ash&bone

Killadelphia #2

Reading Terminal Market is stuffed to the gills with sweat soaked chattering humanity and cheesy, fishy, smokey, deep fried odors. You are a salmon with an unrelenting will to live, you’re catapulting upstream one fin at a time when you see an opening and slip into the void of the Amish candy shop. A neatly dressed girl in a crisp white bonnet rings up cellophane packages of chocolates, gummi worms, malt balls, lemon drops, sour rings, pistachios, swedish fish. You are not thinking about dad. Your warm hand slightly fogs the wrapped treats; if you grip them long enough, maybe they will liquefy. Your tongue is remarkably dry. Don’t think about dad. Don’t think about anything. 

Don’t think about the stash of sugar coated jelly oranges in the glove box. Don’t think about the wordless fist of sweet gelatin he’d transfer into your palm after school. The market is suddenly still, the heartbeat of the Amish girl is amplified or maybe it’s a drum or an impending tsunami. It is not your blood in your ears, it is not a leaping in your chest because you are not thinking about him. You are not thinking about him or the bundle of tubes and hoses that kept him suspended in his mechanical bed, you are not thinking about the determined beeping of the heart monitor. You are not thinking about the plastic smiling sympathy of the organ donation representatives, the cheap ceramic heart pendant they offered you in exchange for his body, or the fact that in spite of a quadruple bypass four years prior, his heart was the last part of him to still. You are just gripping the chocolate raisins or the swedish fish or something crinkly. You are the only salmon in a sea of cellophane, a bathtub of jellyfish, a bear’s jaw, an aquarium of breath. 

The register flies open and the coins clink against each other. The Amish girl adjusts her bonnet and sighs, and you are thinking about the impossibility of drowning.

killadelphia

how does one return
to the verdant swisher smoke park
the pet store window filled with exhausted, sweaty kittens
or the Subway franchise that should’ve crumbled to the ground months ago 
in a tragic toaster fire; this is hoagie town
beneath an indecisive sky and a thousand boys on paper thin bicycles
napping with a mango water-ice in one hand and a watermelon beer in the other
burnt out, hollow row homes leaning against moldy squats leaning against castles.

i cut my teeth on the jutting edge of a broken heart here.
i drank wine on quilts on every rooftop for the eternal summer 
fed moldy grapes and kale stems to a flock of anxious chickens
my blood to a herd of relentless mosquitos in overgrown yards.

how does one return to the cordoned-off scene
the site of a thing that happened
of a time that died?

Sewing Lessons

I miss untangling the knot of him,
gripping a loose strand between my teeth;
to tug, to pry, to pray him loose,
to whittle away at the mass.

New boyfriends are a neat braid,
thick, straight down the spine,
punctuated by an elastic band,
his strands heavy with logic.
It’s not hard to hold still.
It feels good to be woven.

Is adulthood learning to resist
the fraying of thread?
Or learning to excise the knot entirely,
fusing together raw ends over a match
and hoping they won’t catch mid-seam?

How to learn to choose

The first decision was the ugliest,
like picking the right grain of sand.
The seconds stalled,
the air before and after the choice
perfectly symmetrical,
perfectly unsatisfying.
It should have been an earthquake.
I should have simply eroded.
Instead
I chose the needle, I accelerated.

The next time I left,
the difference between here and there
was not a glass vial but 10 tanks of gas,
a box of novels,
a fistful of finely ground stone
to mark the trail.

A yes so much simpler
than the ones I used mutter
or leak
for lack of other options.

To learn to choose
fill your mouth with cinnamon;
see how long it takes to choke.
Crush an egg in your hand
and wait for it to dry.
Drink a gallon of milk;
see what happens.

To learn to choose
dare yourself to be wrong.
Do it anyway.

Phantom Limb

at some point the muscle memory that taught me to share beds must have atrophied. something about that particular skill felt permanent, the way new bodies sunk into my flesh, nestled in the skin as tattoos. had I noticed their open mouths or hungry bellies I could call it parasitic, but instead my need was a snowball, rolling and building on itself like an avalanche-to-be. when I met him, I was fully formed. when I fell in love, I started to flake. when he left, I pooled and waited to splatter.

the last time he fucked me, he held me as an infant, one strong arm supporting my heavy skull, my weak neck. the other arm pulled, worked at my insides as our pupils soldered together. it was not the playful, sugared sex of a beginning, but the determined, mournful sex of an end: a farewell fuck if I’d ever known one. the center of our venn diagram went with him, froze my moon at the cusp, either nearly waxed or just starting to wane. a missing limb that refused to identify itself as sprouting or newly severed.

there have been a few since then, five or so in the last year and a half, a dramatic shift from the dozen or so people a year I’d slept with since twenty. and then, winter. it’s been four months, the longest cold spell since high school, which was basically one long blizzard to begin with.

lately I’m trying to remember how to fill the beds of strangers, how to let new bodies dig into mine but something, some emotional bungee, keeps springing me back to the way he held me, the way he reached into me at the very end, grasping as though for a shovel.

TRANS PEDAGOGY 101

by Julian Shendelman

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(Source: fagglet)

first, frost

my mouth could harbor your mouth,
shoulder your shoulders,
palm your palms.
I could wash the unwashable segment of spine
below your neck, the thicket of coiled dark hairs
a trail for foam, a body’s gutter.

I could bring you cherry blossoms for your kitchen table,
blood oranges for your split lips.

I could drive you everywhere,
make green mint-chip milkshakes, cinnamon rolls.
You could lick the bowl, the spatula.
I could lick the icing from your fingertips or,
better yet,
just your fingertips.

the winter came and left without speaking.
I could have been so many sweaters
while waiting for the bloom.
I stood on loose docks, crawled through torn fences.
A hundred cigarettes and innumerable buses
passed through my fingers as rice.

my first season alone
and I didn’t even freeze.