From the Zin chapbook, (2013)
Poem: Zin’s 14th Street Demo
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: 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: 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.
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