Consider the whole of me to be a house
with newly washed floors, kept clean enough to
make your skin go tight and sting with the health
of it. Consider the entirety of my being
to be Wendy Darling, to be
that delicate field of want. I am the Lourve with
my legs crossed the ankle,
I am the Angkor Wat wearing your thick smell like
vines in my veins.
Consider me to be a place so undisturbed that
grass has grown over the welcome mat and swallowed
it back into the earth. And you, as your own self, as Captain Hook,
as Leningrad with a creased collar, walk into
the smallest doors of my body with your feet
chapped. You knit a space between my lungs and keep your
mouth tilted towards my throat.
It is like swallowing hornets,
It is like watching honey rot.
Consider my body to be the apartment lease you do
Not pay. The place where girls
Rode the elevator smiling and became
Buried alive, their teeth still flashing
Like neon signs.
The first time I try to have sex, I call Annabel and pray to whatever god is tuned in that it’s a good day. I put her on speaker phone and let it rest on the bureau, so she can hear when I put my palm flat onto a boy’s chest and cause him to fall backwards onto the mattress. She doesn’t say anything at all until I bite his ear and he sucks his breath in sharply—and then she laughs, sharp and abrupt and loud, as if she was in the room with me. I imagine the bed dipping further with her weight, the smell of her breath curling over my shoulder.
“Oh my god. Oh my GOD, this is too good. Suck him off. Did you suck him off?”
The boy leans up and the skin between his eyes wrinkles. In the dark, it makes him look a little too much like my father. It makes me want to bite the soft folds of skin but I lean over him and say into the receiver, “You’re ruining your surprise, Annabel.”
“Some surprise, I heard the mattress creak. My nana’s car is better oiled than that piece of shit bed.” She laughs again, and I hear the faint click of the lighter that means she’s smoking. When I close my eyes, I see the usual thick mass of black, and her small hand reaching out from the center lighting Virginia Slims.
The boy leans up into me again and says, “What?” And then, more agitatedly, “What the fuck?” His hand looks like it’s shaking in the low lighting, but when I touch it, it’s so tightly curled up that I can’t tell. I trace the rings on his knuckles instead. “What the fuck is going on?”
I touch the outside of his mouth while Annabel giggles and then makes a soft hissing noise that means she’s making an effort to be quieter. She’s blowing smoke out of her nose three towns away from me in a French Inhale that she swore she’d teach to me last summer, and the memory makes feel honest, which makes me say apologetically to the boy, “Well, it’s her birthday.”
“What the hell does that have to do with anything?”
“She likes to be shocked and I didn’t have enough money for anything else.”
He is dark, thick and stocky, the way Annabel likes boys. The vein in his neck stands out slightly when he gets up from the bed and closes the door behind him, balling his briefs up into the pocket of his jeans. I stay a picture of him walking away and send it to her. “I cannot fucking believe you,” she says, “You’re, like, an actual fiend.”
I wince, and then I smile. “Like your present?”
“Pretty good this year, man.” She agrees, but she sounds bored. Annabel’s out to sea. Out to lunch. Completely out of range. “I miss you. When are you gonna come see me?”
“I don’t know.”
“Fuck you.” There’s a small crashing noise from her line, but it sounds tinny enough that I can’t figure out if it’s glass or ceramic. “Fucking come see me.”
“I have class, I can’t.” Outside of my own door, there’s a soft thud and the boy’s voice, getting steadily louder as he curses in two different languages. “I love you, I have to go.”
“You don’t. Asshole. You’d come see me if you loved me. You’d come see me every day if you loved me.”
“Annabel, I have to go.”
“You always fucking have to go. What the fuck do you even do all day? Sit in your room and fucking touch yourself? You’re not friends with anyone up there.” Annabel inhales sharply, coughs, and then says, “Not really friends, anyway.”
The thud gets louder, and my toes curl under my legs like I’m going to start praying. Muscle memory from eighth grade, and I wish I’d let the boy kiss the memory out. Or let him try. But I say, “I’m so sorry” and she says—so derisively and sharply, like she keeps nails in her mouth for the days when I’m three towns away and imagining her behind my eyelids, “Of course you are.”
I cry at this part, I always cry. “I am! Jesus. I’m sorry.” I cry enough for her to hang up with some semblance of happiness and then I wipe my eyes with the cuff of my jacket. I spend the rest of the night in the bathroom trying to sob with my head between my knees. I feel cleaner each time my breath stutters.
achilles
in my chest i keep
a hollowed out
tooth, the teacups
that were given to my mother
the day she first leaned across
flowers to kiss my father,
and a small photograph
of crows’ feet. sometimes i wonder if
instead i should have built a
windmill under my breastbone,
or a wax heart. maybe there would be
contractions in it, maybe it would
spin like an old marvin gaye record and
inevitably skip when i think of
you. maybe i’d still dream about
waltzing, pressed cheek to cheek
and smiling without our mouths moving.
anne & sylvia
my singular winter mind does that salsa, does that
quick anxiety foxtrot that means
i will be curled up for weeks under
the bed trying to scratch that
sadness out. my nuclear autumn mind, it does that
insatiable panicking bebop which means
every sound comes out too
sudden, as if it is about to
flatline. i am trying so hard
but—oh, i think it’s in trouble,
my poor heart. i think its arms
are going to turn brittle
under this hysteria
that hangs heavy
and heady,
so much like meat.
your body as a dance hall
your mother is concerned about the white temple growing inside you, the one that she hopes is sprouting,
extending its marble arms to keep your legs knitted together. she prays for it regardless of where you are—in the wake of doctor’s appointments, in the car while
testing you on who wears their virginity under their sweaters
and who is laughing on her back, filthy and so at home
you shake your head so much like meat; you cross your ankles and keep that pearl temple flushed
in carmine,
in amaranth,
in that soft labia pink that grows like the vegetables in your mother’s garden, taking root and extending to that man in the clouds
who does nothing but hum like a skipped record,
like the first time you
sat on top of a boy and
ran him round like a
carousel.
or maybe there is no
such thing as color,
and the only sunrise
i will see is the one behind
my eyelids. maybe those
shining galaxies collapse like
card houses, and we will
all go out like candles. it is not impossible
to think that my ribcage has shriveled;
i am always speaking with my
heart in my mouth—i am always
two inches away
from desperation.
shame comes
easier these days, and regret and
a bitterness so smooth that i can
weigh it out in teaspoons. i am walking
with my back stooped and drowning
every sunset in platinum,
in gainsboro,
in charcoal. but you still sing in
technicolor and talk with your
hands spread wide, as if
to cup every sore edge.
ennui and i are dating again. her mouth tastes too much the underside of iron, a sort of grey-colored nausea that is too familiar to be pleasant. sometimes i wipe my mouth on my sleeve after kissing her, she doesn’t mind. she knows i will always wake up with her, even if i’ve spent the night laughing into anxiety’s hair or if i’ve been wrapped up tightly in depression’s long, comforting arms. i have had her name patiently written on my hip and picked flowers from my mother’s garden for her. we have stood together, pale-knuckled and shivering with expectation—the moment before i wait for the whimper that eliot promised, before i watch ennui curl into herself and become dried and barren on the sidewalk.
elliott said,
“you
idiot
kid.”
i am too in love with most things—the way you cup the base of my shoulderblades when we are walking, the moment before candles go out, the soft movement of eyelashes
on cheekbones. i love the way elliott sings like he is two steps away from putting his guitar away and
walking upstairs to cry in his room. sometimes i still have those dreams where i am curling into the same ovens as
sylvia, who cradles her head in her hands and says, “i don’t know what else i would do,
the time is so thick, and the minutes are so
harsh.” when i turn my face to hers, we practice being alone together. there were moments where i didn’t listen to music, or read. i spent ages trying to float and
tell my feet to keep climbing. i spent ages turning my face into your collarbone to
cry and empty out that heavy, sick sadness that sat in my lap, squalling and unsettled—in the bathrooms of academia,
in wooden rooms,
on the bright blue buses of downtown with my fist in my mouth.
elliott said, gasping:
“you
idiot
kid.”
there is a dream where you are an expert at swallowing hearts and vincent van gogh is charming in his complete and utter distaste for himself. he sits in the same corner every evening with a sunset painted under his fingernails and sings to himself in a thin tenor. you pronounce his name wrong and he walks you backwards, his fingernails leaving raised half-moons on your shoulders, screaming in dutch, in flemish, in french. he only ever says the same thing: “i hate, i hate, i hate”—you have never bothered to learn any language that is not your own, but loathing is understandable in any tongue. you burn his paintings in the morning while rolling tobacco in leftover sketchbook paper. van gogh passes you a mug full of tea. it has bluebirds, delicate and feminine painted on the front, and he only smiles when you drop it to the ground and turn it over into the fire with the edge of your foot.
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