. She ran her fingers down the skin of his neck, and he closed his eyes and she was the only thing he felt in that dark. Then he thought of his own fingers tracing across Elizabeth's neck, four days ago. Of the bruise that he knew was caused by someone else's lips and the open drawers across her dorm room that she always stared into after they fucked. The girl had called him, his phone vibrating deep within the sheets, and when Elizabeth had asked who it was, he had told her that the girl was just an old friend he had run into. Eventually Elizabeth had rolled over to look at him and when she dropped her head onto his chest, he closed her eyes and felt the weight of it and knew had been lied to because the world was anything but limitless.

In the car, his fingers pushed across the fabric of her dress and his mouth was hungry and dry. They were in the back seat now, the windows still rolled down and the stereo still playing. The whole thing was careless because it had to be, because they knew that thought would rip the night in half. She let him take off her dress, lifting her arms over her head. When he had it off, she took the lifeless fabric from his hands and threw it on the floor. He smiled a sheepish smile and she lay back against the cool leather of the car seats. Seeing her like that, he wanted her in his bed on a morning when the sun was out, wanted to feel her skin as it would contrast with cloth and comfort. He watched her for too long, and she stared in his eyes as he watched. Then she sat up and she put her arms around his neck and pulled him toward her and moved her mouth in his

He pushed his fingers underneath her bra and he was reading her like a map when his phone went off in the backseat. All at once context clapped down around them: he saw it come together in her eyes. He watched her face change expression as she remembered what brought them here, the stupid drunken voicemail she had left him, how sad he looked when he picked her up. He brushed her hair away, tried to brush those thoughts away from her. He kissed her on her cheek, and while his lips were tracing down her stomach, she said, “wait,” and at first it just came out as hot breath, so she said it again.

“Wait.”

He looked up at her. The concern on his face was obvious and fatal. He said, “What's the matter?” even though the answer was spelled out in the air. She hesitated and she said, “I really don't want to fuck anything up for you.”

He laughed a sick laugh, like a death rattle or wood splintering, and he said, “You could not possibly fuck anything up that hasn't been broken forever.”

She wanted to be insistent. She said, “Really.”

And he got up right next to her face and he said, “I promise. This is what I want. I wouldn't be here otherwise.”

She shook her head at the boy like he was misunderstanding the world completely, but when he pressed his lips against hers again to prove his point she kissed him back, and when he ran his fingers over the lace of her underwear she lifted her hips so he could take them off. They let the phone ring and ring.

III.

Afterward, they stayed for a while in the cool of the car. There was a feather on her hip, composed of barely straight lines. He ran his finger along the raised ink, and said, “What's this?”

She said, “ I did it myself.”

He asked why, and she said, “Sometimes you just get too drunk and too sad.”

The boy turned the stereo off and took the keys out of the ignition so that the battery wouldn't die and they could stay longer, and asked, “Is that why you're here now?”

Soon, the girl wanted to put her dress back on. The boy got out of the car and walked around to the front and sat on the hood. He put his hand on the pack of cigarettes in his pocket, and hesitated for a while before he lit one. The girl joined him while he finished it. He drove her home. In her driveway, she started to get out and he said, “Hey, wait,” and they shared another long kiss before he let her slip away from him. She tasted like he imagined the winds might taste if they were changing.

VII.

The boy drove back toward his house as rain was starting to fall, thinking about the girl. There were puddles of water already gathered at the shoulders of the road from yesterday's storms and they reflected streetlamps like they were trying to imitate constellations. He wanted everything beautiful to stop, because it was making his head ache. He wanted a drink. He pulled off the road two exits early, and parked in front of a gas station.

The boy got out of the car and smoked another cigarette, staring at the sky, and then at the gasoline pumps. When he was finished, he threw the butt of his cigarette into a puddle, searched his pockets for change and vacuumed the car. The car got clean, and then he didn't know what to do. He walked the lot until, eventually, his cellphone was in his hand and he stared for a long time at the girl's number in his directory, mouthing her name to himself again and again. Then, slowly, he scrolled down another 6 names and dialed.

Elizabeth answered on the fourth ring and he could tell by her voice that she was alone.

He said, “Can I come over?”