armed with little more than a whim

[poem]: an affair

epistolic — Thu, 26 May 2011 13:15:25 GMT

an affair

A line of taxis outside your door
and an exit sign, looking nauseous.
Sometimes I bring flowers or a basket of fruit or a movie
but mostly I just take off my clothes while your shower is running
in the room next door, and lie down on the bed.
The clock ticks on the wall
but you're looking at me like you think I'm a highway,
a riddle that someone has scrawled in black felt
on the crusty inside of a toilet stall.
I don't like your mouth and I don't like your hair
or your cigarette-smell folded inside of my clothes
or your limbs, unfurling.
I've looked in your palm and it's empty.
The ceiling fans tremble like bells
while the smell of your cooking comes into the bedroom
as harsh as a baby's cry.
Turn the lights off
and for an hour the two of us will dream of ghosts
in a circle of chalk, in a wedding ring.

[poem]: atlas

epistolic — Sun, 22 May 2011 04:56:13 GMT

atlas

You said you were hungry, so I took my heart out
and placed it in front of your plate like an orange.
I’m wearing Black Cherry on my nails, and yesterday
the two of us watched a film in which a girl had her fingers
bitten off by a psychopath.
You’re the prettiest boy I’ve met.
Last week, someone stabbed electric wire
through a possum and taped it to a power pole
while a girl in my class had a cancer cut from her face
and cried for three hours because of the scar.
Every time I think that I know this world
I look at you, and see the pulp of me between your teeth.
A year from now, the two of us will marry.
I’ll keep holding my ribcage out for the pips.

[poem]: jennifer

epistolic — Thu, 19 May 2011 12:40:40 GMT

jennifer

We’re walking down Queen Street, and you’re telling me stories
about the time you broke your fingers beating up
two guys in fifth grade.
I’m trying to imagine it,
you, a school uniform white as paint,
biting and spitting and pulling on hair and
screaming like a dog. You’re as good as my sister,
the one I never had but called Jennifer all the same.
You’re not scared of anything.
Sometimes I feel you trying to fix me,
walking down the gravel on our driveway in Milton,
walking down Queen Street,
walking down a dead end with your fingers on my back
like a radio dial, and I’ll think about telling you that I’m in love
with the ten-year-old kid who lives a block away
guitar chords in the early hours
the sizzle of rain
candle wax on the bottom of a mirrored dish
the cool smell of your linen.
Those are good days, and then sometimes I feel
so sick I can barely think. When I’m lying in bed
with the burnt taste of carbon in the back of my mouth, shivering,
I think a bridge opens up for me
so white I could lick it, take it into my belly,
breed it.
Always so far.
Little Jennifer, hard-knuckled and never afraid –
you’d tell me to fight, but I’m naked at heart and I
thought I’d killed you in a mirror ten years ago.
You’re the sister I never grew into, or met, or gave birth to, or swallowed.
You’ll bury me one day.

[poem]: midnight in los angeles

epistolic — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 13:20:32 GMT

midnight in los angeles

Somewhere in the city my sisters are driving
and my cousin is coming to ask for her future back.
I feel like I should know this city, I’ve driven around it enough.
There was that single time, if you still remember,
when we sat by the curb in our high-heeled shoes late at night
with the moths in rings by our heads, very low, and you asked me to kiss you.
You’ve stopped painting now
but I’d like to think that I’ve cured myself of screwing the lids on jars
that won’t close, or won’t open to save themselves.
My father brought us out here to search for a life
thirty years ago, and I think you could find anything at all you wanted
if you just searched in the gutter for long enough.
I’m still scrabbling for a coin you might have tossed to me,
for your cigarette smoke, for that earring you lost in the cab with my tongue in your mouth.
I’m not too picky, baby,
I’ll settle for offal when no-one will.
I’ll drive this city into the ground and you’d better believe it,
because I have, and because I know you might still come home.

[poem]: thoughts from the inside of a courtyard

epistolic — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 06:47:44 GMT

thoughts from the inside of a courtyard

I.
The two of us in a courtyard, your head in my lap and my
fingers in the brown of your hair, sitting still.
I’m wishing that we were on a road somewhere, with the wind drying out our eyes and lips
so that when I kissed you I’d taste something dirty and bare and
it would remind me of those nights, in the grime of a room
with all the doors wide open and no way out.
It’s easy to ask for a thing you don’t have, and have no plan of having.
You used to kiss like gunpowder
or the colour of steel, and I used to think it was better
to pick glass up, carefully, by the fingers than leave it
cracked on the ground like a knife had gone in.
You’re wishing for a road.
I’m wishing for a river to wash my hands with
to clean out my heart with
to breathe as my air.

II.
Somehow in my dreams I see us stumbling through a field.
There are dogs, and a creek, and your laces undone
on the boots that you stole from the girl two streets down, while her back was turned.
I don’t really think
that the mud on your knees makes that much of a difference.
Lying on gravel, lying on carpet with the dogs always yapping,
you with that look as if you’re itching to get your hands on a shotgun
and the taste of fresh blood when I bite my tongue.
We had what we wished for, when we wished for nothing and
tramped through the fields just to flatten the grass,
trailing sweat. I can’t mend a bone that’s not broken
or toss it to dogs who’d still love us yet.
The cigarette I’m holding is lit at both ends, and
I can’t put it out, or you out with it.

III.
I was five when my mother opened a fridge
and I’d left a doll there in plastic wrap, dress blue and eyelids frozen shut.
I was eight when the car door slammed on the driveway
and nine when the ducks flew into our pool
and my father chased them away with a broom, while I watched.
I was thirteen when I met you and I felt as if
I’d forgotten how to feel at all, those old days spent
scrambling deep in the dust of my mother’s attic, kissing over portraits,
you on your back on the floor
with the cobwebs trailing from your elbows like paths
through a desert that neither of us had planned for yet.
I liked the lamp, and the things that we didn’t know,
and your uncle’s boots clumping up the stairs.
I wished for an hourglass that would never turn over,
while you wished for a mystery, and I never found out.