Fish Spit!

I was slick

             as

             fish spit

                          sweat body slippery in

                          out of water

                          hands,

bent                 pretzel

             in your first car.

 

Stuttering fingers

             fumbling denim button

             to closure and you

                          gratified me,

             though your Christian

             guilt called you to repent

                          before I even

                          made it home.

Then, after

moon lolled

                          to shift,

midnight painting

the tiny town navy

                          you beat down

my door, pant and

                          please,

             pleaded

for more, for my twisted absolution,

begged

             for me to color you

 

            tongue whip crimson

 

 

My High School was an Ex-Strip Club

The jokes practically wrote themselves. It stood a little smear of construction, windowless with mirrored ceilings, leaking roof, plumbing on the fritz, a garish globe shaped building all but dilapidated, an eye sore for even the most distracted teen driver. In the parking lot, sweat slicked teens pawed, thirsted, and I tried to hitch a ride home with any upper classman who wasn’t stiff up, preoccupied. Though I claimed to be different, an exception, I still applied lip smacker gloss towards any warm body gliding coolly past. You could say I was Mia Thermopolis invisible, though sky and gods and bugs and birds noticed me enough to turn chin, enough for baked stoner bodies to hazily see clear through me. Still, I hungered. Sniffed out fantasy plots, nose bent down to book, picture I would shed back brace fungal acne and the soft bread stuck in braces wire, the dairy intolerance would then be estranged from my intolerable bloating belly, and I would emerge bleached blonde with black lashes cool calm sure and grateful, god, who I could be without the muddy of my fud ruck genetics, wrecking my chance of spotlight, the perfect vision of my untapped potential, I thought. If sheer will alone could soothe the bones of a bitter teen bent on metamorphosis, I would have grown hydrangeas in hell but, alas, I sat in class, who I was and largely who I still am, joints a mess of ache and snaps, better suited on the outside of an inside joke. We were talking about the school that built me. The water bulging the ceilings, a dark mass spreading across the tiles, sagging, and when the burst came, a belch of brown water further stained the hot mildewed carpet, so perpetually wet, it squished. We were talking about the furnace cracked broke so hot girls kicked off shoes and peeled off socks in Calculus just to wiggle away the steam. One May, the summer near breaking open, a group of seniors brought a case of eggs, baked breakfast on the hissing space heaters, just to prove a point. Despite the mildew and the heat baking us burnt, we were still teenagers, animals. The wild call of hunting season, a hormonal hunger so feral, jaws snapped, cars rocked, our mouths insatiable, sour.

 

 

Night Terror

Horse stands

in charred field

so void of color,

you check

filters are off.

Only eyes move

on horse. You see

iris then whites.

The bright bulbed

spotlight reveals horse’s

inflamed stitches around

its breast implants.

They’re lopsided,

cartoonishly heavy.

A red gel is placed

over bright bulb

hueing scene crimson.

Horse goes to howl

but can only wail.

It’s moving on a

conveyor belt.

No. You are.

Toward pincers ready

with stitches. There

you go. Off

to be made horse.