Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Give me the strongest cheese, the one that stinks best; and I want the good wine, the swirl in crystal surrendering the bruised scent of blackberries, or cherries, the rich spurt in the back of the throat, the holding it there before swallowing. Give me the lover who yanks open the door of his house and presses me to the wall in the dim hallway, and keeps me there until I’m drenched and shaking, whose kisses arrive by the boatload and begin their delicious diaspora through the cities and small towns of my body. To hell with the saints, with martyrs of my childhood meant to instruct me in the power of endurance and faith, to hell with the next world and its pallid angels swooning and sighing like Victorian girls. I want this world. I want to walk into the ocean and feel it trying to drag me along like I’m nothing but a broken bit of scratched glass, and I want to resist it. I want to go staggering and flailing my way through the bars and back rooms, through the gleaming hotels and weedy lots of abandoned sunflowers and the parks where dogs are let off their leashes in spite of the signs, where they sniff each other and roll together in the grass, I want to lie down somewhere and suffer for love until it nearly kills me, and then I want to get up again and put on that little black dress and wait for you, yes you, to come over here and get down on your knees and tell me just how fucking good I look.

She said, “If one does solitude right, this is the prize.” But what if I don’t want this prize? I am here sending out smoke signs deep into the night: beacon, signal, saint. Do not make the mistake of building a home or a life around a person who has not yet proven worthy of that love. For it is like building a house of the driest wood, and deciding to make a fire for warmth - it will all go up in flames. I guess maybe it was wrong to think that you hung the stars. Maybe it was misplaced. Let’s call my autobiography Los Angeles for the Heartbroken. Last night, I ate so many cherries that I was sick to my stomach. I am alone in my night bed, where darkness cleaves my word in two. We’ve done this before, where you disappear like a ghost into the night. It’s exhausting. You are here in the smallest ways - still important, still beating within me. I’ve become weirdly sentimental about water glasses left on my kitchen table - which one you drank from last, where your lips may still mark the glass. I loathe to wash them - it feels like washing away a bit of you. I think I fell in love with you when you told me That you’d been on Tray 1 of Invisalign for years now. What would have sounded noncommittal to most I found unbearably attractive. Here are some things you have taught me: That I have the intuition of water - I leave no room for you to be anything other than honest with yourself. What it means to feel seen, bright and haloed with light. Where my darkness lies, deep between my shoulder blades, and that you are the only one who can see it sometimes. Perhaps there is still a possibility of grace between us.

Upstairs / Downstairs

One day, whether you are 14, 28 or 65 you will stumble upon someone who will start a fire in you that cannot die. However, the saddest, most awful truth you will ever come to find–– is they are not always with whom we spend our lives.