Two Stories
Flowers
When my mother took me home from the hospital I sat inside my bedroom pulled my chair up to the window pressed my face against the glass. I could feel the cold air rush in push my cheeks like bones and I was leaning I was looking I was trying to find the stars. You don't remember the old stories or how I said them how I said them. And that was when I met you you didn't know I sat and stared. When you called I put on make-up my cheeks wore rouge like painted bones and I would smile at you for hours when we went out you drove me home. You did not know you said you said you did not know. What I was like to be with or what I was like to live with or what I really wanted when I want to be alone. And I loved you for it. You gave me
flowers on my dress like corsages and pressed against my wrist like the ties that bind. And the world sighed still I was ready to start and you didn't know I could not love you this way. But I am trying to smile/ it is disjointed unity in connected union where everything seems to fit. Even my body when I run out to greet you it is small enough it barely breathes it will love you forever it will cry for a long time in the bedroom before the mirror or at the window where I feel myself and I feel bones. I remember your flowers yes I remember your flowers yes I remember your flowers
and how they made me feel.
To Jenn
My roommate was pale and claimed she was the ghost of Edie Sedwick and at nineteen I couldn't sleep because I was afraid of the sound of angry flies coming from her closet. They were hiding in there--behind the shoe rack and hanging clothes, the eye shadow and razor blades, the toe nail clippers and bottles of hair dye, the newspaper cut outs and cardboard box filled with shivering, orphan rice. I didn't mind her scars or the sound of her retching with one hand holding open a garbage bag and two fingers of the other stuffed down her throat. I didn't mind her repeated invitation to join her for fifteen minutes, to strip off my clothes and cross the floor in strapped on go-go boots otherwise naked but for feigned expressions of despair. And when she went home for the weekend, I didn't mind the garbage she left behind for me to deal with. It was the gathering of flies that kept me up at night.