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Saturday Night Saturday Night We are watching someone pretending to die on TV, once again your arm around my waist, hands beneath the blankets as if seeing someone being repeatedly jabbed with an icepick was the most romantic of events, of settings, a natural prelude to mashing body parts together and staggering into bed. I lean into your shoulder wait for that first, perfect kiss I know is coming, pray that that stupid commercial with the hamster chanting Buddhist mantras is about to come on, something, anything to disrupt the uncomfortable feeling that I am getting turned on by watching someone get jabbed in the eye with an icepick, and I’m too busy groping and fumbling to truly care. Somewhere there are rats crammed into shoeboxes wires strung into their perforated skulls, diodes set into their flesh and they are real, they are not acting out their horrible, lingering deaths. In the bathroom, jamming my diaphragm into place I recite Buddhist mantras for those rats, the ones the hamster taught me think about those rats in the shoeboxes, what they’d think about my impassive viewing of a stranger getting stabbed over and over again with an icepick wonder if they could distinguish between the special effects needed to make the scene work, or the actual criminal, torturous act, I wonder if I can tell the difference, what I should do. ... The Flavor of the Sea She bares only half of her history to him, spreads her hands wide to hide the stories that should stay buried. There are screams sandwiched between pages of sunlight, blood washed into wasted breath parts of her that will always be stained with dirty fingerprints will never wash clean. She sets her pleasant thoughts carefully on the quilt before him, delicate as china lets them unfold into bright, floppy paper flowers fancy enough for displaying, half-opened, in jacket pockets at formal functions. She can be good and pure for this one, she can, ignore the whispers like needles the panicked dreams of escape. ... Barricade I pretend my house is an island, Louisiana before the white men came surrounded by the emptiness of the ocean and virginal in the ways of vapid conversation. The wind blows in the sound of trains rumbling by sounds like voices coming through a baby monitor, strange hands poised to smash through glass. I am San Juan before the Spanish landed, far from the boy next door and the thud of the dishwasher upstairs. I can almost see all the way to Catalina Island through the glare of streetlights the flocks of white-winged moths and storm clouds heavy with portent. The ripple of galleon sails distorts the horizon, damns me to admit white men once continued long enough down the Mississippi to find my house did not turn around at the entrance of the Gulf of Mexico, were not dissuaded by the piles of beer cans in my trash, the oil derricks tilted off-center in the bay the lawn paved over to make a cracked basketball court. ... The First Year Out Numbers of gees flew overhead and you laughed at my excitement, our mutual relief at the sight of the old farm still standing, the broken windmill, the outlying buildings. They held a future we dreamed aloud--a vegetable garden, flocks of chickens and turkeys, thick as clouds and eager for morning. Your fingertips relieved the ache that settled into my shoulders so many years before I’d lost count. The ache set into new places, almost forgotten, for a little while longer for a full season of wonder as we made final promises against a sun that kept disappearing as if into a great crack in a wall of reoccurring rainbows. You told me about the geese that would land in the new pond and stay, the cows that were coming soon spoke as if we had a real destination, a plan. I am still holding onto that first day, descending over barren hills borders between states disappearing into thin spiderwebs crisscrossing a map sacred ash in a smoldering iron pot. I remember when you laid out your theory of the sun-scorched, explained how we were just like those clouds of birds that came to rest on the flat, golden plains around us their feathers taunting us our slow, tired bondage to earth. It all made so much sense back then. ... The Box We pick it out together, giggle uncontrollably over the pastel lining the superfluous pillows sewn to the interior, deny the shadow of cancer and fear that hides in the shadows in the dark space between our palms when I take your hand. I call you “Mom” more often now, forgo introducing you by first name even to strangers. These last days, all I want is for you to be my mother. This seems a good enough place to bury your secrets cushioned in unrealized dreams of running away. This will be a place where shouted orders aren’t expected to complete you where cracked pots and conceptual pieces aren’t questioned on merit where bluebirds come gift-wrapped and sing only of self-preservation. Visit our shop and subscribe. Sponsor us. Submit and become a contributor. Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.
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