zoon & june & the sleepover guest

June said to come right over. She’d make a big green salad and she & Zoon would be watching this comedy show they loved to watch as a couple. When I got there, June started giving me the tour but we were talking so much in the kitchen. She had corner store stuff in a bag around her wrist like a bracelet. There was gold glitter nail polish by the salt and pepper shakers and I started to do my toes. Zoon caught a whiff. Salad crunched in his mouth like a mattress.

Once it was summer and Zoon & June were on a beach in bikinis and each photograph was a kiss. Back at the fridge, they pressed up the photos but it was still cold. June’s mother told them to raid her freezer while she was out of town. They gathered up all the change on their dresser. They bought picture frames.

Zoon was waiting for his dad to call. June picked up the phone. Police message. A young male attacker with a ponytail was climbing through windows. Zoon & June talked about it with big eyes. The window in the kitchen kept open by a brickish dictionary.

June helped Zoon lower the extension out the window so he could hear the phone outside. “If my dad phones, it will be to call us ‘teenangels’ again,” Zoon said.

In the backyard, there was a rocket. A neighbour rocking a little too close. A velvet covered journal on a stone block. There were used cups everywhere collecting something from the sky.

Zoon waited with his guitar for the words to fall. Then he could string them up like patio lanterns. “Am I just the fungus of my emotions?” I offered for lyrics. Zoon laughed, “I can’t sing the word fungus.” Zoon was staying. Maybe he’d go inside and dust, leaving all the lampshades crooked.

I told June in the park about lost loves like stepping on ladybugs. June said when I used to be in Geography, she was in her basement in a bathrobe. We wanted to play Frisbee and found one. June said, one time Zoon and her went on a picnic that never ended. Their shadows pumped in and out of the basket.

Zoon was a statue in the chair that we left him in. June slipped coins between his toes. The coins fell, the dictionary by his feet, the window closed. She reached into her bag and lit them up cigarettes. Their cigarettes, they never rushed. He asked us if we believed in guardian angels because his was a rock star.

Before, all I thought I knew about them was that they broke into swimming pools. Zoon sat at a table upfront by the band, by the fingers. June saw the whole picture from the bar stool. Carried it bulky in her arms to the bathroom. Left it there. Kept going to the bathroom.

It was a mall out. Zoon up and down the streets with his running shoes. Popping into one place for money, one place for smokes. Banging on the restaurant windows at the fish inside swimming. June buying watermelon thick as carpet and pink tongue. They let me walk in the middle.

Zoon set up a place for me to sleep in his music studio, a room at the heart, six feet lower than the rest of the layout. The door was off its hinges, it danced with me on my way in. Zoon sunk a satin sheet down on a couch. Said, “It’ll be like a groupie, you’ll probably slide off.” I asked, were they going to fall asleep to music? He pulled out a drawer that had tapes. “I haven’t done that in a really long time,” he said. “I used to do that all the time.” Me too, but I was acting the role of the sleepover guest.

Zoon grabbed the door to leave and it collapsed on him. “My dad did come by,” he told it. “He smiled leather in the doorway. I waited but could just crawl in and play on the skeleton bars.” June was a skeleton herself helping Zoon towards the kitchen.

I was sleeping in Zoon’s eyes. Lucky he saw the world as his bed or I would have slept on, endlessly touring.

I floated on cat sperm. There was a phone in a tree.

(for nic and anj)