She'd smoke cigarette butts
out of public ashtrays
and had no qualms about
pissing in the neighbor's
rose bush.
She'd fight like a man
and spat like one too
She'd shoplift clothes
and makeup
she'd never wear.
She got mad
broke plates, lamps,
hearts.
She celebrated,
drank, shot,
screamed, fucked.
I taught her how to do
a drive-by, testing
her abilities first with
a 12 gauge. She shot
the rural stop sign with
aplomb.
Next, she anointed an
abandoned house with
turkey shot as I
maintained 40mph
down a dirt road.
She careened and freewheeled
her ragged Japanese import
scars on her arms
and the wind in her hair.
I watched her come off dope once;
I was solemn and dutiful.
She told everyone it was the flu;
I knew better.
Sips of Gatorade between
bouts of vomiting
and
I held her hair.
Garbage piled up;
I cleaned it.
We would drink, laugh,
holler, cry for the night to depart in sullen
sleep on the couch, tangled together
in knots, snoring, drooling.
The next day, she'd slug whiskey faster
than I and my beer.
She'd backstab, shit-talk
break windows, hearts.
She'd nod off on your couch
and burn it with cigarettes.
She'd puke out the car door
while driving home.
She'd forgo shaving in the winter,
then spring, summer,
then fall.
She was a portrait
of unfinished tattoos,
scars obtained in domestic disputes
and sharp, steely blue eyes
that stared past the horizon.
We'd stay up on painkillers
and watch kid movies or
hospital dramas on DVD, then shirk
the dawn in the back booth of a Waffle House,
downing tarry coffee, more painkillers.
Not completely clean, she takes
a job across the country, a 120 dollar
bus ride away. Removed from
the resources of stagnancy,
she altogether
changed.
But,
The night before she left
we drank, screamed, cried
for the heartstrings that would
tug, pull, snap.
We slept together on a couch
like drunken kings after a
battlefield victory,
but sober too, like baptists
at a funeral.
Our limbs tangled in a mobius strip,
wrapped around each other into
infinity.
While we kept in regular contact,
by both phone and by mail,
and I could feel the chasm widening,
our respective floes drifting
apart, borne by the currents
of change, of age, of
days followed by nights.
I drove fast the night
she came home, and after
a brief reunion we settled down
and went to sleep. This time
in a bed. Our limbs did not
tangle and a desire once so
imposing in its presence that
we could not shun it
now
was absent.
I will always remember her
smell that night, as it had been
altogether new and foreign to me:
Like makeup, like shaving cream,
like deodorant, like
fresh packs of cigarettes.
She wears dresses that
flatter her and are not
paisley or patchwork;
They are black and classy, usually.
She wears makeup, black
around the lashes, blue
on the lids,
red
on the lips.
She looks down her nose, sniffs,
scoffs, scorns.
As a man caught in a riptide looks at land
so I look at her.
I consign myself to drowning,
turn away, and face the endless sea.
She courts her eastern European
boyfriend, pursues a degree she will
never have to
use.
She works, grows
She dances, sings
eats, believes.
She breaks barriers,
glass ceilings, records
and in a final
destructive throe,
she breaks
a single, seeing,
pulsing, hearing,
longing, feeling,
Heart.
