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The Moon is Down
Last night I captured the moon for you, threw a rope around it and dragged it down to earth, tied it to the radiator in your bedroom so that you’d always be cast in the perfect light. You took the moon and sent me away, watched me trudge out the door and down the stairs to the cramped hallway where we wanted to make love but hung framed photographs of couples making love instead. Some of them look like you. You come to the stairs to watch as I pass them. I turn back to count your eyelashes as you fail to count regrets. Instead, you count memories:
the Orange Julius I bought you two weeks ago when the summer heat made our clothes stick to us, and our legs stick to the seats in your car. Leather. You’ve always had a thing for leather, but I’ve never seen you in it. The man in the photograph has. The muddied carpet. The empty wrapper - blue and unassuming, hidden beneath the bed. The boots in the hall that you said were mine, but I could never remember buying or wearing. I’ve never seen them. The man in the photograph has. I leave my boots at the door. |
This is you remembering the time when she used to sing,
back when you still thought that it was a good idea to date an actress. She strings her songs together like pearls each one just for you. Brilliant harmony in cant chained around your neck like a noose gleaming and you feel it in your bones the distant thrum of familiarity buzzing through your blood, setting it alight. You were at her mercy once before. You know this with a certainty that you can’t explain, no skin has been bruised or broken, no tears have been shed, no secrets have been left in the garden to rot beneath the earth, yet there it lies beneath the pomegranate tree in your backyard a stage cloaked in summer haze and stained red with promise: the whisper of a kiss behind curtains. Mine it says. Mine. |
This is the day when you realized that, maybe, just maybe,
dating an actress was actually a terrible idea…and decided to do it anyway. Each night after the show, she counts the stars from her dressing room choosing a number at random (14,871. 1,264. 8 billion. 76) giving an end to the endless masses winking back at her. She sees fate in the little lights and pricks at you with golden shears binds your heart with golden threads and cuts them when they tarnish and turn first to silver then to bronze. She loves you. She loves you not. Voice like glass, she cuts a piece out of you - the bronze you - one night and places it on the mantle above the fireplace: Trophy it says. (she loves you) and something stirs inside of you when you see it: Again it whispers trophy. You hear: something to keep. Yes, you are a trophy, something to keep. And as you slide under the covers beside her, it whispers: Heart. Heart. and you sing out its notes and know that you are lost. |
This is the day when she fucked the director,
back when you still dreamt of dating an actress. In your dreams she has Miranda’s heart and Desdemona’s eyes in her pocket. She sits on the edge of a fountain in the garden at Center Stage waiting for you, always for you, stringing pearls on a length of invisible wire. But it’s you she stares through, your body shifting and fading in the hazy afternoon light as you approach her. In your nightmares, you aren’t featured at all, and she sits in the grass by the fountain, her back pressed against the heated stone. She sings out your name as another man kneels down to devour her – he looks familiar. |
The two times she cheated on you with the director,
and the one time you followed suit. The first time she slips into bed at 3am and wakes you, she says: “I had to stay late to rehearse my lines.” It’s not the first time that she has done this. She doesn’t like to share: her masks, her desperation, her lies; but you can feel them all if you lie still in his arms while he takes you from behind with sharp thrusts that leave you laughing at their resemblance to the knife that she used to cut out your heart and place it on the mantle above the fireplace. Each time you laugh he slams you against the wall painted like a setting sun until you’re delirious with the joy of it and there nothing but sunset the oranges reds golds whites - Again. Again. Again. He’s your Iago he’s your Lucifer he’s your Loki, silver-tongue feeling for your pulse as he lies to you loves you, and you hope that he’ll tear you in two so you don’t have to face her in the morning. A brush of lips against your neck your ear, a litany of curses that sound like a prayer, and you sag against him sated. The second time he takes her you pretend share her, your sweet Ophelia lost to a madness called lust as the director lifts her onto his desk takes her from behind. You snap a picture from the far window. It feels familiar: the angle, her cries his the position of their hips; and you sigh imagine fingertips ghosting up your arms, kneading your shoulders, imagine the dough the two of you made when she was still content to play at being domestic and the both of you ended up on the kitchen floor covered in flour and smelling of bread and sex and joy. He is remaking her now with each thrust, he is remaking you. He is standing behind her in nothing but a pair of threadbare socks, redefining joy and you love him for it. |
This is the day when you got fed up with dating an actress and decided to end it.
Last night you turned over to reach for her in your sleep and found a chrysalis instead, delicate and worrisome. You thought it was another role, another ruse – thought: she loves her theatrics. It isn’t the first time that she’s brought them into your bed. Two nights ago she was an assassin – pinning you up against the wall, driving a prop knife into your body again and again as you drove yourself into her. Last week she was Cleopatra, bent double against the headboard, her eyes lined with kohl darker than lust. Last night, she was a cat, sleek and soft in black silk and furred leggings, content to curl up in the crook of your arm. You could have sworn she was purring. In the morning, the chrysalis is still there, but there’s a hole in the side, and the wispy edges fall away at your touch. She is nowhere to be found. You think, maybe she’s finally flown south for the winter. You catch a glimpse of her out the window, standing beside the director’s brand new Cadillac, and know that she is flying south, and you are winter. You pick up the knife on top of her desk and sing out a melody, calling to your Madame Butterfly. |
“The headlines read: 5,000 birds fall from the sky in Arkansas,
no one is exactly sure why.” They drop like flies (the birds) all around us, blackbirds and starlings falling like rain until they become commonplace; the splatters of gut and grizzle, the explosion of feathers as crack they meet their fate on the road or the windshield or the upper edge of a well placed signpost. Soon they’ll be stranded on rooftops and littering backyards. Soon children will wake up and parents will be left to explain the little piles of feathers in the yard. “They’re sleeping,” they’ll say, and then workers with thick rubber gloves will come and help them fly away. But now they’re falling, and I sink back into my seat, unable to look at them (at you) and pretend that I’m asleep. You dodge around them as they hit the pavement and I can tell that you pity them - (not birds) the people running them over. |
I once asked a schizophrenic mathematician what love was.
He told me that it was squaring the circle, that nothing was perfect, and blossoms only grow under the covers in the darkness. (So many layers) It wasn’t an answer, but I took his hand anyway and walked with him, our shoes dragging against the pavement. -Reluctant. Each scrape in the silence an answer that he would not or could not give. He took me on thick blue sheets that night, washed himself afterward and spooned with the wall, whispering quietly to no one in particular when he thought I’d drifted off: “Love is when you take the square root of pi and divide it by zero.” |
There Is No Us In Silence You, You were mid-day banter, Clear and dry like the summer skies. And we, We were sun-kissed berries, Always a bit too ripe. But now, Now we’re stereophonic silence. Not noise, Not static, Not a whisper. Silence, The act of sound executing fury. |
On Our Way from Phoenix to Denver: Six Hours Before We Break Up
Your face is lit by the blue glow of the dash, and I miss the static of the radio with only two stations: both country. I hate country. You don’t say a word, haven’t for a while now. For all I know I left you at the rest stop in Arizona. The dust in Arizona suits you. Dust and Silence… You belong there. Here beside me, hands white knuckled at ten and two, you’re like a bird in a cage. I wish I could open the driver side door and set you free. |
'Into the Ocean' All is drifting, lain still upon the shattered wood remains of his maiden; Fingers grappling with shards of the sea, losing. Betrayal, a spark, the powder, then nothing. Though duty laid him down, fate preserved him. Now the sea, as before, as always; ever present. Unforgiving. Sweet. Suffocating. Home. |
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