I put up notice on the Internet where misspellers wrote the most compelling notes.
They wore industrial eyeglasses and ironic T-shirts and trucker hats
and often forgot their wallets. One taught me about science fiction porn
while we lay on his silk leopard-print sheets. After that, a Nugent
look-alike, then a mapmaker in Alaska and that old-timey
going-nowhere correspondence; I thought I’d tell our kids about our cute meet
over Thanksgiving in the new fifties. I watched films that made me feel old
because of choice feminism contradictions and wrote poems about
the city’s howling lunatics in technology and snark dialect compost.
And then, and then, and then. Met a lunatic on Craigslist.
Concerned about starts, I stuffed his inbox with amendments and bloated metonymy.
This happened for months. This happened while I healed from pneumonia,
from broken bones, from agoraphobia. Drinking beer gave me a panic, so whiskey.
Divorce ephemera, safe doors and pre-midlife. I collected fancy pens
and yeah, I’m working on an article about animé and Marxism. Pills
made me shaky, but I filled myself with pills because they made me shaky.
Attended dotcom parties thrown by post-Stanford nerds in tucked-in shirts,
such Adam’s apples. They gave away fonty tchotchkes for Internet pet stores
and other terrible ideas. Just one hayride after the next and only tickling
and stalker calling, the hang-up thing. We’d work on it,
we’d patch it up. My action item, my best of bread.
I met the lunatic and we did it until it outlived its hipness,
until it was Eastern European. We did it until the buildings came down.
We did it until the affect was moot, until the recipe got muddled.
We did it until I turned into myself, until the whole city turned into itself.
We did it until the line got too long and therapy turned me down. I’m talking
Beginning of the Decline of Our Smug Empire. I’m talking
about the rise of a collective posture for the skittering tower of our time.
This one softens the soul cartilage.
This one makes the red lights green.
I have bought enough powder
to make a tiny little cartoon cat.
Mitsubishi, Batman, Teletubby, Toyota:
I love you. I love the Earth and forgive it.
I love you: guy at the weird apartment
playing South Park video games, guy
with tennis scholarship and the guy
who has a grandmother who’s dying
because you all carry. You make me
love helicopters and dust.
This one makes me throw up, but then
I listen to Pink Floyd in the dark without
getting scared. This one throws a dart
at my nemesis, but it’s a lame gesture.
This one makes my augmentation less brutal.
The doctor gives me one that says,
this might cause sudden death. 250 mg vs 500 mg.
Dry mouth, nausea, dizziness.
This one is legal, so it’s not as fun.
Take this one with orange juice.
Swallow this one with a spoonful of peanut butter.
Take this one alone. Don’t take this one alone.
This one brings the horizon line into your lexicon,
and you store it for better occasions.
Chewing this puts me on a raft on Lake Erie.
I’m in the sun, then I’m in the mud baths
of Black Rock City getting felt up by a chick
with a bone in her nose, then I’m at the top
of the hill of my street getting the mail,
no business driving, then I’m alone
under the single bulb of self-interrogation.
This one makes me near-dead but still pretty.
This one makes my friends hate me.
This one makes my friends hating me
a dull sting, calamine lotion for the brain.
If I take this one, then I can bury
the undead with a spoon. This one
belongs in a hall of fame. The last one
not really the last one,
the one I want to relish, my first Casanova.
Like a wino I trolled the streets
in search of an elixir for my
melancholy. A Virgo with gold
teeth lured me into his lap
and sang songs about the fraudulent
landscape. The purple sky
is invented for you. The purple
sky is not among us. When his hand
traveled south, I blushed.
I left when tomorrow made sense.
That’s the way a walk renews—
she makes her way through
the imperfect city and discovers
how the world is people
with hand puppets. People who shiver
metal sheets for thunder,
and then she squints her eyes
to fuzz it more, to prettify.
• The ladies at the laundromat called me La Chula for my role on the show Trainwreck. I had birds in my hair and my porcelain feet chipped when walking. An earthquake and, an omen, the Emmy for Best Hooker with a Heart of Gold Ingénue fell on me as I slept.
• Later I sold chocolate smuggled in from Morocco, but it was so boring I faked my own death. Muffling my voice with a hanky, I called in as weeping mother. For days, I cried thinking about the things I hadn’t gotten to do like jump from planes or have sex with British DJs.
• My lover said massage school. He said PhD.
• Then I built Taj Mahal replicas with dried pasta and sold them to Texas Junior Leaguers for thousands of dollars. I was moody and dark and skinny and Modern Painters did a feature on me. I posed on the roof of my building with a mannequin. I poured hot water on one of my works, and the photographer and I ate it.
• After this, I professionally wrestled men and my ring name was Kristeva the Krusher because I was brutal and post-feminist. The league paid me in Macy’s gift cards, so I could buy lacy garments and complicate the paradigm.
• Without training, you won’t go places, my lover said. Without an education you’ll work where they can’t remember your name, he said. It’s not you. It’s the edifice and me, our default. We’re keeping you out on purpose because we only really like you in bits.
• That year, I learned Pet through the mail from Sally Struthers who also spoke King Cobra, and I counseled cats although I was allergic. The cats argued that their reputation for indifference left them love-starved, but I talked over them because this was true for me, too.
• I squandered a date with Ms. R.G. Destiny by being too breathy and insistent. With Mr. Great Hair, I was sprightly and I lay open like the library dictionary. I used words like journey and spirit in earnest like I had crystals and an altar to Gaia. Like that.
• At that time I invested too much in the thing itself. I should have diversified. I fell into every role offered to me.
• My résumé was a phone book, a travel guide or a Bible, a vacuum cleaner with no money down. I sold those, too. If retrospect were a lifestyle, then I would be jet set. If regret were a whistle, then I’d be its dog. I’d be the dog trainer mauled by the dog, plotting my workmen’s compensation package while selling underwear at middle-class ladies’ parties.
We’ll be erasing the past, so I’ll insist on paying. You’ll stare at me with brace face and forgive me.
Whisper that secret name we learned from the movies. I’ll forgive you.
We’ll puppet voices and mug shots, and you can forgive and forget. We’ll bury our past.
We’ll surprise your grandmother’s house with paint. Grateful, you’ll return the sweater you said you lost at the Mormon dance.
I’ll live under a blanket.
We’ll wear matching Izods to Sadie’s Dance and french by the trophy case.
I’ll show you pictures of my dog. We can walk through the mall and pierce our ears.
We’ll deliver pizzas in a white Corolla. We’ll take the bus or catch a ride with a stranger who strokes my bra strap. You’ll ride my handlebars or I on the back of your Vespa.
We’ll try for summer jobs with the city and not find any. We’ll listen to the Doors and pretend it’s the sixties. We’ll pretend we do drugs and surf. Your dad will drive us to the boardwalk to buy skateboards.
You’ll reject my boyfriends and I’ll reject your girlfriends.
We’ll pretend to like each other’s lovers.
We’ll pretend to understand poetry and carry notebooks on buses and talk in fake accents.
We’ll decide to start a Bauhaus tribute band but quit because we fight over who’ll be lead singer. You’ll start one behind my back, I behind yours.
I’ll drive you to your abortion, you to mine.
Sometimes we’ll build houses for poor people and be noble.
And then we’ll be yuppies and have titles at our jobs with nine words in them like Asia Pacific Manager of Development for Future Projects Millennium.
We’ll have another wedding.
We’ll quit our jobs and go to grad school. I’ll major in Women’s Studies, you in Labor Law.
We’ll live off the grid. We’ll live sort of off the grid and spend too much money on organic marmalade.
I’ll fuck your boyfriend, and you’ll fuck my brother.
I’ll stake out your house, read your journal, smell your hair while you sleep.
You’ll throw all my clothes in Glad Bags and we’ll have a big dramatic fight like in that perfume commercial. We’ll make sex tapes.
We’ll meet guys online and send them pictures of your sister.
We’ll buy out-of-date garments and decorate them with spangles and feathers because we want to be pretty.
We’ll say nice things we don’t mean, bust in on frenemies, chap our lips from snow. Cave into peer pressure.
We’ll put you in your first suit with a tie from the eighties.
Do you know how to give yourself a tattoo? You can give me one, too.
I will drive you to the mountains and off a cliff into and against the trees.
Some of it will be true and some of it will test what we know.
Some of the things we do together will disturb our fragile social circle. We’ll escape the fragile social circle for your garage.
Some of the time, I will like the nights when we don’t talk for hours until we’re facing in bed.
Some of it will feel awkward like before we knew what each other’s ears looked like close up.
We’ll go to pretend jail to lift weights and make shanks from toothbrushes.
At times we’ll hate so much that it becomes its own living thing.
At times I will drive addled for you. At times you’ll walk up a thousand stairs.
Turn me in, offer me coffee, take me soup, and privilege my opinion.
You’ll teach me soccer like you said you would. I’ll take you to Los Angeles to look for Perry Farrell and you’ll claim you saw him and I’ll pretend to believe you because that’s what it was all about in the first place, the believing.
I’ll greet you in the Chinese restaurant where I was pretty and you weren’t.
You’ll greet me in the pool hall where I was fat and you weren’t.
It’ll be conciliatory. We’ll feel like we can’t talk. We’ll take a bath together.
We’ll move in and away from each other. It’ll be like we never happened before.
1.
Longing brings me to the bar.
Smoke swirling draws me in.
This could get serial.
We use wine goblets as mirrors
when we talk about war.
We’re trying at sophistication.
My head is the sound
of a body’s erosion.
Five minutes from defilement,
and I snap like it’s a fancy.
They don’t know
me from my body on them.
After a speck of morning light,
my amnesia thickens,
then rises like bile.
2.
The city depends
on being the most something.
The string of shoes
from the phone wires:
cryptic odes to hometowns.
It’s morning so we crowd the bus stations
to earn our pittance, the dream life.
3.
The city’s eye
revises my face,
so that fluorescence
makes an illegal, a yuppie,
a salesgirl or an angel
of the hole I make in the fog.
4.
Throw romance
over a bridge, through a toll,
in the alley, under the billboard,
to the curled fingers on the window,
kicked to the curb, off-ramp past
the homeless
with the wilted sign.
Pamphlet the whole city
with your tractate.
5.
The day is bare as white,
so I stay inside
lest the wind change me.
I sort my miniskirts to trade
with skinny girls at Buffalo Exchange.
The shops along the avenue
offer new strategies:
to be modern or demure.
Minx or Library.
I could be the whole beachside,
cold and bleak and briny
but homey nonetheless.
6.
Loneliness hides
in a corner to tell me
about the troubles he had
finding a place to park his self.
He’s my new fellow
and brings me flowers wrapped
in indie weeklies denouncing
how we live
purchasing and fading.
7.
One street into,
and three away—
we’re treading fiscal boundaries:
one building with blue trim
and one with tin shingles.
The houses project
their occupants.
Where there is decay, failure,
catastrophic or slowly
wearing, and where there is
gleam, atonement.
Desire turned into itself,
made saccharine.
8.
Civic melancholy
pushes through the traffic, so
I don’t see right
in this Babel.
If I owned the city,
so little of it would be.
I pass over the avenue,
assemble some ending of mine
as a vision or a refusal.
My heart is bleeding. It bleeds upward and fills
my mouth up with salt. It bleeds because of a city in ruins,
the chair still warm from sister’s body,
because it will all be irreproducible. My heart
is bleeding because of baby bear not finding mama bear and it bleeds
to the tips of my fingers like I painted my nails Crimson.
Sometimes my heart bleeds so much I am a raisin.
It bleeds until I am a quivering ragged clot, bleeds at the ending
with the heroine and her sunken cancer eyes, at the ending
with the plaintive flute over smoke-choked killing fields. I’m bleeding
a river of blood right now and it’s wearing a culvert in me for the blood. My heart
rises up in me, becomes the cork of me and I choke on it. I am bleeding
for you and for me and for the tiny babies and the IED-blown
leg. It bleeds because I’m made that way, all filled up with blood,
my sloppy heart a sponge filled with blood to squeeze onto
any circumstance. Because it is mine, it will always bleed.
My heart bled today. It bled onto the streets
and the steps of city hall. It bled in the pizza parlor with the useless jukebox.
I’ve got so much blood to give inside and outside of any milieu.
Even for a bad zoning decision, I’ll bleed so much you’ll be bleeding,
all of us bleeding in and out like it’s breathing,
or kissing, and because it is righteous and terrible and red.
The fantasy: to lure you into a bush to tear out your heart.
These heart trades: my poor impulse control for your eroding face. The prize: territory.
Living provincial is hard; navigating restaurants with sharks in them is harder.
I want horrorcore-pique. I want to break your bones with mind or contempt.
Which would be more effective? We’re so talented at protracted and foaming slowkill.
Our thing was like a box of chocolates with razors in them.
Our thing was like a factory of soul-slicing. We put souls on hooks. We pushed them through grinders.
We deforest, we slay with biting humor, and wait for what is offered in return.
It’s what we vow because we’re caught in each other’s complex web.