Our Numbered Days
Page 2
I won’t kiss you, it’s the wrong
season. The nearest place you can buy a gun
is only twenty minutes away. I’m not going
to tell you how to live your life, but maybe you should
listen to your feet when they tell you to run
the fuck away. Maybe you should get out of here,
then get out some more. I was trying
to take apart a clock and put it back together
before it noticed. I was trying to kiss you
and blame someone else. Kissed the sidewalk
instead of you. Kissed anyone I actually
love. It’s so hard to love you
because who the fuck are you? I feel
like I’ve spent my whole life waiting
for this moment and now this moment
is terrible. This moment doesn’t even
have any fireworks. This moment falls asleep
with its keys in its hand. It’s not your fault,
probably because you didn’t make me
this way, stupid, no, I mean I’m stupid, I mean
you might be stupid, who knows, who
the fuck are you, but anyway, I thought
cheating on my girlfriend would be so great, and now
that I’ve kissed you, all that’s happened
is I’ve kissed you. In the pile of snow
over the pile of leaves, in your car, on the train,
always slightly hoping someone would catch me.
All Harvestmen Are Missing a Leg
All drivers in St Paul must have
broken ankles. I have a broken ankle
and am driving like them, poorly,
therefore I declare this to be true.
The harvestman, in case you were
wondering, is that spider with the tiny
body and long legs, referred to
by the unimaginative South as a Daddy
Long Legs, though I admit it would be
funnier to imagine all people who harvest
hopping on one leg. Not funnier. Did I say
funnier? I meant somber and embarrassing.
I meant whatever doesn’t offend you.
Don’t ask me questions if you don’t
want to hear stupid answers. I’m not good
at many things, but I have been called
the Pierre Renoir of being privileged
by absolutely no one ever. But let’s not
forget about the terrible St Paul drivers.
They’re so bad that I don’t go out
when it’s raining. I don’t go out
anyway, but that’s because of the anxiety.
The anxiety comes out when it is
and isn’t snowing. All snow is missing
its drivers. All drivers are missing a leg.
All legs aren’t working right today. All
appointments today are being missed. All beds,
all beds today are full.
Memorial Day
The old lesbian couple is sitting
in the park overlooking St. Paul. They are
holding hands as though one or both of them
have cancer. Or maybe it is their anniversary
but their car was just towed. Or maybe
I should assume nothing about their genders
or sexual orientations because from here
they are indistinct and from here
I cannot tell. But they are holding hands
and they look like they have been crying
and the flags are all waving and people
are all walking uphill and night
is coming on and I am sitting
in this park watching an old couple almost cry
together, and I want this to be
the most important thing I do all year.
Future Tense
And when your fourth love leaves you,
you will want to kill yourself but
you won’t. You no longer think of suicide
as a house you will build one day.
Your fourth love, who is your first
real love, who brought you peace
when your whole body was a gun:
when she leaves you, ask your roommate
to hide the knives because you will carve
her name into all of the food in your fridge.
Stop showering. Warmth will remind you
of her. Masturbate in public. Hope someone
catches you. You need to feel vulnerable
in front of anyone else. Try to burn her
clothes. Try to fall in love with strangers.
Try to fall asleep without her: open the windows:
she would have wanted them closed;
turn off the radio: she can’t sleep without
noise—you can’t sleep without noise,
but noise will sound like her whispering
you into the world of lights and breakfast;
make the rain sound like nothing, make
the rain sound nothing like her voice.
Don’t be alone. When you are alone,
you won’t do anything you did with her,
so you won’t do anything. Marvel at how she,
the patient gardener, the bringer of sleep,
she who draws the bath and lights the candles,
she who made you someone who could make
himself into someone, she made you want
to live more than anything else, and now
she makes you want to leave the world
because you have seen it. In her
you have seen the color and shape
of your perfect life and now the children,
the house, the arguments about tablecloths,
they are all fading like things left in sunlight,
like any dream left too long in the light.
For months—years—every time you see her
you will want to kiss her. When you do,
you will expect pain to come like the old dog
you could never bring yourself to put down,
but there will be none. You will remind yourself,
she will remind you, you will remind each other,
that this is for the best, that you are physically
incapable of loving one another, and in those
moments you will be lying, your heart screaming
I CAN I CAN I CAN. But you’ll stay silent.
Because of her. Because she asked for this.
Because she filled something in you
that’s still full, even though
she’s gone.
April, 2013
Crime rates rise with the temperature. Elsewhere
in the country, a bomb has exploded
at a marathon. A fertilizer plant has exploded
in Waco. A coffee shop has exploded in Iraq.
Many things have exploded in Syria. Where I come from,
everyone is surprised no one has flown a plane
into the refineries. I am no longer from
where I come from. I live in Minnesota,
and in Minnesota it has just snowed seven inches.
Winter forever means I will be safe
forever. We have all been stuck in our houses
for so long that we are growing used to them.
Who would build a bomb in this weather? Who
would plot anything this morning? Who would want
all our houses to be ash or hospitals or tombs
or anything other than houses? It’s been so cold
for so long that my fingers could not build anything
other than a fire, but the robins, well, the robins arrived
today. The forecast calls for rain.
Our Numbered Days
You never give away your heart; you lend it from time to time.
If it were not so, how could we take it back without asking?
Jeanette Winterson
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br /> You are always ticking inside me.
Sierra DeMulder
I loved the way she changed before the dark did,
the woman inside of her stepping out of her jeans.
Jason Shinder
There are two beds in the room. Of course
we make love in one, fall asleep in the other.
Sherman Alexie
I counted out my future children’s names like stars,
I let him touch my back
under my shirt.
Éireann Lorsung
She made you want
to live more than anything else, and now she makes you
want to leave the world because you have seen it.
The author
So maybe love is a form of crying.
Catie Rosemurgy
through the gate into dusk you’ve gone like the day.
Paul Guest
I have been wondering, mostly, if love
and sanity are the same thing. When I say
I am in love I am also saying the world
makes sense to me right now.
I know that love is not the same as knowing
everything, but because she is gone, because
about her there are unknowns that will now remain
unknowable, it is important to list what is mine
to list: she likes hazelnut in her coffee; she is a
better driver when the transmission
is manual; though she couldn’t name it, her favorite
color is Bakelite seafoam green; she loved me once,
though it wasn’t for very long, though it was
distracted, though it shouldn’t have
happened, once, she loved me.
Chitin
My ex-girlfriend, for the fifth time
this morning (and when, I wonder,
does she become just my friend?),
swats my hand away
from my mouth as I chew
on my nails. She imagines my stomach
as a bird’s nest of finger ends. She
imagines the digestive system
as it ought to be, karmically.
She imagines me full of dead things,
re-consuming that which
I am trying to grow out of.
She is not wrong, but I hate
telling her she is not wrong,
and really isn’t this a metaphor
for shit, anyway? As in,
I am holding onto some shit.
Neil, you just have to let that
shit go. Stop biting
your nails. Let it go.
The Sadness Factory
is where I go when I run out of
Missing You. Because the door
is three feet high, you have to
crawl into the Factory. Let me tell you
about leaving: it’s either the drain
or the window. The carpet
at The Sadness Factory is all shag.
The drapes? Also shag. The walls
are supposed to change color with your mood,
but they have been broken since the 80s,
which I hear were a rough time for empathic
architecture. The sadness factory is, no joke,
shaped like a heart. Sadness is the corniest
of emotions. The most popular time to visit
the Factory is at night because, again,
corniness, so they have hired the world’s most
incompetent security guard. He is always
weeping and saying something unintelligible
about my wife, my wife. Sadness
is much easier when you are reminded,
by phone, by accident, of what makes
you happy, so the Factory always smells
like maple syrup and snowmelt. There’s no
golden ticket. Iron, though. Cement. The lines
for samples are prohibitively long: New Apartment
Sadness; Everything Is Great but Something
Feels Off Sadness; A Midsummer
Night’s Sadness; The Sadness of Wanting
To Break Something but Being Too Weak;
The Sadness that Comes from Always Knowing
Exactly Where You Are.
Ekphrasis with Peeled Onions
after Peeling Onions by Lilly Martin Spencer
I am not convinced those are onions.
Onions do not make you cry
like an opera singer. I have to assume,
therefore, that she is an opera singer and that
therefore the plenty around her is about to
disappear; you cannot be an artist
and also know plenty. The jars, the somehow
very ripe fruit, the gold earrings, gone.
All that’s left is the knife and the onion.
The knife, barely indistinguishable from the wall,
barely for now. The way the blade stays
out of focus until it’s called. The way
your life is sharper once it’s gone.
Phreaking
is the act of stealing a phone call.
1. In 1968, John Draper built a small blue box
with parts so simple they might as well
have been magic. He stepped into
the California sunshine. He found two
payphones, one next to the other, and launched
his voice around the world to the payphone
next to him. He answered “Hello?”
and in the five seconds before the sound
returned to his ears, his voice unhitched itself
from his throat. “ .”
2. My girlfriend moved to California
and my cell phone is starting to replace her.
When it rings, I feel like she’s touching me.
I can feel it vibrate in my pocket
even when I know it’s off.
3. Still standing at the payphone, John Draper
tried to speak. He was choking on nothing. His voice
was locked somewhere out there. He sent it away
and it could not come back. He opened his mouth
and all that came out was static and the Pacific.
4. I am driving to her and somewhere in the middle
of America my car breaks down. My phone dies
in my hand. This country is closing
around me. There are so many
stars. I call out her name but it’s
swallowed by all that distance.
5. In 1971, AT&T had John Draper arrested.
The police released him without charge.
How do you jail a man
just for speaking? There are no words
for the theft of time and distance.
6. When we call each other halfway
across the country, we are paying
for the illusion that space does not exist.
We are paying to pretend
that one day, if we reach hard enough,
we will touch each other.
7. That night, John Draper heard his voice
laughing at him. It was in the walls. It was
in the phone lines. He took a pickaxe and started digging.
With every swing all he could hear was HELLO HELLO HELLO.
8. When she calls me, her laugh
crackling over the Midwest,
I feel farther from her than when we
are not speaking. I reach and touch
nothing. I hear phone lines in the wind
they are calling my name.
9. John Draper had the same dream every night:
an endless field of robots with his voice; his voice
watching him sleep; his voice digging
its own grave; his voice building walls
and a roof out of wire.
10. I have not seen her in so long. To me,
she is only a ghost in a machine. She is only
a memory, like a broken flashlight
or summer. For her,
I sent away the best parts of me.
I haven’t come back.
The Talk Show Host Has a Nosebleed on National Television
No, the talk show host becomes a moth. No,
she enters wearing Klan robes. No, she
interviews exclusively cartoon characters
from now on. No, she tells Mickey Rourke
to suck it. No. Bad plan. She sets
the clock back. She’s a woman
with that nosebleed. The talk show
host opens the window and flies
away, she flies away.
The New Sheets
after Ross Gay
Because I love you, I shouldn’t tell you this, but
I put a single red sock in with your sheets. Also,
I used the detergent with the muscular arm
and the tool instead of the bubbles and clouds. Also,
I turned the temperature knob at random
and darling, please don’t take this to mean
that I think erratically of our love. Also, I tried
to use bleach but found a bottle instead
that somehow I cannot find again that somehow,
somehow, made the pink a brighter pink and darling,
I am telling you this not because you would find
out—you are absentminded and would convince
yourself you had done this to yourself,
I am telling you this because I love you,
and if anyone should hurt you, it should be me.
Again
also after Ross Gay
Because I love you, I shouldn’t tell you this, but
I put a single red sock in with your sheets. Also,
I used the detergent with the muscular arm
and the tool instead of the bubbles and clouds. Also,
I turned the temperature knob at random
and darling, please don’t take this to mean
that I think erratically of our love. Also, I thought
of using bleach but instead found your hair
dye, your red, red hair dye, and I poured
it in, all of it, because you were tired
of our bed, because we needed a new
washing machine anyway and darling,
I am telling you this not because you would find
out—you are absentminded and would convince
yourself you had done this to yourself,
I am telling you this because I love you,
and if anyone should hurt you, it should be me.