Friend

She curls on my bed with her hair in a fan while I tear at my fingers beside.

Floaty speech bubbles and thought bubbles and skin troubles pepper the blank wall I like.

“Hang some stuff here!” She tells me.

I nod, but “I like it blank there,” I reply.

Because when she leaves and the dent in my sheets pops up again I can see

What she said

What she thought

What she wants spread about on the white wall and

Be more like she.

Catching Faces [draft]

She tips tiny heads and faces into my hand, and I catch one by his hair before he splashes through the hole in my palm and onto the tile.

She sees, and spreads her fingers for me so I can see the shadow of thin lace stretched between them. Specifically for the catching of coins, she says.

She also says, “I am more beautiful than you,” and then leaves.

I pocket my faces and resolve to save up for lace fingers so I can be beautiful, too.

Summer Rain

In the back yard, tiny purple flowers sit quietly below the fat hoods of our clover patch.

They conspire in their dark, for

There are mistakes in the clover: monstrous leaves and four-leaves abound.

In the front yard, behind the driveway, daffodils bob loudly in the sun.

I chalked one on concrete

With a new yellow and an old, broken green.

The effort browned my shoulders and roasted my neck.

I took a blind picture of my art, and when I took it inside to observe in the shade, I saw shadows of sword-fighters and incoming rain.

It did rain, and the clover grew larger and

My model daffodil moved and

Its portrait was washed away, but

The white stripe above my right foot (from crossing my ankles) remained.

Stinkbug

     I shake a stinkbug out of my shoe.

    “A katydid!”

    “No, that’s a stinkbug.”

    “Katydids are stinkbugs.”

    “Katydids are green,” I say.

    “Well, I say it’s a katydid.”

    So it is a katydid, and we watch it claw its way along the waves of the carpet like a creepy tank.

    “Does it even know it’s out of your shoe?”

    “Probably,” I tell him, ” Stinkbugs can sense light.”

    “And they can sense stink, too! The stink of your shoe! And it’s a katydid.”

    “You’re a katydid.”

    We allow this to hang in the air for a moment as we track the insect’s steady progress across the Sahara floor. Nose forward, two legs going at a time, this bug is surely the armored mercenary of its tiny world.

 .

    Long after we secure our critter-free shoes, after going all the way down to get the mail and coming all the way back up, the stinkbug is gone, and we have forgotten it.

    “Do you want strawberries?”

    “Ew.”

    I am about to reprimand him for this response when my thumb brushes against the skin of the giant strawberry I had been about to cut for us. The scratch of stiff hairs and the sticky coolness make me jump and glance down, where I see strawberry seeds, fingernail-colored and just the size of bug footprints. I flip the berry over, but they are on the other side as well. Little bug-feet, marking my strawberry, marching all over every inch of it.  I shudder and drop the strawberry into the sink.

    When I turn around, he is on the floor with his butt in the air, his elbows propped up and his chin resting on his hands. The cat walks back and forth in front of him, looking for a warm spot in which to settle, and he watches her feet. “She moves two feet at once!” he announces.

    I have a vision of an insect coming across the giant strawberry in the sink late at night and nibbling at it until it is a massive, monstrous creature moving around my house two legs at a time, leaving indentations in the carpet with its huge, heavy feet. I slip one hand under his belly and another under the cat’s and pick them both up at once but then almost drop him, so I put him down and just hold the cat.

    “No!” I say, as I hold him away with my foot even though he isn’t reaching for the cat. I stretch my body towards the front door, doing a little skip/hop to reach the handle, and toss the cat outside.

    When I turn around, I see that he has scootched away from my extended foot and it eyeing it with an eyebrow raised, “What the heck.”

    “Don’t say ‘heck.’” I run back into the kitchen and wash my hands vigorously, until the tap water runs over the discarded strawberry long enough to force it down the drain. I keep washing, adding more and more soap, until I feel his head against the small of my back and jump, shutting off the water. “What?” I ask.

    He raises his head and looks me in the eyes, “What are you doing?”

    I shut off the water and take his hand. He squirms out of my grip, which is still soapy and dripping steadily onto the tile floor. “Ew,” he says again, flapping his hand in the air. Small bubbles float down to rest on the wet patches I dripped. He pushes this mixture around with his foot and slides out of the kitchen, away from me. I start to follow him, but turn back and flick the switch on the garbage disposal. The sounds of a giant strawberry being torn to shreds fill the kitchen.

It’s Kind of Weird

There is a cat

In my house

And

It’s kind of weird

Because she’s

A cat

And this is

A house

And I was told we invented houses to keep

The cats

Out.

,

There’s a gate

On my pen

And

It’s kind of weird

Because

My thoughts are trapped

In my pen

And

I was told we invented pens to let

The thoughts

Out.

Yellow in the Fall

It is time

For yellow and

Burnings

And cold metal things.

The air went to find yellow

And fell asleep in the corner

I squint at my socks from last year.

Little bobbles of lint

Enumerating pimples and sins

We held trial for yellow

But the jury blushed and shrunk up and

Died.

We swept them up and fed them to the fire.

Yellow had lied.

Flip-flops and Dandelions and Popsicles…

We catalogued his aliases.

But he seduced us all.

Again.

Light

My toes are creamy glowworms in the shade

They are scrunching through this thin wet carpet

Scrunch

 Scrunch

Scrunch

And there is a lick of yellow up those stairs

But your balcony is still dark

I jumped and wriggled in my puddle

When an old van illuminated

Your aluminum frame

It slid through the fog

Crunching pebbles

Crunch

Spit

Pop

I thought it was you.

An Office

          Spending a day with people familiar enough to speak predictably and unfamiliar enough to be awkward is exactly terrible. Tim writes this, the pleasure of such an observation fading into reality as he pockets his little pink notebook and steps into the organized fray of the office party, where men speak to women and women talk about shoes or hair or whatever the hell women talk about. Probably about Tim, the strange man. It is New Year’s, and Tim recognizes that attending the office party for the sixth year in a row will end as it always does: with that wet-sock, fell-asleep-in-jeans-with-the-light-on uncomfortable feeling that pines for those hours to have been spent in a chair at home or asleep or anywhere else. 

          “Ay! Tim!” a slap on the back stings through his jacket, pushing annoyance up into his brain, where it sloshes around and swells a little bit. “Hello,” Tim responds, and walks away. He can hear them chuckling behind him, their cool exhales tickling the hot handprint on his skin even from feet away. Tim keeps walking, nodding to the ladies and gentlemen and saying their names quietly through his nose as he passes them, “Fatso, Double-Fatso, Chin Woman, Madame Hairdo, Guy Loudly, Fingers, One Time You Wore Two Different Shoes…” He twists around them, mumbling excuses, until he is at the door. He peels the door open and holds it with a foot, ushering a lagging coworker into the social area before exiting. He crosses the thin carpet of the hallway and spreads a palm over the surface of the opposite door, with his fingertips pressed against the plastic plaque. He wishes he knew how to read braille, but just reads the white Arabic letters above the dots, instead. “MEN!” The word is in all caps, so Tim says it with some amount of emphasis. “MEN!” He says it again.

          Tim feels satisfied with his proclamations just in time to avoid sharing an uncomfortable moment with an accountant, who is at this moment exiting the Men’s Room, wiping his hands on his pants. Tim catches the door as it swings closed behind the accountant, and allows himself into the bathroom.

         Tim leans against the sink, casually doing nothing on his Blackberry, until the porcelain edge pushes too far into the fat around his hips. After a few minutes of looking around and listening to the hum of silence ricocheting off the tile of the walls and the floor and the ceiling, he decides to turn in a tight circle until he is facing the mirror. He leans his face very close to the surface and raises his eyebrows at himself, noticing himself. “Men,” he says again, quietly. “MEN!” He wonders how good he would be at reading lips, and tries to make himself say something he doesn’t know he is going to say and then read his own lips to decipher it. This does not work.

         Tim fishes his Blackberry back out of the depths of his pocket and balances it on his nose. When it begins to fall forward, he leans again, pushing his nose against the glass so the device may regain its tiny balance. “Very good,” he tells it, nodding his approval. This causes the Blackberry to fall from his nose and into the sink below with a terrific clatter. Tim frantically scoops it up with both hands, juggling it and the little bits that have fallen off it between his hands as his nose-print slowly fades from the mirror.

         The Blackberry’s screen is split; tattooed now by a glassy spider web. Tim is pleased by this arrangement, and studies it with the pad of his pinky finger for several minutes. “Men…” he says again slowly, as he runs his finger along the cuts. When he tires of this, Tim takes his notebook back out of his jacket and, turning to a blank page, lays it open neatly on the squares of the bathroom floor. He places his scarred Blackberry carefully on one page, closes the opposite page on top, and stamps on the package with both feet. As he (with minimal struggle) replaces the notebook and its new contents into his  pocket, he realizes that he has no idea how to tell the time now. Tim leaves the bathroom, holding the door open with his foot and stretching the rest of his body into the hallway until he can see the company-issued clock that hangs between the Women’s and Men’s rooms. “Well, shit,” says Tim upon reading the time. He gets a drink from the water fountain and retreats into the bathroom, having forty-five minutes left to burn.

Skinny Skin

She likes her skin close to the bone;

slinkies and tin-can phones propped in-between are no good. 

She likes concentric silhouettes

and she’ll chase away the slide-factor until she is happy

and her bones are safe from the

heartbreak of

loose companionship.

She is expertly

eliminating the middleman;

she is two men

over whom she has perfect control and who are tighter than tight and thinner than theives.

Sailing

                The great gate of mist that ushered us into its oceanic parkinglot feet retreats, and its dark toes shrink to elevator buttons. It shrivels into discarded socks, cradled secretly by the suburbs. I have an oval view of gum-pack houses in which tic-tac people worry and wander and vacuum and fill out forms. I stretch my arm downward and snatch them up and tell them not to worry because they are only tic-tacs.  Their relief turns to steam and floats over the mist, creating a lattice work of white. I reach through the holes of the lattice and snatch up some more tic-tacs, who are dissolving into sugar crystals. I sprinkle them on my shoulders and stand up, “See?” They see, and their relief blows them up through the mist and the lattice steam and into the sun, where they burn up and crystalize in a very nice black crust, so thin that no one even notices a little bit less light on the ground, they just vacuum less often.

                We are out to sea, pushed away from the perfect white boulders of the shore and floating above the ocean, puffing toward the prairie. I ask for a can of Pringles.