On Starving

Like I've hung a stuck halo around everything: the edges of me shimmering into the bedspread, the shard of lawn under the window blind turned to one fantastic green smile. It isn't just that. It's what the sea's become, the smell so sharp in my lungs I'd swear it had a body, and hands, and all the air in me clutched in them. It's the house burning down the street and the alarms searing the air, a sound that is in me now, or a scar of it.

I wish there were a way to say it that isn't in terms of God, but there isn't. Each day is a resurrection now: waking, I drift this thought of you across my empty room, a seeking quartz summoning the world back. I wake up hungry, but I am sure that there's a gill in me somewhere that will feed me on all this, if I let it only stream in like water.

Minotaur.

Last year for Halloween, you went as the minotaur. You pulled your Bulls cap low over your eyes and went to drink blood and sands alone in the basement, the ceiling pipes a web of loud heat above you. I stood at the top of the stairs in my Catherine the Great costume; I'd gotten lazy, and glued a stuffed horse to the crotch of my prom dress, thrown a sack of flour over my hair.

Needless to say, it didn't seem that funny anymore; not the pocket full of My-Little-Ponies with Barbie heads wedged on that I'd shoved into my purse, not this smear of you which somehow had a voice which somehow yelled up that you weren't coming to the party. I could have thrown the thread of my own voice down to find you, but I knew I'd be mixing metaphors, or at the very least giving you too much. I have given you everything I am already: a silhouette framed in hall light, a gap of shadow that loves you completely. And you have everything you need down there: those stairs, that bull's heart, everything you need to climb up here and fill me in.


Drawing is Gustave Dore's from the Inferno plates.

Intervention.

When you are twenty two everyone you know will finally stop shitting you: they will admit that they are all mind readers, and your whole life has been planned out in secret meetings, a record of your innermost thoughts tacked to the wall of their lair like an illuminated map of bombing targets. It sounds sinister at first, but they remind you that they all went through it too--the awkward intervention ceremony with the floury store-bought cake, all the shame when they found out that their parents knew what they did during all those hours alone in the basement.

They went through it, and now, that doctor administering the anesthesia, he'll help you be like them. You know that girl, Amy? Listen to her tomorrow night, while you lean against the drum of her stomach and pretend you're dreaming. The first time's tough, so listen hard. The words she whispers into your hair, her fingertips' soft calligraphy: they are not a language you can speak anymore. If you pay attention, her thoughts will be a split fortune cookie in the palm of your mind. She will give you permission to do it, to break her heart.


Photo is by Sam Taylor Wood.

Effigy.

There is a picture I keep of you over the door and in my head too, where your hand is the shadow of an overhead bird falling over your eyes, your eyes tense with a pain that made your nerves fray and spark like wires, a pain I watched you in, that you called out of to say Don't touch me, touching hurts right now. There is also an empty shirt over the door knob and a book which contains the sentence

Will you believe me when I tell you there was kindness in his heart? If I opened up your head and ran a hot soldering iron around in your brain, I might turn you into someone like that.

--but mostly, there is this picture, and the gloss over it which attracts the sun, and the sun which comes through the window at dawn and erases you daily. At least, it erases this picture, this unburned effigy of you, which is you to me, at least.


photo is gregory colbert

In Case You Ever Wondered Why I'm So Tired In the Morning

I have this thing I do, sometimes, when you're asleep. I take a magnifying glass to the skin along the inside of your wrist, press my face close enough until the thread of blood there blooms into a thick and writhing organism. I stare into the vortex of each pore until I'm pretty sure that there's no solid color in the universe, that you're a horrible, ugly, porous boy who's ruined Newton and great art and all of that forever. When you wake up, I am careful to balance my forehead an atom away from yours, to hold my breath until your eyes open and become one eye, until that eye becomes one black, swimming thing.

And honestly, I am sorry: that you are so beautiful and cool, that I need some antidote to you. When you speak, I want to able to hear the thrush of kept air escaping along with it, stale and ancient, my name.


(ps painting by Ian Francis)

How I'll meet my wife.

I don't think a roofie will quite do it. I need to slip you one of those Alice in Wonderland pills, cage you against the bar in my closed fist. I'll whisper to you on the taxi ride home, carry you across the threshold like it's our goddamned wedding night, slipped into my shirt pocket like a love letter. In the morning, you won't be ashamed or call the cops. You'll remember your body in the throat of a linen flower, my heartbeat like the inside of a sonic boom. You couldn't help but love me then.