Confessions of a Flawed Deity
Looking at your face now, thirty-nine years
after the fact, is like returning to a crime scene.
Every tooth in your mouth is shaped
like my tombstone, each bone in your hand
is a last straw capable of breaking my back.
I apologize for the hairline.
I cut corners
on the follicles, and
that was my fault.
But
how about them thighs? Strong enough
to crack
walnuts. And how about the hazel
I drizzled into your sockets? Sparkly darkness
I called it. Wanting you to be fierce,
but not bloodthirsty, I modeled your nose
after a shark’s, sanded your teeth down to the dullness
of a grouper’s. I’m sorry for lifting your fingerprints
from two opposing sources—I loved the idea
of your hands constantly being pulled
in two directions. Obviously I poured too much
acceleration into your temper—I didn’t
want you getting trampled and figured (incorrectly)
your slender wrists would keep your fists
dangling at your sides. But oh that pulsating
estuary—thoughts twinkling in your
mind
shimmer like glow-in-the-dark jellyfish.
It still feels like I am the razor, and
you
are the wrist, like I’m the window,
and you’re the person about to jump
out.
Origins
I’m from touch football in parking lots and street-corner Romeos
I’m from half-brothers and three-quarter
nelsons
I’m from
watered-down blue blood and finger-painting on subway walls
I’m from tongue kisses in stairwells and tequila sunsets in the closet
I’m from stealing the coins out of
other people’s wishing wells
I’m from jordache jeans and pick-up games in the twilight
I’m from Italian girls wearing murmurs I oh so badly wanted to speak
I’m from sidestepped obligations
and nomadic fingertips
I’m
from listerine in alleyways and whiskers in the vaseline
I’m from unreliable narrators and abandoned buildings
I’m from don’t cross 24th Street because of the
Irish and don’t cross South
Street because of the blacks
I’m from the merry-go-round where white guys in cars slow down after
midnight to take a visual bite out of my twelve-year-old ass
I’m from fuck you when my friends
are around, and please stop looking
at me,
please
stop looking at me, please stop looking at me, when I’m alone
I’m from sucker punches and a mouthful of blood spit in my face
I’m from a nightgown breathing
at the bottom of a staircase
I’m from I wished you died in that hospital
I’m from exit plans that involve shotguns
I’m from you gonna front like the hard guy,
you better back that shit up.
The Pool
Twelve years old, treading water in the deep end
when Maria Goretti swims up and snatches
my tennis ball, clutches it to her new chest,
dares me to wrestle it back. The world—the
lifeguard
in his elevated metal bucket, the grown-ups
buried in their lounge chairs, the other
kids shallow-end
frolicking—can only see our heads,
the twelve inches
bobbing
above water, not the other fifty-eight
writhing beneath the surface, our silk thighs brushing,
our bathing suits bursting with these new pieces
of organic technology invented inside us. The grown-ups,
nerve endings filed down to a bore, and the lifeguard
with his transistor brain don’t know Maria and I
have grown gills, that we’re breathing
underwater, that life
is happening
down here. In twenty years, we’ll climb out,
grab towels, slide on wedding rings, and sink
into our respective lounge chairs. The grown-ups
will have moved to Florida, a state with so many old people
it looks like a coffin being lowered at an angle
into the earth. The pool will be cemented over, paved
into a parking lot, where once a year Maria and I will come
with our bathing suits bunched up in our
pockets
and stare at the yellow lines and the nicked
fenders and think
how
certain tailpipes look like the rusty lips of snorkels.
-from The Endarkenmant
