I wasn't losing my religion when
I plucked the hairs of ten unwed
grandmothers and offered them to her
in atonement for the granite-colored
sky, her father's failed falafel shop,
tenements demolished piled into neat
stacks of cordwood— she cringed, told me
I wore bleach stains on my face. Rumors
circulated of old love being outsourced,
sold as contraband on the streets.
Hard as tungsten. A thready pulse
ran from unmade beds to my cold head
after a shower. A hooker handed me the
last furrets of her love in the shape
of an uneaten chocolate heart. I imagined
summer to be one more lazy lie told to
immigrant workers unable to produce
green cards. A man with hobnail speech
and hands smooth as a woman's marched
up to my apartment and told me he's
increasing the rent. Hispanic women
congregated at the corner of East Houston
and complained about the pirating of
stray dogs to be used as beef stock.
The weatherman predicted at least seven
inches of rainfall this month which is
not enough to wipe out the memory of
tiny umbrellas stitched to my underwear.
A policeman issued summons to men
who smiled like moray eels yet denied
the rights of pelagic creatures crammed
in the fish tanks of their uptown suites.
A huge traffic jam stifled Eighth Avenue and
someone on a podium looking like a kid in
oversized threads apologized that Paris
Hilton will not be available for interviews.
If the Martians decide take back Area 51
and everything else,
If the Chinese decree the United States
shall be used as a gigantic badminton court or
a market to export tennis balls,
if the Prince of Wales flings his cummerbund
into the gutters of East London
and decides he will eat pie
and not porterhouse,
if zero gravity dominates our daily lives
and we will stand straight on curved surfaces
i just want you to know
that your secrets are safe with me:
how you wore your mother's army boots
when the dime store relocated uptown,
how you plagiarized Marcuse
in your mid-term critique on Kant
when you meant to plagiarize Hegel,
how you shop lifted at Macy's
when you promised you wouldn't
you promised you wouldn't
and hid delicate spindly items
in the crotch of your father's boxers
that you wore for sentimental reasons.
)
[Remember how spiders were once
your favorite pets? Gave you
such a thrill creepy-crawling
up the vaginal fornix.]
(
i just want you to know
that for a schizophrenic girl
who wore Ray-Bans only at night
who had delusions of hypertonicity,
hallucinations of being the Queen
of all salts,
the Bishop of Bicarb,
offering the cure for hypochloremia
and various maladies of metabolism,
it was never a breakdown in com-mu-ni-ca-tion
you were the best fuck of my life,
your acid to my base buffered this
indigestion called living,
and i will never forget someone,
anyone
no matter how wide (+ the anion gap -)
no matter what the lab values betray
about brain chemistry,
acetylcholine L-Dopa receptor
receptor
oh my key receptor
neural misfit Madonna of my dreams,
I will never forget anyone
as potassium pleuterperfect
as you.
The last time we met
which was decades ago
and i was young enough
to deny the lethargy of snow,
you turned into somebody else
hard and cold
not the Vassar girl
i once knew
majoring in French
and free love
that was never free.
You aged into some soap opera queen
who deflates egos
by sticking a pin
into her breast implants
and telling the men
they were never breast fed.
After five years
of a love so apathetic
the way i feel about
the sight of unwashed wine glasses,
i hung on
while
you hung out
somewhere else.
i remember i took up
chain smoking
while you gave up
smoking on trains.
We were not destined
to be neutral
like meteorologists
when they report on cold fronts.
One of us had to work up the nerve
to say, "The ice is here to stay."
Occasionally, i still dream about you
and i think about you
more than occasionally.
And i wonder how it is
that you shut me out
so long ago
when i still believed
that snow never lasts
yet, you can enter my head,
explore its rooms and caverns
its shrines to false gods,
you with flashlight
and stone-cold gaze,
spreading out a white cloth,
constructing a tabernacle
to yourself,
then leave without
saying good-bye.
When after all,
you were never invited.
Kyle Hemmings holds an MFA in creative writing and loves to cook, bake, and burn whatever he cooks or bakes. He also listens to The Beach Boys sing of an endless summer that never arrives.