Helldalgo

this bathroom is the reason time moves forward to leave the pink-and-green nineteen-seventies behind I'd rather saturate myself in worn-out feminine soaps and smells than watch his catheter bag and look for blood well lookie here, it's my favorite my favorite eldest granddaughter your only eldest granddaughter how's that man of yours? he's such a wonderful man we prefer heaven's picture perfection so we sing Baptist hymns and my pasty white uncle sings old black spirituals from his diaphragm jubilee, jubilee, oh lordy lordy lordy is that my son?  I think he's been drinking I want to hear Where Will I Be okay, dad doorbells ring a

she will call on Saturday and I will understand that her apology is buried in the niceties in the money in the clothes that she will buy me the clothes I never asked for she will call again sometime to call me distant, cold, and selfish to ask for help in the same weary, self-important breath and I will understand that she does not hate her daughter but that her daughter is the easiest to hurt she will wear an expensive dress and she will look her very best at my April wedding of which she does not approve

do you remember journals lying naked on the table the peeling yellow pages lying naked on the table your child's hand imprinted with force upon the pages do you remember blushing and burning the pages that lay open on the table? in the bedroom in the back you heard the sighing of a shattered woman and her crying collapsing in the quiet of room in the shadows of the room where she never thought her sobs would pierce the saturday cartoons

in a musty thrift shop in the darker part of town on the busiest street in town my first guilty, female lover slouching at sixty-nine inches on her size-eleven feet buckled and strapped in a knee-high pair of size-eleven boots my size-eleven boots

you shed your slacks for skirts squeezed my hand in the august sun and said no, you didn't know what it meant to be a man but you'd find out I was learning to link the warmth in my pelvis to the strong muscles and square jaws and didn't know why your slim hips made me just as warm I was being prepared for womanhood with bras and polished gossip and didn't know that I wouldn't burn in eternal flame for kissing her you took on titles that ran together boyfriendlibertarianintellectual man and lashed out at me and my autistic attempts at femininity we split like teenagers on a september night and took a year to grow into our

born wrapped in snowball fights and country air musty church hymnals and sabbath school he makes me hide our vices in our back room shedding our cigars and swearwords and alcoholic saturdays as we putter on icy switchbacks to the ramshackle pink house that mustn't be tainted by fornicators and homosexuals (only half, we laugh) there his mother beds us in separate beds under handstitched, separate quilts and makes me miss his sweat his nighttime mutters and his nighttime smells born wrapped in God-is-so-good and ten-cent tithes on chilly pews and patriarchy he slips a fire-warmed hand on my breast when no one can see

I throw knives up to hit the ceiling’s non-vital organs to keep them away from me. Because it terrifies you because you can’t put a name to your feelings because September is coming the dying season has passed & the grasshoppers can only pretend to be sticks for so long until they startle me. Because I can’t make you love me I live off rations— the blankets you’re always stealing the videos into your life this week’s birthday money my mother’s returning health the lumpy mattress I’m inhabiting as a body the sound of your voice tracing over my indiscretions. Always saying I’m

suicide princess, I think you're half in love with me: the way that you follow me about, grab at my ankles, tighten my veins would almost endear me to you. and in a certain masochistic way, I nearly welcome your knock on my door, the steady clink of your instruments of torture—because who would I be without this choking disease to carry around? but sometimes, dear, you impose too much. it's all well and good to write the occasional woe-is-me poem, to hold you by the hand of a Saturday afternoon when I have nothing better to do than indulge your caprices— but you're not an amusing pet, a fashionable idiosyncrasy. not to me. yo

Your smile traces the shape of my lips but I've already misplaced the memory of your voice - they say that's what leaves you first. These months will haunt me for too long, this bare beach and this autumn without leaves a tribute to the long lost greenness of summer, laughter in the trees I am cold as the last slow minutes of midnight, watching as the sun slips gently into the sea