technicalglitch
Sometimes, just before the sun peeks her bright eyes over the horizon, we'll go walking. In the silence, you can hear the city breathing--the soft whisper of electricity through the line, the collective sigh of humans turning in their beds to catch the last moments of a dream. We are church mice, skipping through the pews on shadow-light feet, creeping through the streets in the dewy haze of morning. Nothing feels quite so real as your hand in my own, the rub of your thumb on the my trembling palm. Nothing feels real as we slip between cool sheets, the brightness of the day burning through the gauzy curtains the strip the secrets from the room, and I cup the softness of your cheek and marvel that you're here, with me.
Anger weighs black on your tongue,
heavy, like licorice, and twice as sticky.
It stains the white of your teeth,
the whites of your eyes,
until those bright windows go dark,
and the projector flickers
and I am left wondering
when you drew the curtains.
Sinking into the heat, descending below the churning froth is a relief. Water pounds my head, pounds my chest until I can't tell the aches that mingle behind my breastbone apart. If I hold my breath long enough, will I disappear? Will I dissolve fast like coffee grounds, nothing left but bitterness and hot black fury? Or erode gently, like granite beneath warm rain?
There is something unmistakable about clean dirt running between your fingers, about sun warmed stones pricking at the soles of your feet. There is something unmistakable about the way you feel her hand in the small of our back, hear her brilliant laugh ringing through the rustling tree tops as you pull the hoe across the land. You can never get the rows quite as straight as she does, can never quite match the ease with which she melts into the loamy ground, bare feet black with life and growth. You like to imagine, briefly, that the sweetness of the first summer berries are her lips against your own again.
you told me, that day
when the sky cracked like an egg
on the hot black sky
that I'd be in your prayers.
how do I tell you
that I'd much rather be
between those clasped hands
or on those fluttering lips?
how do I tell you
that I'd much rather be
knelt between your quivering pale
sunday school thighs?
how do I tell you
that I'd much rather be
in love with you
than pledged to Him.
He pressed his lips to the cool tile, hands flat on the dirt of patrons past. It was dark, dark as the woods in the dead of winter where he'd hack at black ice to melt for water. Pa couldn't do that anymore, not since last winter, but that was alright.
The organ wheezed, dusty breaths slapping bare pine beams. The church wasn't much to look at by city standards, but it was theirs, hewn from the land and snow and ice. It clung to this place obstinately, like the people whose hands had raised it, and they were proud, proud of this simple pine and iron.
This was their place.
Looming oak and tapered glass
rise above endless rows of
silence on silence.
Arms crossed and hands clasped,
in hopes that one day,
something will fill them.
Stomping angry rubber feet, the girl scowled from beneath cotton floss bangs. "I don't wanna," she mumbled, words catching in the holes where teeth used to grow as she turned her narrow back to the dinner table. Long lean light lounged along the worn wood of a dinner table, set with three place-mats, two plates, and one person.
"Why not?"
The words were soft with tired fondness, like worn sheets.
Today is the day I become a man-- high hoped and gleaming with shiny newness that comes with thinking you know what's best in the world, what's right. A sense of entitlement that wreathes your crown-- you are the golden boy.