beside the timestamp and the picture of your
Mother’s house.
The cursor blinks judgmentally at me, asking, “Who will it be tonight?”
Will it be Passion, will it be Regret?
Will it be Slow Decay and Wasted Breath?
Will you just get wasted and give it away
To whatever comes to mind?
Memories taunt.
They hike up their skirts and show you the
Terrible
Beautiful
Dramatic
Traumatic
Terrifying things you have done and seen,
Inviting you with a chance at the ultimate intimacy.
To be fondled in the mind and then splattered on a page
is all they suffer to want.
Memories are
whores like that.
___________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________
50 CENT NECKLACE
A brass chain with a brass bird
hung on a hook above to my grandmother’s pearls,
and all the finer things you gave to me
because it is my favorite of them all.
I like to think it belongs there,
I like to think that I, not circumstance, may choose where I put it.
But my mother came into my bedroom unbidden and put the brass chain
and the brass bird
into the drawer where I prefer to keep my socks.
I wanted you beside me,
Rather, I wanted me beside you
(to be where you are)
And I couldn’t even strategically position myself.
How then, reaching from where I am,
Could I strain and stretch to grasp at you?
Let alone, move you closer to me.
My fingertips graze--
A cookie jar out of reach of a toddler—
The smell of you in your leather jacket—
The feel of my fingertips on your brow—
Brushes with fate, pieces of love that touch
But that I cannot hold firmly.
Please wait for me—if not faithfully, then truthfully.
Screw who you want to, but leave me a place near you.
Let me hang myself from a brass chain around your neck,
a tarnished bird beneath the pearls of your eyes.
______________________________________________________
______________________________________________________
BRAIDS
We divide in three
And weave a rope
To hang ourselves
And our princes by.
______________________________________________________
______________________________________________________
SLUMP
Sophomore Slump.
A fact-myth we live,
never feared, like the Freshman 15.
We never do dread the right things.
We fear for our waists
and waste our hearts.
______________________________________________________
______________________________________________________
GREEN TEA
The teapot calls the kettle black, while the tea goes green and bitter with envy, oversteeped.
Was there ever so great a crime
(or so common)
as hypocrisy?
As ignoring what is most central to both of us for the sake of pinning
the title we both deserve
on one another in anger?
Rather than granting within ourselves that the name is appropriate
That we have earned it
That we are each, deep down, that kind of girl.
That those girls are
these girls, and we have let ourselves go.
No.
We let the bag sit, seeping into the drink for too long to taste good.
Black kettle, black pot.
Green tea.
____________________________________________________
____________________________________________________
A nanny comes home from work to drunk friends. Life is sameness.
____________________________________________________
____________________________________________________
TEXT MESSAGES
Why do I send you
text messages
instead of calling and hearing
Your darling voice,
when it is all I want to hear over the din of the city?
Because a text message is noncommittal.
It hides the flaws and indiscretions you might have just overlooked
in three years of talking
but would somehow notice now, over the sound of the subway trains outside the window
And my drunk roommates.
I type “I miss you” because, spoken aloud,
You would know I mean “I love you”
Every time.
-RCE
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