Hanahaki.
if you didn’t want me to tear that black silk nightgown off of you, you shouldn’t
have worn it. if you didn’t want——but what did you,
it was never certain. we saw a film, cried, walked on the beach, you were silent.
days later you said how magical and i thought: no, it’s just a friday. but
for you there are none, or few. your
dysregulated
mother and the thirteen cats. four slavering unsocialized caged dogs. bathroom
i am not allowed to use. office full of disney and anime where you work
interrupted, again and
again. in an incorrigible pain.
listen it is with hideous difficulty that i engraved this life. i left at 19, it took
effort and refusals to stay away. constantly recalled by the molestation factory like an
appliance that might catch on fire.
when i first thumbed across your nipple you startled and not in a good way
so i backed off. later
asked for space, tired when i hadn’t seen you in weeks. i didn’t mean
to tear any more openings, girl already riddled with grapeshot,
didn’t mean to recapitulate my tragic
backstory and you didn’t ask: the one
where she wrote i haven’t victimized you. i’m not going
to litigate it.
as now i laugh at the rude lost-password prompt what is your best friend’s last name?
you linger in an exurb surrounded by dolls and tag me the bad guy, can’t figure out
why don’t i feel shittier? my dude
i have been him forever, let the underwriters win so long ago
and it’s not a compliment, i know who i am, what i did.
when you put your hand to your mouth and cough and up comes
a wet clump, handful
of blood-soaked petals (tsubaki) i’m not surprised, but it’s not me. you can’t pick
me. don’t
put weight into my enervated gaze or my fingers toying with
that spaghetti strap. i’ll blow it. i already blew it. severed.
chew them down, swallow back now, a part of you
you need and you need to go on, you’re
grown-up and have
yourself, full cup, a time
while i walk mindless and self-attended along the same water,
unbridal, her gone forever. that i could rise to
split this cage or this mew, i will fly the minute they
let me leave
Mangalsutra (my girl only throws away what’s valueless).
Resigned to it, I walk the cat. In the alleyway
where she’s afraid and the boys who play basketball are taller
this summer; she
watches them down the block, eyes riveted on their game while
I don’t know what color to crochet
your scarf so I pick the softest gray, a dragonish
green you used to like four years ago.
If I made one for my other lover should it be black, I don’t
know anymore. Then she gets all excited by how tall the phone poles are, tries
to gouge in her claws and crab to the top,
the
same way
I used to be aroused by breasts or a good song and now it’s
when students say something thoughtful,
blood in the water. Maybe you would prefer red. I fall in love
with a mottled murex
immediately like I did with your. Complexity that I wanted, your girlish contusion.
Nothing hangs
together anymore without it, you’re
meaningless and I’m just Satan, I left her, and her. And evil. A
betrayer.
Concoct a trial of velvet cream liqueur mixing milk plus amaretto and it’s not the
same, watery and
wan. There’s no drug, nothing dark, no dépêchement
to shaft between me and the grinding
excruciating
grit of having failed to be your need. You put me first
and that was savage, why didn’t you tell me,
I should have realized you were doing it the whole time, a cocaine of my
stupid resilience. It
seemed frailer. It lied. You, my twin.
Gives an irony that I can’t hang now, or it would be
the worst thing I could do. So I elect slowness. Drink sugar, don’t move,
wait. As it is
you can still be nettled,
too serene to roll your eyes, you might yet curse me. The exact same
way this has
utterly fallen
apart. You might rip up
the misty scarf, might set
fire to a gift. Or more likely just fold it quietly into the
trash
A kiss.
We were making out, leaning against the paneled wall
of the library hallway, waiting for our ride
when you pulled away to say oh look, the van is here! and tripped
out to meet it, shrugging your barn jacket back onto
your shoulders. As I slumped there, dazed, ached,
watched you leave, wet slime against my
sanitary napkin and worked to catch
my breath. And got it. That it’s different, that you
would never want it like this. That you were meant
to grow up better, marry well, be vibrant, turn always
real. While I crashed out so hard I can’t catch my breath or
stop, watch myself become another gifted idiot
who faceplanted, trainwrecked, lost prospect, wherewithal, brains,
too overmedicated to read a novel. Your upgrade
has been, wow, significant: not one but two associate
professors, book tour, endowed chair, a garden of mary’s tears
and private practice with lavender-blue sofa, perfectly tarnished
mindfulness bell, loose-weave scarves and willowy
thigh, this is what forty-nine looks like you
inform your neighbor tartly in the university town
where you grew up and now scout
gluten-free cupcakes and balanced cocktails dusted
in foam, I was so fucking
ungrateful.
Fitting I can hardly get
up a single flight of stairs, hilarious it’s
maybe four, five more years at most before the stroke
takes me out. I anticipate its moment of
falling, how unbearably funny it’ll be feeling the dismayed spark dim,
twinkle, wink out. Everyone in the theatre plans to laugh.
You’ll be so sad. No, but keep living another forty years, die wiry
and white-haired in a wheelchair, reading Tolstoy
on your tablet or whatever they have by then. Not before ninety at least,
walk your nth generation of red fox retriever by the marsh,
start up waterbirds. Don’t, you can’t, you always
have to be the girl backing
away from me, mouth a little reddened, who says
let’s go it’s time to leave, always be
that perfect. Because it was. Because,
xiaomaomi, you were.
The black book of hours.
Listen, I wrote it because I loved her. I wrote it because it would make her happy. I wrote it because I was bad, and if by writing anything I could get her to turn her attention onto me for even a moment, I might be less so. I wrote it because I was lonely, and she was busy, and I wrote it so I would have her company, in the sense that I pretended with every sentence that she was attending. I wrote the words as if she were hearing them. I wrote until I was worse, and she was better. I wrote because I didn’t know what else to do. I wrote because there was no one else to talk to in the middle of the night. I wrote because as a child I would mouth the words aloud and act them out, arrange my face into the expression of an adverb. I wrote because I tried to make my own newspaper, my own movie, my own dresses out of paper and staples. I wrote it knowing that she would never read it, that I would never show it to her, and that even had I been able to do so, she would have found it distasteful. I wrote it so I could hide it from myself. I wrote it so that I could hide it from her, and since it was she from whom I hid it, it might thus belong to her more truly. I wrote it so that she was the object of the sentence, making me its subject. I wrote it not for her but for myself, except that everything I became had already been constituted by her. I
wrote it as she wrote me, as if I were an amalgam of her gestures and tricks of speech and angers and slender affections. I wrote it as if it were made out of her sighs of light. I wrote it for her. I wrote it to her. I wrote it about her. I wrote it until I could have almost become her, until there was so little there was hardly anyone left there to write. I wrote it all, except for all the times I didn’t write it, all the spells I didn’t dare (try), all the intervals I didn’t even (to her) once listen.
JSA Lowe’s newest books of poetry, Bad Sanity and Not Again, are forthcoming from East Beach Press. Her poems and essays have appeared in such journals as AGNI, Black Warrior Review, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, and Missouri Review, and she lives on Galveston Island. Her favorite revenge story is 山河令 Word of Honor, a Chinese wuxia television drama based on a novel by Priest. Wen Kexing, the vicious but elegantly fashionable Ghost Valley master, is bent on avenging his family when he meets equally lethal former assassin Zhou Zishu, an alcoholic with a bad attitude and a worse fake beard. As they join reluctant forces to unearth conspiracy, hijinks ensue, of the eternal-love variety; sorry about the plot, you two villains, but this is your clown4clown romance now.
