JAMES HARMS
“In this case I think it’s better to face it—we belong together.”
— RICKIE LEE JONES
I remember Lani floating from her body
and asking me to ask the surgeon for her teeth.
And how she sang over and over
“We belong together,” while I carried her
to the car and folded her in, slipped a prescription
in her blouse and put her hand there, as if
pledging her allegiance, or holding her heart in.
We drove across Bloomington,
the spring air thick as a thousand feet of water.
Lani sang in her seat at a stop light as a boy
in a blue Chevy watched and frowned,
his idle erasing her song. Her head
lolled back like a child’s beneath a night sky—
stars for the begging, the moon
dripping into a pail of old rainwater.
She kept singing, “We belong together.”
I carried her up the stairs to bed and brought her
soup and straws to sip it through,
I brushed her hair one hundred times.
A week later, with cheeks like Dizzy Gillespie
and codeine in her veins,
Lani searched all day for cilantro
and made salsa in the middle of Indiana.
We trimmed our three rooms
with white, red and green, and invited everyone
we sort of liked to our place
for Cinco de Mayo. It was a night where
people fell down a great deal.
All year we’d looked for that apartment,
where she could work and I could work
and we could throw parties and be better forever.
But that was a small, wound-up idea
of how two people come into each other’s arms
repeatedly for the time it takes to
ask for everything, and to take what’s given.
Then, one day, he asks for something
she doesn’t have, something she’s never had,
and he asks because he knows this, that
she can’t give anymore. So he leaves.