"Head, Hunter"

What small thing I gave you
I've forgotten.
When we sputtered on the basement floor
How did that feel?

I said, you are not here, not anymore
Nothing walks in the kitchen
before I turn on the light.
Still I pretend

The water haunts the drain
Rises like a Judgment bride
and fouls the air
like a shiny, smirking Jesus child
Like Lazarus
Like a hand holding hands
still reaching.

What do you want?  What was it called?

a swelling, fingers, spreading apart
pushing up, then rivers
and six inches of tepid water

This is no place for a waiting heart
These walls are not to be contemplated against.
This bed is to be yours, again
But it is not for my aching,

pressing,
gritting
tribute.

It is not for the dead
to walk up to and find me
when I've finally fallen
into my own, mortal
mockery of Sleep
after six whole days.

Six, after which they'd given up---
The ghosts---
and left

Because they can't lie down
next to me
and they can't wake me
and they can't remind me
what it was to touch your warm body.

Ideas blah blah

1.   "Today, I called myself by your name.  When I realized this, for a moment, I couldn't quite remember mine."


2.  There was that aware, irrevocable regret as the kid reached the door.  She did not turn the knob, but put her hands palms-down against the wood.  Bean watched her.  Something in them both fell, though her hands ascended, ascended, until they finally conceded that, yes, there was this invisible weight.  However, just as quickly, she turned and fell on him with a smile. 
    Bean thought more of getting her out, how cold it would be, and smoothed her jacket. 
    The kid sort of hung and bowed, and they both stood until it seemed more like the time to say goodbye.
    She laughed, looked up at him, and said,
   "I just wanted to be punk like you."
   He smiled and she went out into the reveling streets.

meh

    “I don't want to shower here,” she said.
    Bean glanced up.  Not even so much as a sardonic murmur, did she get.  She stood over Bean, observing its thin little form on the couch.  A scarf tied around its neck, it staring up with those mildly annoyed eyes.  As if every attempted conversation were an interruption.  She looked at Bean's legs and the way its thighs curved in so as never to touch each other, and she felt equally jealous and attracted.
    “I said I don't want to shower here!”
    Plainly, Bean said, “Why?”
    She knew that it didn't really care “why”, and only answered her because it knew she only wanted it to say something so that she could get angry.
    “You seem like the type that has to masturbate to fall asleep.”
    “Do I really?”  Bean asked.
    “I mean, you seem that fucking repressed and miserable that I bet you have to do it to shut out all those thoughts at night, just furiously masturbate until everything's okay again.”
    “Nope.”
    Bean watched her for a moment, perhaps paused in case she had anything further to say.  When she didn't, when she just stiffened her shoulders and turned her eyes this way and that, Bean again ignored her.
    Bean's hair---short or long, depending what your thoughts are---stuck out in pieces, so that no matter which way she came at it, she was confronted with black knives.  Though she noticed, today, how faded its hair had gotten; the dye leaked out through its fingers, swirled around the drain and went down, down, down that stack of bones, down those thin legs, against those unmoving feet, and was washed away.
    As she thought about leaving, she pondered the back of its neck.  But this was what made her say, “Do you know why I...?”
    Maybe Bean had stopped listening.
    It took a large, calm breath, and said again, “Why.”
    “Because,” she said, almost satisfied, “No one loved you ever.”
    “Okay.”
    But she knew that wasn't true.  Someone had loved it, after all.  When they looked at one of its earliest sonograms and called it “Bean”.

Cleaning my ears is another thing that I used to enjoy but now just feels painful.

Yesterday I pulled a dead ant from my ear, and when I realized it had been there for a month-and-a-half, I thought of the people in that time who have kissed me on the mouth, cheeks, and forehead.

 

I met you when I needed to know there were nice people in the world,
but before I realized I am not one of them.

-C

revision. hate revisions.

Dear Phillip,


The second-to-last time I saw you, you called me "Judith" and sexually assaulted me in my own bed. But don't worry; I never told anyone. I know how much you wanted my friends to like you.

I've been well. Right now I'm trying to rid myself of my self-injuring tendency to always be moving “faster and faster and farther away”, yet I don't think I've ever been happier than I am now. I live a sort of special, quiet existence as of late. There. Now I've given you kind of an idea. And... what else? I have cherry-red hair and sleep a lot later, if I can. Today I couldn't because I got restless, so I decided I would write to you.

This letter concerns yesterday:

I had a bicycle accident on my way home.  Holes in my clothes, fresh scrapes in my skin under those... And it was raining, so all the mud unloosed, stinging as it went down.  And, regardless of everything else, I still thought about it---

The population of Boulder, Co. is 102,800. I suppose something like this should have been among my expectations when I chose to move here, knowing you made the same decision a whole year and a half ago.

I think up until yesterday you may have been dead. But I saw you and you even look like dirty laundry.

Phillip, was this accidental, or will I be seeing a lot of you?

If you want, when it happens, we can again feel the tiniest moment of utter panic and pretend not to recognize each other. I'm not even going to look up your address and mail this letter, if it makes you feel any better.

Before you left our city of origin, you called me by my full name, and then you called me “whore”. No one ever calls me either, and I've been mulling the truth of these things since.

J.



-C