Fuck, Marry, Kill

He’s dirty

His hands are bloody and bruised.

He’s gentle

His steps are soft and his breaths are slow.

He’s appropriate

His eyes are closed his skin is close.

He’s dirty

With close skin and slow breaths.

I’d fuck him.

Someday he’ll be educated

Mozart, Milton, and mechanics.

Someday he’ll be wealthy

In soul or in stuff.

Someday he’ll be witty

With inside jokes and good intentions.

Someday he will be educated

With good intentions and soul.

Someday I’d marry him.

If he was clean

With smooth hands and heavy steps

If he was stupid

With stuff and bad jokes

If he was lost in sight of a someday-

I’d kill him.

He’s educated

he knows me like the back of his hand.

He’s wealthy

That boy has all of me.

He’s witty

All his jokes get inside me.

He’s dirty

With close skin and slow breaths.

I’d fuck him. 

Hoping For Raleigh

Hoping For Raleigh 

“I made it down the coast in seventeen hours

Picked me a bouquet of dogwood flowers,

And I’m hoping for Raleigh

So I can see my baby tonight.”

I’ve given up on seeing lines and lanes

I just wanna feel that satin and lace

I wouldn’t care if I drove off this road,

If the risk was anything but seeing your face.

I didn’t say I was coming

Because im just feeling needy.

I need to make it just far enough south

To get you to hold me.

You told me not to leave when I did,

Said I couldn’t bear the cold.

Warm me up baby-

I’ll never grow up, im just getting old.

I bet you have a life now

Some big plans and a big deal

Cause you were always good at being good

And I don’t know how not to steal.

If I run out of cigarettes and these flowers die on my dash,

I’ll knock on our door with petals and Marlboro ash.

I hear they’re cheap here in Raleigh,

“So I can see my baby tonight” . 

Success

Success

There is a tranquility at my lonely kitchen table. It’s modest, quiet, and tarnished. There is a candle from some fancy shop in the center of a town just far enough out to be a trip. There are some dishes from this morning too; a plain glass, a cracked plate, and a fork. I eat everything with a fork. I Push them to the other side of the table like I always do, and open a self-help book on time-management or some similar bullshit. These are what gifts become when you enter adulthood, I guess.

I stop for a second to look at the picture that has become a bookmark. I think my Aunt in one of the Carolinas sent it to me for Christmas. It is of my cousin and I, seven and eight I’d guess, in that big opened living room we had when we were still down south. I can see into our dining room in the picture, (it was probably the only legitimate dining room we ever had) and on that table is some china I’d never eaten off of and some chandelier bulbs dad hadn’t yet installed. The living room was pretty impressive for our family too, big old stone fireplace, two matching velvet chairs and a long ass sectional my parents split up in the divorce.

Then there is Jessie and I. I’m wearing a red sheet wrapped around me like a strapless gown with a longer train than any wedding dress I have legitimately seen. Jessie too, is decked in linens, but she is pulling off a sassier short look. Her sheets are pinned up at the hips with hair ties and her own popcorn-butter-coated-fingers. We both tied up our straight blonde hair in knotty buns and left out some straggly strands for show. I am holding a hair brush (that did not belong to me) and has the word “princess” inscribed on the pink grip. Jessie has the real microphone; she must have bribed with a good secret to get it for the day.

Looking at the picture I can hear us singing Britney Spears at the top of our lungs. My dad walks in and out of the memory, desensitized to our booming presence. Sometimes we’d yell demands like :

                “Daddy, This dog can’t be on stage with us, it’s barking over my singing!” or,

“Uncle Mark, can I have a Pepsi? Britney always drinks Pepsi and we are just as famous as her!”

Then he would let the dog out, and brink us drinks. He would be muttering things under his breath about how we should “marry wealthy” cause we clearly weren’t ever going to be “cut-out for day-jobs”. He’d tell my brother and his friends that “at least we were ambitious” and he would tell our mothers that they should teach us to be “realistic”. He would tell us we should hope we were “cute like this forever” because he saw no signs of “the crazy in us calming down”.

We didn’t mind back then, we would steal away with our sodas in our dresses and write fairytales about becoming famous and being on Oprah.

Sometimes in the end we married princes- but that was always for the tabloids. When we were young, famous, and successful princesses, we were romantic classics, and we were always in love with the poor boy next door.

 It sure as hell made for a good story.

I called him a couple weeks ago, the poor boy next door. He didn’t have long to chat, he translates for the UN now and has two kids. His wife is a stay at home mom I hear, but she is better at being best friends with their nanny. He asked what my plans were and where I was in life. I laughed anticipating how surprised he would be if he knew how calm the crazy in me had become. I looked at my kitchen table and ramshackle apartment and I told him, “I’m pretty successful too. I’m saving up to buy our old house back.”

I will get it all back too. I’ll be trading in this tarnished table for chandeliers and velvet chairs. Even if it means marrying a prince for the tabloids and wearing my best red sheets. Daddy should be proud. 

Unsettled

Unsettled

I have a set of keys

To 900ft. of carpets and walls.

I know how many steps to the bathroom,

How many people fit in these halls,

But knowledge isn’t home.

I have a bedroom with my paper name on the door

In a house somewhere too far out.

In a place that smells like your cigarettes and perfume,

Where the air tastes like strangers and doubt.

Papers and names don’t make home.

I have a gas tank and four tires

New brakes, and a new transmission.

But she came used and already trained,

And she starts up without my permission.

Mechanics built her body but didn’t build a home.

I have a gypsy whim to abide by

And a youthfulness unwilling to settle.

I miss believing in something permanent

I’m a gypsy who is too attached to you:                                  

           I'm the present tense of cars and keys that came and went. 

The Things He Told Me

The Things he Told Me

“Tell me all your secrets” She said.

My parents hate themselves.

My two cats love each other more than any human being.

I had an accident when I was nine

And when I was eleven I pushed my sister on purpose.

I want a white picket fence

I don’t want to be the death of me.

I have never really been in love,

But I promised someone I would love her forever.

“Tell me your truths” she said.

I don’t know what I believe.

I believe in true love.

I don’t believe in god,

but I believe there is magic in the third pew from the alter.

I believe men and women are created equal,

And all men should know how to drive a truck and skin a deer.

There are always bad people.

There are no honest definitions.

“Tell me your story” she said.

I wrote a book once.

No one bought it.

I guess that like all art,

It was a self-portrait.

I grew up right here.

Graduated there, skinnydipped in that water, and had sex on that soil.

I’ve had brown hair and brown eyes my whole life-

Just like my sister’s.

But these seasonal freckles

And that faded suntan

Are really telling my story.

“Tell me who you love” She said.

I love my mom.

She never yells at me anymore

And she looks at me like the man across the hall-

With worry and forgiveness.

I love my sister (I guess)

But she is kind of a slut.

I love my sophomore history teacher-

He once had us color in class.

I learned so much about the world.

“Tell me who loves you” She whispered.

Not the right people.

A girl who wants something impossible from me.

A girl who won’t believe me when I tell her:

“I made it all up” he said. 

I wonder

I wondered when you sat shotgun

Your fingertips on my forearm.

Your voice in my ears.

Your rhythm in my heartbeat.

My hands cooled my face,

when I was hot and sticky.

You just smiled.

I wondered then, too.

I had no appetite,

But I wanted to swallow you down.

Wanted to taste and feel you

To keep you deep inside of me

Filling me with wonder.

Filling me with hunger.

Then there were goodbyes.

Your poetry between my lips.

Your hands warming my face.

And I wondered then

Because I could feel the tears

Inside of me- where you belong.

I wondered when you were with her.

The frozen seconds of you too on expensive paper,

Brought me those same brown eyes,

That same tangled hair

Except this time- against her.

Tangled in her hair you were in her brown room.

I spit up a smile for you still.

Why is your smile

So overwhelming and all-consuming?

Why is every word of yours

Worth a thousand pictures?

Though I never could say it:

I wonder what that is-

If it’s you, filling me to the brim.

Then so much distance,

Starved and emptied me.

I Spewed out all my pleas.

Please.

I begged you for one sip

I longed for one more bite

You gave me nothing;

So I sustained myself on wonder.

Here we are now.

No pictures. No poetry. No hair or skin. No distance.  

Nothing sacred yields nothing broken.

Your heart and my soul, can’t make any more promises.

Overdosed and underfed by and for- you

I wonder. 

Denim on Rayon

Denim on Rayon.

He sank her onto the bed and followed her down. His fingertips slipped down the rayon defined curves of her torso and then clenched at her hips. He proceeded slowly, moving his fingertips down the sides of her cotton leggings and stopping at the hem of her dress. With new found confidence he slid underneath her clothes and felt the warmth of her skin on his. He kissed her neck and shoulders as he leaned into her body and his hands neared her breasts. She took a heavy breath.

“are you okay?” He asked.

“Mmmm.”

“We don’t have to do this.” He whispered. He kissed her jawline beneath her ear and she encouraged him by running her cold fingers up his naked back all the way into his scalp. The hair on the back of his neck erected. He kissed her lips and pulled her up right.

Her dress made a soft pillow behind her when he laid her back down, his hands cupping her breasts. He moved one hand down her stomach to the inside of her thigh. He Pressed her knee out and pulled away from her to inch into the space he’d made for himself.

“Turn off the light” She whispered. One shaky hand lay over her own stomach. Her other index finger traced the letters Levi Strauss and co while her thumb lie just inside the joint of the perpendicular zipper on his jeans. He moved his hand up her stomach and weaved it inside of hers.

“I want to see you.”

“Not this well.” She moaned. Her voice was saturated in nervous neediness. He kissed her chest and hesitated, but then nodded into her, his nose tickling her. He pushed himself to his knees with that hand and then leaned backwards to feel for the switch on the wall. when he removed his hand from hers she too sat up, her legs wide around him, and unbuttoned his jeans. Her hands were still unsteady and cold, but they were certain.

“do you want help?” He moaned. His voice dripping impatience and incontinence. She needed not respond, he guided her hand down the zipper of his jean and over his lap. She petted the outline of him over the denim, and inhaled deeply. She opened her eyes and tilted her head slightly upward to look at him, Her nose rested on his chin. He bowed his head and kissed her.

“Back up,” He breathed. He held the crotch of his clothes in one hand and took a couple steps back on his knees. She laid back and inched closer to the head of the bed, pulsing towards him again with every inch of separation, never taking her hands from his body, ceaselessly clinging to the anticipation.

He pushed her knees together with both hands and kissed the cotton that covered them. He drew her calves up over his shoulder and swept her into nudity. He then did the same to himself, and centered himself inside her.

What had always been fairy tale, forbidden, dark, and desirable was suddenly just his inhaling and her exhaling. His putting in the effort, and her opening up.