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 From Potato Head Journal

Cats in the Rain

by

Kyle Hemmings

This year, senior year, Kat and I share home room. She’s my biennial girlfriend who no longer opens up for me. Maybe too much shade. She’s missing classes and I bring her notes and little Styrofoam cups of tomato soup. In the school cafeteria we hold hands like we’re in a corny Andy Hardy movie from the 40s. Warning: for washed up nerds only.

It’s raining hard.

Today, I bring an umbrella big enough for the two of us to walk home under, big enough for the space between us.

We sit on her couch like two poker-face misfits stiff from the rain. Lately, she tires easily and is losing weight. She looks nothing like the girl in the beach photos in my wallet. In a bikini, that girl was more dangerous than sun. A slim shapely package of love notes written with invisible ink. Perhaps too intimate to be read by her father.

She’s shivering. Even with a terry cloth robe over her knees that if they could talk they would chatter. I tell her to wear a bicycle helmet because so much heat can escape from the head. I’m not sure if it’s true. I heard it on an episode of E.R.

“Only if you do,” she says. Then adds that I’m as weird as her father who lives on pumpkin seeds and dried prunes. “He looks like a dried prune,” she says, scrunching her face. He teaches Marxist philosophy in college. She said that sometimes he wears the same underwear for days. “It’s a class struggle thing,” she instructed me. She trudges to her room and brings out two helmets. One is her dyslexic brother’s.

She claims she has belly pains at night and she knows she’s not pregnant. “Like shouldn’t you be in a hospital? "I ask.

“No, the doctor is giving me all kinds of vitamin shakes and medicated liquids for this. They just need time to work.”

She loves bad boys so we’re watching an old Clint Eastwood spaghetti western. He’s shooting three guys at once. And I can’t even squeeze the truth from this fading girl, like what’s the diagnosis. And WTF is the prognosis? Or, are you fixable? No, I wouldn’t be that crude.

Outside, the rain is punishing the rooftops, the streets.

She holds up one hand, shows me the ugly black paint on her fingernails. The same color as the black lipstick that she swears she'd never wear.

“It’s black ink from art class, the kind I use for washes. I’m trying to be economical. Saving everything I can. Cuz’ you never know. Too many rainy days, what they add to, and all that crap.”

A dog barks in the distance. Maybe it’s a neighborhood full of stray cats trying to keep safe and dry.

Kat falls asleep. Her arms, unlike before, are hairless. Which doesn't mean they were ever hairy. I remove my helmet.

Outside, the rain is tapering. Eventually, it won’t be heard at all. Or it might start again.

I take a wet tissue and wipe off her lipstick. I’m not into goth.

She doesn’t wake.

Standing a foot from the couch, I whisper that she’s the only friend I have. Please don’t go anywhere without me. Okay?

Behind her closed eyelids, I imagine her eyes as two tiny spaceships headed to a planet of sunshine at night, a constant never land that you don’t want to wake up from.

On TV, Clint Eastwood places a sombrero on both his head and his deaf mule. They must both sense that it’s gonna rain soon.

 Proud to be included in the last issue of Deracine

 cancel art 

i find you taped to his walls, 

paper -thin & only a sketch,

 as if a work -in -progress. 

beneath my feet 

the crunch of pencil shavings. 

in the kitchen he's slumped in a chair, 

eyes still as moth balls his skin ashen.

 he must have died before completing you. 

 gently peel you down 

carefully removing the adhesive backing 

as if stuck to my own skin. 

i carry you home trying to breathe life into you. 

color spreads across your face 

your eyes turning watercolor blue then it all fades. 

exhausted, i quit. & i am left

 with the blind wrinkled hands

 my hands 

that once fed you solid food.

 Published at Lothlorien Journal

Five Senryu Poems

in bed,
the two of you
blind cubists

after love
she unravels
in tremors
of mad butterflies

fascist hipsters
no wonder
we never click

underbelly of the sea
water-logged lovers
playing scrabble

lonesome dove
selling method sex
to men who can’t fly

By Kyle Hemmings

 from Fiction on the Web

New York Hearts by Kyle Hemmings

Sunday, May 19, 2013

 

2 MINUTE

READ

Kyle Hemmings' lyrical flash about a New York ballerina.

Behind the fading pulse of day, Zin is not dying. And although wounded by a thousand loves, she can still perform a petit saut while thirsty. Or "spot" on her own demand, execute near flawless rotations of the head, fingers forming exquisite egg shapes, or almost touching hips, the not quite blonde hair pulled taut. Her Spanish "fourth position" is untenable.

When a relationship ends, she multiplies in mirrors, leaves fresh blood streaks. She's in love with a gay dancer named Lev. Between rehearsals, in hushed conversations when he stumbles on long words, mutters fragments of his childhood, his eyes drift and turn star-ward. She can see herself as incredibly small and dancing inside his eyes.

At the tail of a crowd jaywalking to dusk, Zin shuffles or sidesteps, imagines herself as the perfect lead for Firebird. Who, in this crowd of scherzo-disbelievers, she wonders, can catch her?

She shares an East Village apartment with an older woman who collects ceramic birds from Sunday flea markets. The birds are remarkable in their stony silence, the way they can pierce the eye of a broken room. The woman has a thick accent and her country no longer exists. But at the apartment, her chipped birds stay loyal.

After three subway transfers, after performing warm-ups with girls who remind her of mechanical dolls with thin lips and glassy eyes, after fasting so she can be nothing but soft bone and air, Zin messes up a demi plié. She has flunked the audition.

In an abandoned tenement on Avenue A, five stories up. she stands before a window, shattered god knows how long ago. How easy to dive without a partner. Or she can become limp, stay apathetic forever. Instead, she picks up a glass shard and considers it running it deep into the underside of a wrist. A pink pattern of scar tissue is already there to guide her. It reminds her of a zipper. How easy it would be to bleed out or become sucked in. The body as a collapsible theater of glisten and glide, of last great works. For the self only. But then a rustle of wings, a soar from rooftops, a flutter and scrape. Who can this be? The reflection of a bird in its solo flight, its angle of free-form, distracts her. She won't die today. Each life will get a second act. Even if it means yesterday's tea bags and toast crumbs for breakfast. At home, her roommate's silent birds are multiplying.

 From Cease Cows

Two Rare Flash
by Kyle Hemmings
Break-Rain
When it rains, I try to sing in the octave of night. My voice goes funk-hoarse. It’s been raining tuplets & crazy riffs for three days & nights. It’s been raining droplets encapsulating tiny dancers, ones resembling Judy Garland or Gene Kelly. It’s been raining an old hardcore rain. Because of the rain, Zin & I are trapped inside on a dance floor. She tries teaching Fred Astaire grime & rave. But he insists on doing the Fox Trot with her across the floor of bodies fluctuating to a dub step of 190 beats per minute. He says “Girly, we’ll never get rich with proper dancing broken beat, but you sure have one mean funny face.” Zin insists that Fred ride her beat. Inside the club, it starts to rain.

The Acrobatic Dance
In a modern dance, she’ll love like a foolish princess miscoding dangerous mimes. He performs large leaps in a city of anti-Expressionists. With articulated pelvis & flexible spine, he’ll steal her polyrhythmic heart & her best foot thongs. Her side aerial view of dreamless pedestrians is: all fall & no recovery. They have such stiff knees. But her. She likes the swizzle & the round-off. The amazing handspring. Sex is contact, twist, release & surprise. After-sex is a forced giggle & a broken toe. A girl prettier than she will arrest him in a slow dance. With limbs isolated, with the gravity of her own weight & resistance, she’ll perform tricks solo. Or take a day job at The Watermelon Trust. She’ll be an Isadora without scarves or suicidal lovers. She’ll laugh at her own crippled nymphs.

–

 

Wilderness House Literary Review 4/4 — 1 — Kyle Hemmings Hunting Season 

You drop hand-formed rabbit pellets, oval-shaped, dark, along rub lines and bedding areas. You do what papa says. Lying down in soft grass, you wait for a lone buck to bed. The sky undresses itself, dons a nightgown of swirl, from the bottom up. Slow sundown. A sharing. Consider papa’s Interdiction: make your mark as a man or you are doe waiting to be hunted. Squatting, you make out the burly figure of your brother, cradling a .28 gauge in his lumberjack arms. Then disappears past a thick of red and white oak without mast. He will search for early scrapes from a mature buck, scrapes under a sweep of branches. Playing papa’s game. If he naps, papa will thrash and make him whimper. Such a strange pleasure papa derives from making men feel small as acorns. Your slow witted brother who is still a city virgin. You snuggle against your .20 gauge and swing your head, watching papa saunter in a northwesterly direction. Listening to his grunts and rattles upwind, watching him hold his human decoy--a head of medium sized antlers that will make a buck aggressive without fear of smack down. Papa loves to fake them out and soon he is gone too. That harbinger of all fake-out and doom to cruising bucks and coteries of sweet doe. You have this vision: a lone deer will remember your papa almost crawling through, but eventually succumbing to the smoke. The cabin on fire, his greasy heart and his careless matchsticks. That same deer, the one papa could not kill, limps in your backyard of chewed apples and leafless stem, night after night

 From the Zin chapbook, (2013)

Poem: Zin’s 14th Street Demo

BY AUTHOR ON APRIL 25, 2013 • ( LEAVE A COMMENT )

By: Kyle Hemmings

We are glitter-puppies in a dance temple of extended happy hour truths. Some of us will die in our distressed jeans. Who is the closet lipster with too many au cell phone lives? So wasted in those buckled high-heeled sandals & waist-tiered crochet shirt. On Wednesdays, the 70s disco night, I imagine her heart to be a sponge. On Saturday Classic Free Style, it is a terrorist on high pump. No cause for alarm. Everyone’s false eyelashes will fall straight, sooner or later. & the Bobbsey-Brothers are approaching Zen-Oneness to dub step & wobble bass. When they play Madonna’s “Beautiful Stranger,” I want to be a tramp stamp on someone’s misaligned spine. Or a compressed shadow with strong techno inclinations. Outside this place the comets are cynical & keep missing the sleep-deprived. I will hand over my skinny frayed self to DJ Pharaoh Sun-Rah. My body, all patch cords & re-mixed air. I could fly for an instant like a homesick bird with prosthetic wings. In the morning, we will make love to our stalkers in double-breasted trench coats. We will recall with true Platonic form how our lead-footed mothers gave birth to us in S&M dungeons. They had such crazy whips. We will turn to tiny glass gazelles scattered on the streets, crushed by taxis rushing one way. 

The Music Room

BY AUTHOR ON APRIL 25, 2013 • ( LEAVE A COMMENT )

 

By: Kyle Hemmings 

At work, her father fights a losing war with paper men. Home, Zin imagines wind scorpion women without musical sense, exoskeletons in the morning, left-overs of love. Some girls are cursed with supernatural powers of hearing. She composes a boy of blue half-notes. Outside her flimsy wardrobe of snapback hats, mini-dresses with illusion stripes, a scatter of old dollar menus, she develops allergies to cacophony, to boys who can’t rhyme for a dime. She supplements her income by being a sexy sibyl to a star-crossed man who lives in the past. Walking alone on cold nights, the clouds are musical compositions by Russian virtuosos, exiled to her brain. Her father brings the day’s casualties home. It is he who is dead. She wonders where the souls of chocolate-covered ants go. Her musical boy hums in her head. She thinks: Live with me forever or I’ll tear up this score. In a recurrent dream, they make love with crooked fingers & white keys. Her father enters the music room wearing an army helmet. He smashes the piano with an ax. Zin wakes up with a stiff spine & cotton mouth. She can barely dress herself. The boy is gone or is he? There is almost a face. In the kitchen, the sound of spoons & knives clang against the sink & table. Together means her, her father & the empty chair reserved for the boy who wants to sing. Together, it will be a jagged melody of hope.

Poem: They Could Almost Breathe as One

BY AUTHOR ON APRIL 25, 2013 • ( LEAVE A COMMENT )

By: Kyle Hemmings

Her new step-mom keeps losing herself in supermarkets, especially in the aisle that sells kitty litter or retractable dog leashes. She loves little dogs & homeless cats & admits freely that she herself might be verging on extinction. She tells Zin that she once dated a man who hated dogs, who used words like chain saws, who grew a double head in the night. How did you know who you were talking to? asks Zin. Do I know my right from left breast? replies the new step-mom. She’s a chain smoker & coughs into her own oyster soups, her fish stews made with snapper or grouper. Zin dreams of being food poisoned by fish that can no longer breathe. The doctor says only a lung transplant might save her. At the hospital, Zin brings her brownies that crumble like her too-skinny girlfriends who are always laughing at their pigtail knots that keep coming undone & leopard sneakers that smell of feet feet feet. Zin brings her vignettes of her silly boyfriend who keeps crashing his bicycle into walls, who sleeps with a set of stereo headphones to block out the night. Or she brings her warm pretzels that leave zigzag salt trails over the bed sheet. Zin says I’m going to give you my left lung. I think it’s the better one. Don’t ask me how I know. The step mom asks for a cigarette. She’s puffing, performing the pursed-lip exercises the nurse taught her. Later that night, she stops breathing. Zin calls her boyfriend to tell him that she had a dream of the doctors removing the wrong lung, of losing a sea of salt-water & blood, of her dying in the step mom’s arms. Perhaps dense in his own dream, he doesn’t pick up. 

 Published in Unlost Journal

THE GHOST RANCHBY KYLE HEMMINGS

Issue 11

Beyond the hills that were once mountains, past the empty town that was once a falling star, an old man wakes from the dead. He recalls the farm where he planted beans and raised the water. The nights of the shrill cry of stray cats, their memories of swooping vultures. He recalls the lifeless eyes of his then newly-widowed mother. When she refused to talk, to talk about anything, he went to the well, peered down its dark mirror and mistook the darkness for himself. One day he brought a cast iron bucket of water into the house. To wipe his mother’s face of a boy’s sense of death or what little he could make of it. To make her come alive and speak and feel. Stretched out on the daybed, she remained soundless, frozen in time. Her hands were blue. His premonition: nobody was coming back with their old skin. The boy stared down at her, his mouth closed, determined to kiss her cheek, to make his presence known. It was worth a try.

Source: John Riley, The Well (http://fictionaut.com/stories/john-riley/the-well–2) Three Short Poems

 

PIGEON-BOY

When he first learned he could fly, Pigeon-boy blushed at the thought of hand-me-down wings. Yet, he learned to dance on street corners, laugh mid-stream at the thought of being lighter than an idea. Then he was hired to carry messages between lovers. The distances increased & Pigeon-boy grew breathless. Sometimes, he delivered messages to the wrong lovers. The notes read I love you, still, walking on air. Some receivers at the wrong destinations died in air-tight bliss. When this happened, the world grew smaller. One day, a morning where everyone carried some form of artificial sunshine in their pockets, of paper planes released from the sweaty palms of air controllers, Pigeon-boy delivered a note that read: I don't love you anymore. He fell from the sky. A girl named Yugi took him home, brought him back to life with her songs of flight. From then on, Pigeon-boy was wiser with air-time, more cautious about his fly-ways. He circled & landed only within her. In total, they never touched ground. Whenever she breaks open a Chinese cookie, the message is always the same--When the world is cold, stay indoors.

 From DeComp 

Last Night I Thought I Saw Virginia Woolf Walking Across the Thames

Kyle Hemmings

Your first and only lesbian lover is a chemistry student named Esther. You meet at a frat party where the cheese is free and the girls sputter their theories of love while pressing chilled wine glasses against their cheeks. At least one girl, named Penny, rumored to spread a mysterious social disease, gets up to puke. They find her body, years later, half-naked, in the backseat of the professor’s station wagon. He teaches myths of the Mid-East. But tonight, you find yourself lying next to Esther over your mother’s hand-knit blanket, laced with pictures of...little horses? Palominos? Your head buzzing from the wine, you freely admit you never did it with a woman before. “Isn’t it strange,” says Esther, “how my name almost rhymes with aether. You know, Aristotle’s fifth element.” Her voice is somehow desert-dry, falling in shafts, as if excavating old truths. Even when she comes up for air. From now on, whenever you make love to a boy, you feel heavy, about to gush white lies, cultivating the energy required to hold them. When Esther calls, you cry for no reason or for a whole chain-link of non sequiturs. The room spins whenever you are alone in the fundamental element called night.

 Published in Atlas and Alice 2014

After my breakdown that caused me to lose control of a bus (how it jackknifed and blocked an entire bridge at sunset), I was placed in Ward 6, where anyone could be anybody. There I met an old woman who called herself Greta Garbo. She lingered on my unintended smile. “When you give yourself a name,” she said, ” you inherit that person.” She often dressed like Alice in Wonderland and told me that the doctors had the audacity to look her straight in the face and say, “‘We just want you to feel safe and happy.’ I told them–like a barking fish you do.”

We shared cigarettes at break time in the courtyard. Her fingers, crooked and bony, shook. I asked her how long she had been here. She took a long drag, exhaled an abstract curvy form. “From the time, I discovered I had a fear of open spaces. We’re composed mostly of space and will return to it, did you know that? Death is not the end of life. It’s just a continuation of the space you were in or it is simply the origin of all spaces.”

“Spaces not species,” I said as if a joke to myself.

Her eyes drifted upwards. “To deal with this problem of inherent space, I tried to build the perfect soul mate. I took bone shavings, hair clippings, diary pages, the dried blood and semen, even the eyelashes of my dead lovers and attempted to make someone new and lasting and perfect. No holes at all.”

“Did you succeed?” I asked.

“No, he failed me like all the others. They all crumble, turn into multiple casualties of space…And you? Why are you here?”

“I accepted everything as it was given to me. But I couldn’t make out the overall shape, if there ever was one. Comets, cataclysms, flying rocks. Men falling into icy ponds, emerging as ducks. Girls with needy thumbs hooked me with a horizontal gaze. I remained a fragment.”

“Nothing worse than a bitch with a hidden stitch.” She winks at me. We’re led out of the courtyard.

That night I saw the old woman through closed eyes. She was sitting in the corner of the room, studying my bone structure, perhaps approximating the size of my anatomical cavities, as if she had X-ray eyes.

 published in One Sentence Poems

Wreckage

I don’t dream anymore,
only think about winter ships,
your blue lips
trapped in the sinkhole
under the shipwreck
that was us.

 

Published in Connotation Press

For Catie Rosemurgy

It might take a while to get over you, how to put things back together without turnkey or worm screw. My Siberian Husky by the fireplace, one eye, ice-blue, the other-- bottomless amber. Here are some possibilities for a hook: the two most repeating digits I learned in school, the first girl who raped my idea of a love affair, chaste and sound, those platonic moors. Come to me, she said, after reading some obscure Victorian romance novel. I brought the guilt-ridden longings, the glue, and my mother's broken Japanese tea cups. Excuse me for my falsehoods is what I wanted to tell her in braids and plaid dress. She was too old by then, and I always fell in love with bright surface colors. But she taught me that I could be split in half. Like you, she walked away empty handed, but laughing, full of herself.

 

 

The Man She Couldn’t Forget (published in a Bad Penny Review)

If he were light, he’d be a lotus petal. A fledging thought inside a girl, lonely on city streets, intuitive on mountaintops. Instead, he left a suicide note that read: The world is not a pond. I am a sturgeon. Everyone wants me for dinner. I’m not even that tasty anymore. I keep floating down. . . Miss tHing fishes him half-way from the water, imagines his eyes of negative space, the ferric taste of the stud on the lower lip, the body heavy, a gunnysack of body parts once fresh with her fingerprints. She decides: He is too waterlogged to be saved. She removes her orange silk top, the low cut jeans that were a real bargain in a city of near-drownings. Underwater, she tows the sturgeon-man to where he will be safe from swimmers, from wanna-be heroes with a missing limb. On TV, they have a whole channel to themselves. Towards bottom, it’s dark, darker than any room where she ever slept alone or never quite woke up. She has the feeling that everything here is vigilant and pristine. A thousand eyes light up. A voice swims inside her head—Leave us be. Pretend you never saw anything. She returns to shore, spitting up gobs of what she can’t remember. She looks up at the slate sky. Nothing is written down.

 From the Miss tHing Poems --Justin Bieber's Hair (published in A Bad Penny Review)

Justin Bieber’s Hair

Miss tHing is trying to gain control of her cold closet moths and her colored light bulbs, bare and incandescent. Yesteryear’s boyfriend stole her mother’s lace lampshades. Still, everything hides in plain sight. On the TV, a trade-in from some Bowery guitar player calling himself Mystic Juice, Justin Bieber is singing “One Less Lonely Girl.” Miss tHing’s boyfriend knocks and enters, shaking the winter from his dreadlocks, a perpetual poker face even when losing. “Something the matter? Like you don’t know me?” he says, as if a prince of renegade comic book heroes. Miss tHing explains that she’s watching the moves on this kid, might try a couple tonight at SpeakEasy But Don’t Die Subtle on Christopher St. “You need drugs” is what her boyfriend says. Miss tHing imagines cutting a lock of hair off Justin and placing it under her pillow, the cover ruined by improper wash settings. She imagines her and Justin on a night on the town, the paparazzi snapping photos from camouflaged positions, lines of people parting as they step into the club, no checks for I.D. One girl shouts out, “I bet Selena is going to be plenty pissed!” If pressed Miss tHing will say He’s my nephew. Or He’s just a look a like. In the restroom, Justin will cut off a lock of hair and give it to Miss tHing. Then, security will smuggle him out the backdoor. She will stuff the hair in her boyfriend’s mouth when he snores. When he wakes, she will laugh the way she once did, wearing purple tutu and leotards and way too much make up under her mother’s softly shaded light. Her shadow moves, however, were intense.

Musical Genius

The song Miss tHing’s piano teacher gave up on her plays in the voice of a man with shuffling boxcar feet, a body of accordion-squeeze. She would love to pack this little man in her briefcase before going to work, or play a friendly game of hiding him in the closet, just so she can find him again. Unlike her first and second piano teachers, this man will never reject her. She loves his fingering, his timbre mastery in her 4/4 toss and turn nights. So far her tally is: marzukas-20, etudes-30 and then some, polonaises-18, preludes and nocturnes—40 each. He’s divorced and bald, a woman with no sense of count ruined his private boleros. One day, in the Fantasy of the Real, Miss tHing confronts him, says she loves him as if a soft hand inside her, but will never take away the pain, the treacheries of her early tutors. The next day, the little man stands in the doorway of her quiet apartment, a city for amateurs and the permanently tone-deaf, claims he has broken his fingers so she won’t feel alone. She embraces him, tells him that it is only she who is impoverished. In the bedroom, under a portrait of a square-jawed man who could never play music, their movements are quiet, controlled, exquisitely shaded, with an occasional forte.

 

True Confessions, Episode 6: A Dogwalker Gets Dogged (published in Subtle Tea, 2011)

 

TODAY, I actually believed in myself
for ten minutes. Told the bitch off,
her, standing like Trump ready to fire me
when I already fired myself. Shit. You think
she grew talons for sport or maybe
stocked up on mace for the Second Coming.
But I told her that from now on, she
can walk her own dogs and while she's
at it, take some laxative to keep her
occupied. Then I walked away. Didn't
take a cab. I took the wrong side streets
and it was alright. In my apartment off Tenth
Ave. I adjusted the thermostat, did about 33
jumping jacks to warm up, turned on some
black metal, but I wasn't feeling a righteous
shade of self-murderous. Then I snuggled into my
bed with the sinking frame. With eyes closed,
I was turned again to still life without
dreams, just the core of an apple the world
had already chewed and swallowed. But for
a whole ten minutes, I felt really good
about myself. Tired as hell, splayed against
the bed, I leashed myself to the mistress
of night. I knew the rules about no barking
after 12, in this dark open mouth
of a studio, the place where I always begin
and end without a job.

 

 

Blue Hearts

(published in Scars Publications, 2012, part of the Cat People Chapbook)

Whenever Pixie-Bob and Kat get into an argument, he will tear his pillow with a Shonen knife. He will threaten to love girls who work in bomb factories. Or he will sleep under the house with the goat-boys, made homeless under the city’s new urban renewal program. They are dreamless
and have no sense of mute beat. If things get too heated, Pixie-Bob will get lost in L-shaped rooms under streets and gear-grind, doing the Trip Hop before hookers having ticks and herniated discs. When he returns home, he will be in a trance. For days, all doors will be closed. But Kat being a girl-rapper trained in classical, will stand in the rain. This is not to say that every time Kat and Pixie-Bob argue, there will be rain. The rain is not logical, and contrary to popular opinion, has no musical sense. The rain does not say Take off your hi-hat and dance with me. The rain may not be there at all. It’s just that in the absence of the other, Kat loves to stand in the middle of a street, oblivious to sky peddlers and pimps on parole. She will throw her head back and open her mouth. She’ll convince herself that it’s pouring — it’s there. She loves to taste the meltdown of reflexive clouds, their nuclear sadness.

 

Marry Me

(Published in DiddleDog, 2011. From the Cat People chapbook)

My mother told me never to trust girls who speak from the side of their mouths. But Zin, with her rainbow bracelets and flat vans, can’t speak any other way. A creature of ADD and zip-up leather, studded belt and the next No Wave, has mistaken me for the last fuzz boy guitarist who dumped her over a groupie into Goth and 50’s horror films that are HYSTERICAL. So it’s Saturday afternoon in a life of endless afternoons, waiting for balloons to fall, or poppies to emit milky juice through terminal pores. I mean I’m bored. So Zin calls and says what’s up and yadda yadda yadda and I’m definitely leaving for school at the end of the summer and yadda yadda yadda and why is love such an ugly brute and yadda yadda yadda and I’m like Why not? So we’re standing in the throng of a Central Park crowd, sweating in our skinny jeans. It’s a free concert — Blackie Ghoul and the Undertones — who are from the Michigan area and formed as a high school band back in ’64 and who have since recorded three singles but can’t get picked up by a major label. And Zin is looking too cute with her chubby thighs and Ultra-glow pink lip gloss and I’m thinking of flowers falling but are they free? An announcer enters the stage and lists upcoming acts for the summer. Zin is whispering some crazy shit in my ear, like how she would marry a boy who was her best friend or some lines from her poetry like how the sky raped her but she lusted for the sun, or how the mushroom is not a symbol of the penis, it’s just a vegetable that grows in her poems and I say, Zin, like you’re tickling my ear. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Blackie comes on stage dressed as some glitter cowboy with shades. I’m starting to think what the Fall will be like with Zin gone. It was always a thing of Almost Love or there’s somebody else just a notch above you. Zin is bobbing her head to Blackie’s tune about devil women. Zin is holding my hand. Zin tongues my ear and smiles as if to say Fuck it, right? Blackie asks for a volunteer for his next song. But where is Zin? She’s joining a commune. She becomes a shadow underneath your everything. I’m having flashbacks of Zin on a tricycle. We even shared raspberry popsicles at the age of eight. Was it so wrong? I’m raking through the crowd. I’m interrogating faces. Where did you hide Zin? My mother’s voice answers: She will not be the girl you will marry, Honey. She’s been around. No, mom, she’s just a showy girl with too much black eyeliner. Inside she’s crumpled petals. I was always unripe. I push my way to the stage. There is Zin belting out a Blackie tune. There is Zin on stage, outrageous and flirting with the crowd, making them beg for her smile. There is Zin looking down at me. I love you, Raspberry, she sings. Marry me, I shout back. She throws her brassiere into the crowd and I jump into space like the guitar solo I never could play.