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Fifteen Sixteen Seventeen
Like I know my own body in bed, I know
In some apartment walls soft with mold
You have a window I’d hit with a pebble
And a mattress the size of the floor
Had we not circled the reservoir
Three years ago, middle of May
Cutting each other tirelessly with the
Bottom of the truth - always spit in
My mouth when I’m talking to you.
Silence in the car, too wrought to put a
Window down, then in your empty house
You said you’d get hard holding me,
So I left you in the kitchen
Face in a million iterations,
And blew a stop sign on Trevilian
Maybe you heard the car horn
I imagine you, stiffened against the counter
Face like bread.
And then the leather of that chariot slick with sweat
A heartbeat in my thighs
The bones of my fingers flashing
Like white stars below the dash, thinking
That really, I invented you - the girls you raped
Watched me on the sidewalk like
Strange protégés. I was offended
By their gaze, as if exposed
For both whore and pimp
Because I loved you, pieta arms bounding
After you, forehead opened on the barbed wire,
I bandaged you. Tufts of white hair stiff
With red revealed a face secretly
Handsome, and I hated you.
Was all this not enough,
I would ask you, if ever I saw you.
If I saw you without seeking you.
Not enough:
How we rolled like dogs under fences
Tipped over a telephone pole, threw grease
On the others chain, held each other’s
Heads in the snow, mouths open and
Gagged with the stuff. Slid down river banks
In the mud. We both washed in the water.
No one feels stupid, or walks up the freeway
alone. Probably for the rest of my life
There’s no one going to pound my wrists in
The dirt they love me so much
Pack my last breath in ice. I can feel now
The burn in my nostrils sweet like
Novocain, how the thaw will be so painful.
And I liked it- after all I liked it —
Our bodies like rubber reaching for each other.