Love Without End Amen

The stone city below us through the windows blue at night, my white shoulders, my white face transposed across it by the glass like somebody dead; like bloody, bloody Mary in the mirror at midnight: patron saint of my scarlet life.

Behind me from the bed he reaches for me. I like the dark hair on his forearms, the white hair on his chest. The bones in his feet and his dimples. His hands, though, are too soft and floury--long palmed like a monkey, repulsive. Earlier, dancing, his hands around my shoulders, my belly, my neck like a constrictor. In my hair, and breathing me, this older man, saying the things everybody says.

My head is a bell.

Kiss me harder, I say. My hand behind his head I pull his hair. He can kiss harder but it isn't enough--I want to feel his bones, I want it to hurt, I want his skin to be rough, for him to hold me like a man. But he can't and it isn't. There is a solution. I always find the solution.

The bartender smiles, he pours like an angel.

You should be back here with me, he says. You look lonesome.

You don't look much better.

Which is why you should be back here with me, he says, tries to touch my hand.

I find this beautiful girl with Chinese eyes. Her hair is smooth, all of a piece, sliding around like something out of the ocean. Why men, I am thinking. We dance hips together, her soft thighs—the smell of lanolin, cinnamon, honey chapstick. Her shining two lips.

Then her man comes up and steals her away--and James comes from behind me--the men pulling us apart while we are still looking at each other, and now James wants to go. And why the fuck not--why not anything. Why not everything?

He's eating something and I take it out of his hands--anything you want, he tells me, I will give you anything you want.

There is nothing that I want, I tell him.

If somebody doesn't know what they want you can't trust them, he says. They could do anything.

We are back in the room and talking drunken all night. You know it's just as easy to love a rich man, he says.

Why did I come here? This is not what I want, I'm pretending, I'm proving something--what, that I don't hurt? That I can also kiss someone unimportant whom I do not love or know, that I'm fine without you? I cannot believe anything will ever be good again.

I fall asleep--wake up and he is loudly pretending to sleep. I hate him, the juvenile, the idiot, veils all fallen away and everything four o’clock naked. He pulls me back into bed, against him, his coarse forearms which I like, holds me & we close our eyes, he starts talking about all the things. A girl like me. What he'd like to do together. What it would be like to wake up and see my face, what it would be like to leave me and go to a meeting and then come back to me again, my face still there. With my eyes closed he could be anyone.

We could be anyone anywhere, eyes closed making promises without the intention of ever keeping. The game that we are two innocents, and not liars, that we are brave, rational, as happy as we pretend to be.

I want fire. I want to be burned alive, to be eaten alive, never to feel. I want a lover to grab me to hold me and hurt me, to split me open, make me feel, make me dead.

In the morning with our eyes open we get ready, walking around comfortable and indifferent. He orders green tea and juice, we read the paper, we walk outside together for him to show me the city, pleasure in talking about the history of things but something inside me dropping forever like a stone.

I am falling forever, there is nothing and no one to catch me and there never was.

We go to the top of another hotel for breakfast. Do you like the vista, he asks me.

Yes, I say. Paper bags and seagulls in the air, elevators sliding up and down outside the buildings, the red bridge unfolded, the prison entrenched upon the sea, the men in the street. A boy my age sitting behind us, tapping on his laptop, and I am ashamed.

What are you thinking, I ask him.

I'm thinking how I'd like to kiss you, he says. We finish breakfast and walking away he does: tilting my chin, feeling my ribs and my smallness the way that N. used to, finding me out. (memories of our smallness seven years ago in my first apartment, N.'s dear face saying I want you to have my babies, I never want you apart from me. Endlessness, I want to own you. I want you against me when we are old and the blood doesn't move anymore. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I believed. I ate his promises and hung them like a light between my ribs. They will extract the promises like the brains from a mummy--thread them out through my nose, place them delicate into a jar by my body for someday to find.)

I turn my face away--James kisses my neck. In the elevator my neck and my shoulders, his hands in my hair, and I push into him, wanting to be punished to be shamed. I deserve to feel this fucking way. This is what I wanted. This is what I wanted. I have done nothing wrong. These are not anything but kisses. I have responsibilities to no one. No one has responsibilities to me. We are all adults here.

He has a meeting. I'll meet you here at one for lunch, he says, and goes out. I print my boarding passes in the lobby, think about taking a cab and leaving without goodbye. Instead, because I'm there, I walk outside, I go to shops. The people pretend they do not see me and that I cannot see them. We are one million blind men.

And that was me crying in the streets of San Francisco, silent in the bright white sunshine of a white morning, white bricks and people relaxed in their jackets not seeing me. Seagulls and plastic bags, women selling plastic bangles, colored scarves. I am alive.

I am anesthetized I am lost I am alive. I am leaving just as I came in. My burning heart, my sacred body, this world my pyre, these words are smoke, there is nothing which exists.

Reading the Book of Serenity on the flight home, I fall asleep and dream in koans:

The teacher to his attendant: bring me me the rhinoceros fan.

The student, shamefaced: that fan is broken.

So the fan is broken. Bring me then the rhinoceros, says his teacher.

What can you say? There is nothing you can say.

The teacher draws a circle in the dirt. Inside the circle he writes with his finger: rhino

--so, friend, you are broken. Walk not forwards but backwards. Walk back to your original nature, to your natural self, to your face before you were born: the source of the fan.

N. hands me back my heart. He walks away and I am at the center of all things alone, the darkness alone, and this is where I came from, my love, my sweetest friend, the days before you pulled me out, and this is what I am made from: darkness and water and female softness. Yin lady, orange moon, temple's priestess.
I sing the song of myself.

scenes-(unfinished)

Can I just go to sleep here.
I don't think your parents would like that.
Why? You're like another dad.
Go upstairs with Samantha.
She gets up lingeringly, standing in front of the TV, playing with her hair. Smoothing it back from her face. Think I should cut it? she says.
No.
Her face tilted in the blue dark--You like it this way?
It's--I clear my throat--don't change anything.
I want something different, she says, thick-voiced, playing with the strap of her tank top. Rolling the fabric back and forth across her collar bone, the slope of her bright shoulder. Every day is the same, she says, and I want something different.
Kid, I'm trying to watch this.
Sure, she says. I hear her looking back at me, sound of her hair sliding on her shoulders; she'd like to sit where my wife sits. Upstairs the rattle and beep of my sons playing video games. The door slams.

Faye, my wife, had the bedroom done in white and blue. Lit by the night outside us the room becomes lunar: in the bed the planes of her strong shoulders, hard arms stretched fixed across the bed like pottery from the moon, cold perfect. Wax smell of her lipstick, rubbed off on both pillows, black in the dark--Faye all around me. I sit in the chair, taking off my shoes, the sound of her breathing and the fan I can't hear the kids anymore, the sound of the television I left on in expectation of morning anymore, the cars passing outside like space ships to other planets. My wife, my woman, I love her, she is everything I think about and need. I know this. The house, the kids. She works like a slave.
I know this but it comes to me that I am drowning in water, breathing cold water--
my wife, my wife, dreaming across the lids of her eyes: Charlie, she says. Charles. Come to bed.
Keeping her eyes closed to me she is a stranger. Her legs twisting heavily under the sheets to suck me inside her. Cold silk of arms around my neck--her cold neck, her hair in my hands--moving together keeping her eyes closed she is a stranger--strange the years together, strange the memories of classes in college, of apartments and dinners, all of it like a matinee movie and you are already walking out blinking into the sun, the images falling dim from your mind leaving only impressions, vague emotions--
The wetness of her, of Faye, of the cold hardness of my wife her face in my hands, I make her look at me through her closed eyes, fucking this woman whom I love. I imagine that she is the girl. She cries out. She squeezes me, kisses my neck. Faye.
I love you.
I love you.
In the bathroom we look away. You're up late, she says.
I didn't want the kids to sneak out.
I guess they still could.
Nothing happens this late.
She laughs, pats my ass on the way back to bed. Or don't you remember, she says.
We sleep far apart in the bed, something which has always bothered me but she says she has to spread out, else can't sleep--grew up sharing a bed with a sister, probably this has something to do with it.
The poor family Faye worked hard to rise up out of, dreaming every day of the day when she would care for and protect her own. Her family which would be perfect. Assembling us like parts--selecting a career, a house, me, pregnancies--calling to me that it is the perfect temperature for a daughter just right this second, sweetie!
She built us around her--built herself into the center, like the belly from the fairytale, which all the other little parts use or die.

Falling asleep as the sun rises, conscious of Faye dressing to run--a dream that I am at the bottom of the pool, staring at a neighbor. He's stands pregnant, staring down at me, holding his coffee.
I can see clearly into his belly. It is stuffed with twisted, staring animals, each of them still horribly covered in fur. They twine tighter and tighter inside him together, clenching like a snake.

Now the house is empty. Everyone gone. Someone turned off the TV. I evaluate myself in the black reflection. Re-tie my bathrobe--turn to the side. Not bad. Not a bad thirty-five. A thirty-five right in the middle. Not great. Not bad.
Am I the man she married?
I flip the TV back on.

There was a maid but it was ridiculous, with me there at home, lifting up my feet so she could vacuum. So I vacuum, I make the dinner. I get the boys from school. Some days Samantha does this--supposedly one of the chores she was going to do to pay off her car, but the truth is that I like doing it, like seeing all the little kids exploding outside like dandelion seeds, their little backpacks bouncing up and down, pushing each other shrieking. Adam likes this one little girl and she likes him back--sometimes they come out together at the same time and look back at each other while they run in different directions to their cars.
It's time to get the boys before long--another truth is that I stay up late so that I'm up just right as they need to be picked up, because honestly it's so quiet, here with the TV.
I will get a job when Adam is eight, I tell myself. Nine.
--Someplace loud. A kennel, a record store. Someplace roaring. A speedway.

But at the school there is Sam's little purple car after all. She and Esther are sitting outside, talking in the grass. Esther sees me, waves at me like I'm her age.
Hey! she says. She has this way of touching her mouth all the time. It's like being hit by lightning.
It's my day, ding-dong, Samantha says. Young for sixteen, my daughter doesn't hate me quite yet.
Guess I forgot.
The realization that I'm grinning helplessly back at Esther. She catches it--Mr. Canadas, she says sneakily, she who usually calls me Chaz--think you could do us a favor later?
Jesus, kid, it's a Monday.
She shrugs winningly. (Will probably be pregnant at seventeen.)
Please?
Sam rolls her eyes. You don't have to, dad.
No, it's fine. I picked up extra the other day--just stop by later. Before Faye, okay.
Of course.
So, you want to take them home, then? Samantha says. She has a stem of grass in her mouth.
I pull it out and cup it between my hands, making the perfect whistle. It cuts across clear and sweet, just as the kids come barreling out the doors. I blow till I'm red faced--kids start screaming, pulling up grass for their own whistles. Parents glare.
Wow, says Esther.
Lame, dad, says Sam. Hates me now a little bit.
Adam catapults into me. Brian wanders up with a finger in his mouth, looking preoccupied. The girls wave and drive away. I watch the silhouette of Esther's head go.
We want Popsicles, Brian says.
Oh yeah, me too, I say, nodding at the teacher standing duty. She smiles back instantly, a sunny, shining person, wearing invisible braces and a jacket with this pattern of cats all over it, pink and purple.
I could be a teacher...all the women teachers would love me. --Oh, he's so gentle with the kids, so good with his hands--
Oh, Chaz, this one would say, tittering out the door. Fun. Planting trees for the school and dancing at the talent show to make the kids laugh.
And Faye scoffing in the wings...

Esther and Samantha slouching on the patio chairs, trying to hide their cigarettes. I stomp outside. What are you thinking, I hiss. I jerk the butts out of their mouths. --She'll think I've been smoking.
Esther, all her blood rushed to her lips: What, and then she'll ground you? She laughs. Where's the bottle?
Fuck that, I say. Fuck you, assuming I have it for you.
Samantha goes inside. Esther sullen stands her ground--throws her shoulders back, suddenly big as life.
She says it back to me. Fuck you. Chaz. Assuming I have it for you.
She stands up slowly, holding herself up like a woman. Walks all the way around the table to me and puts her face up in mine. She sneers.
Kiss me, if you want to so bad, she says.
Get off my property.
Faye's property, she says. You're just furniture.
Soylent Green--it was on the week before, all of us watching it together, big bowl of popcorn with melty m&ms, and Esther in the white dress that hit just at her upper thighs--
Vicious, I say. Esther trips away unbothered, the cold little bitch. I watch her perfect ass retreat in its jean cutoffs.

When Samantha is in college, I reflect, she will bring home girls who have had time in the world to be broken. Girls who will be kind to me, her good old sexy old dad.

Faye comes home and wipes out on the sofa in the den. Go away, she groans. Turn off the lights. She presses her forehead into the pillow, something she does with a headache.
You want your medicine?
Go away.
So I slink upstairs to the lunar bedroom and try to relax, to look at some TV--it's impossible to fade out in here because the bedroom is really Faye's realm. Everything is Faye's realm, but particularly the bedroom.
She picked out each piece of furniture, circling them one by one in a magazine. We were flying to the Keys.
We'll get back and everything will already be there! she'd said. Do you like this lamp?
No, I said.
It'll grow on you, hon. I didn't like it at first either, but then... she squints and turns the magazine sideways. You see? When you're lying down it looks fantastic. That's key. In a bedroom.
Ice cubes in our glasses and conditioned air at 10,000 feet, my wife smiles at me with red lipstick around yellow teeth. Her eyes are dirty aquariums. They swim full of everything that is not me.
In a bedroom, I say, and touch my forehead to hers--grinning like the lovers we are, everyone in the cabin jealous of our love. Out of the corner of my eyes I see them--wives looking at husbands looking at wives out of the corner of their own eyes: why aren't we happy too? It could be so easy. Forgive, forget. Forget and forget.

That was two years ago. Maybe two and a half.

So watching TV alone in our bedroom while she lies downstairs refusing to take medicine, my phone rings. Someone crying.
Hello, hello?
Mr. Canadaaas?
Yes, yes, I'm here-
I think something baaad happened...I can't feel...Sam won't get up...
Where are you?
*Click*
Vertigo. My bed is the center of the world. The floor has fallen away.
Blood rushes to my head a black wall on all sides of my eyes: calling the number back, over and over, ringing and ringing and ringing.
My daughter answers, coughing. The sound of wind.
Baby--where are you?
She starts crying. We're outside, we're coming. He's back there and it's okay...it's okay...
I'm going to come and get you, but you have to tell me where you are. What's around you?
That...Nazarene church...
Okay-stay there. Don't move, just stand there. I'm coming right now.
She's so quiet, fading away, I'm practically yelling into the phone, yelling to penetrate her skull through the phone, willing her to stand still, a fawn in the forest, stand and wait and be all right. Skull of my little, little girl.
I can't see them at first and think that I'll go crazy--leaning on the horn, getting out of the car--Sam! Sam!
Then they're staggering out from the shadows, makeup bleeding down their faces, faces wenched up like little girls with bloody knees,
I gather them to me like little birds, kissing their hair--you're okay, you're going to be okay--
All of us in the car, and it occurs to me that they need to go to the hospital. I am not comfortable with hospitals. It is not a good idea for me to go to the hospital, or to any doctor, ever, or to any government institution, ever, and these are my girls and I can't very well drop them at the corner and speed away, now can I?
So we're driving home.

Think you should eat something, absorb some of whatever you had? I ask helpfully.
Esther makes a retching noise.
Maybe not, then.
We get back. They don't want to watch TV, they don't want to eat. They want to sit around and cry. So we sit down with our arms around each other and they do that.
He keeps saying, oh, that’s not my shot, that’s your shot, Esther says, and I think he’s being friendly, you know, being polite, and then I wake up in his bed and he’s on me passed out—my shorts are undone—and then Sam’s in the bathroom on the floor and she won’t wake up and she didn’t want to get up—
And he said he’d been on the McCormick yesterday, but it was full when we got there-
Where were his parents?
They’re out of town—
Your pants were on?
Yeah, Esther says.
It’s hard to pull off somebody’s shorts if they're not helping, I tell her. I can't believe this is a discussion we are having. I plow ahead--Ever do that? Play limp? —
Esther nods her head numbly.
and if he had gotten them off, he wouldn’t have got them back on. He passed out. So see, you're okay.
Yeah, she says. --I’m gonna get him so bad.
Yeah, Sam says, let's ruin his life.
Want me to go get his dick for you? I say.
They laugh. I wipe Sam's face for her.
I want to do it myself, she says.
Only not violently, Esther says. No violence.
I'm the first to get in the bed. They cuddle up to me like kittens. For a while we're all of us just lying there. Then Esther climbs on top of me.
I'm gonna rub your back, she says.
I should be rubbing yours.
No, this is my thank you for coming and getting us. And not ratting on us. For all the times not ratting on us.
Blood money. But my shirt is thin. I can feel the muscles in her bare thighs through the fabric.
Samantha lying next to us is still. I pretend I don't realize that I want her to fall asleep. We listen to her breathing. Esther leans forward and licks my neck. Samantha is sleeping.
Don't, I say. I roll over and Esther lies down against me for the most perfect, complete second of my adult life before my daughter stirs. She wakes with a start--we need to call the police, she says.
No, no police, I say. We really can't have any police, hon. I stare at my daughter with cold eyes. You know why, I say.
I'm tired of this, she says. Sits up.
Esther sitting on the other side of me, too erect, and they look at each other over the top of my head. Something happens until Samantha leaves silently, closing the door behind her.
Esther pushes me over again. She sticks her tongue in my mouth and tries to take my shirt off.
I thought you were sick, I say. Around me the walls are melting-
Don't talk, she says. Mr. Canadas.
Unbuttoning my pants and unbuttoning hers. Further. We're going further. I do nothing. Naked on top of me as light as a flower. Her hair falls down over the tops of her breasts, her nipples like nuts peeping through. Burning in my palms, under my lips, and I am on top of her. She closes her eyes, smiling, smiling, smiling--send me, she says.
Kissing her face, the down of her cheeks--
really send me, she says.

She turns away from me to put on her clothes. Leaves her bra on the floor but I pick it up and hand it to her--
She hesitates, starts to take the shirt off again and I turn away. There is a catch in her breath. I open the window. The sound of Esther's hair, moving against her warm skin, walking away from me.

Outside across the street a man mowing his lawn at night. One of those mowers with headlights on it. Going up and down, up and down, rigorously, like a toy. Somebody walking their dog. The smell of chlorine, cut grass, cookouts. Hot asphalt. The smell of sixteen year old virginity, of nothing has happened yet, of a whole life stretching blameless and open before you.

Beneath me I know my house is empty.

Alternative High School

Later they put me in this school run by a bunch of old hippies. The hippies didn't care what you did so long as you were on campus. It was supposed to be revolutionary, make us want to learn.

They had the kind of trees that are good for sitting under. That is what the school made us want to do.
The teachers would come out--"We're having algebra now."
"Yeah."
Then, a little later--"Time for English," they said.
"Okay."
"We'll just be inside, having class. Okay!"
We came in the morning, hung around all day. Left in hordes at 3:08. We were going to graduate without learning anything.

The kids who did go inside for classes, broken down victim types with giant eyes like starving dogs, they went inside and made terrible drawings on butcher paper. They did worksheets as a class, with teacher saying things like, "15 is probably A. What do you think? 15--A? Okay. " The margins were extra size, in case you were stupid on top of everything and couldn't write well.

I lived outside, waiting for every day to be over. Sometimes inside they would sing old protest songs. The hippies were teaching them. Weak, ineffectual people, who had never gotten anything done: you could hear all of it through the windows.

We used to ball my jeep around the lot doing donuts. Drive between apartment buildings, over deck chairs, to the grocery where we walked down the aisles punching bags of bread and opening jelly jars. Behind the grocery store we experimented smoking different things. Wasteful, harmless: these things are not counted.

One of my friends was beautiful. He had black cigarettes that smelled like incense, he had long slinky hair like a girl, he had a face with bones like Johnny Depp. On my first day he came over to me.
"My name's Jack," he said.
"Okay," I said. We shook hands, very formal. It was a transaction. I was quiet, not interested in talking. But he sat with me anyway. He stayed.
A couple times he brought his guitar. He was bad at it.

"I used to love a girl named Paula," he says.

"Yeahh, they're out there," I said.

"Yeah, love." he said. The air was suddenly cool on my face. The leaves were ochre on the grass, like tiny leather jackets.

"I don't believe in love." I said. "I don't think it exists. I think people talk about it so they don't feel simple like animals."

"I guess there's nice things about being an animal," he said. "Only needing to think about the next three minutes. Not so bad."

I was sixteen years old. "You want to go someplace?" I said.

There were people lying in the grass beside me. "We can go to my place," Joshua said.

Joshua's parents weren't around, didn't care. I heard he'd had a lot of fucked up things happen to him and his brothers when they lived with this weird uncle. One day they pulled the uncle over pushing a shopping cart full of bloody scythes and doll hair through the neighborhood. Turned out he was the KC Ripper. You never know a guy.

The way you find out has somebody been molested, you have them sing the ABCs. Your voice stops at how old you were the day you were first molested--even if you are as old as thirty-two you will still sound as if you are six, getting fingered under the stairs by your eighth grade babysitter. This is true, it always works. It comes in handy. I didn't know about it then.

Anyway, four of us crammed into Jack's truck to go to Joshua's house. The seats smelled like incense, were covered in Indian fabric.

Jack's arm around me, I could feel him breathing. His fingertips making circles on my shoulder, rough from playing the guitar, they made sounds against my coat, and I liked it.

Joshua was against me on the other side. He had these diabolic eyebrows that went up on the ends like he was going to do something. I don't know what happened to him. I don't know what happened to any of them.

So Joshua was into bugs--had a bunch of them in boxes, stacked in his closet, and one by one he kept taking them out for us. Jack sits in a chair and closes his eyes. The room is cold, strange smelling. I keep my coat on. The other girl walks to the window and stares outside.

"Hold this one," Joshua says. "Madagascar hissing cockroach," he pronounces, and it must have cost him a lot of money.

I am terrified of it.

"No, she's sweet." He cradles the giant bug shiny against his cheek. "She even knows who I am. She recognizes me."

"Don't they chew out from the boxes?"

"Sometimes. But we've got this dog--it always gets them. You have to hold this one, though, okay?"

The next box was a tarantula.

"He's a teddy bear. Look at him."

"Ah, teddy bear, yes." It looks at me with a stuffed animal expression: blank, stupid eyes, vaudevillian fangs--giant, fuzzy. "It has fuzzy teeth!"

"They don't bite people," he lies. "Too big, they can't get their teeth around."

We cup our hands together. The spider crawls delicately from Joshua to me.

"Evil ballerina," I say, feeling fucking clever. The thing standing in my hands, very light.

"See?" he says. I give it back.

"You know they don't have bones?" he says. "If you drop them, they shatter."

"Have you tried it?"

The front door slams. A woman's voice, and then there are people mumbling angry, confused. A crash of something shudders the walls. The girl standing over by the window jerks like a puppet.

Jack stands up. "Lets drink some whiskey," he says.

There's dogs in the alley, walking silently in the trash, the damp leaves. They run away, the pretty one looking back black-eyed at me, looking backwards over her shoulder like a bright swan. You know how sometimes, even if you don't believe in reincarnation, there are moments, when everything is almost possible? It was like recognizing a lover. I wished she was mine.

The white, scalding sky: I wanted to climb to the top of something, to be lost in the whiteness--

"It's raining," I say.

The whiskey sears out from in me like a sacred heart. I radiate love, I am backed against the fence kissing Jack in the cold coming down rain, our burning faces. My ovaries are twisting worms, sucking holes: fill my spaces, be my lover.

Joshua sits on a rock with the bottle, laughing at us, my nipples in Jack's hands through my shirt.

"Paula," Jack says. "Now I have you."

I slug the drink, Joshua smiling sick-faced at me and I wish he'd leave. There had been that girl with us but somewhere in there she'd gone away, and I can't remember--

"Where'd that girl go?"

"What girl?"

"With the--hair," I said, my fingers together, indicating very long hair.

"It's just been us," Joshua says. Jack looks at me. Maybe we should sit in his truck for a minute?

"Okay," says Joshua. "Don't leave, I've got to get something, okay?"

We blast the heat and sit kissing with the radio on, fogging the windows. Jack's lips are chapped rough, metallic with smoke.

"I know your mother," he says suddenly. "She teaches at Pinckney?"

"Yeah."

"Haydon, Mrs. Haydon, that's it, right?"

My mother the teacher. I don't know what she wants from people. Why would anyone want to teach? This is why nothing new ever happens. Teachers filling our heads like balloons with other people's ideas. We live our lives making things easy for other people. You know smiling, in dog language, is like--'Please Jesus do not hurt me.'

I don't know what I mean.

-what I mean is, I want to be free, to catapult high and explode into a thousand melting stars across the wide sky. I don't want anyone to ever catch me, to ever have any part of me.

It seems like you should do what you wanna do, which is I don't know what, not yet, nothing exact, except it should be something very large and immediate, although not right now, because I am unable. I am unable of anything right now, but there will be a day when I am, when I am able.

I'm thinking all this while Jack is touching my hair, softly. He puts the car into gear.

"What's in your head, little girl?" he says, even though he's only two years older.

"Nothing," I say. "just junk." My hands blurred watercolors in my lap--streaks from my hands on his window I do not remember making. "Poor Joshua, huh?"

"He's okay."

"Hey, you want to see my mom? She always works late--we can catch her. You can show me where you used to sit. It's all still the same, I think."

"Really? -I don't know, she hasn't seen me in a long time." He looks out the window.

"It's okay. Never mind."

His hand moist through my jeans on my thigh. I close my eyes.

Later he tells me he didn't see the sign and because of the rain he thought the bus was still moving.

The last time I ever saw him, looking not like he used to, he said actually he didn't know you have to stop when buses have their lights on and the stop sign out.

It is because of us that there are those stickers on the buses now, the stickers that say 100 fine, even just for passing and not actually going that fast, because sometimes there are girls that run out into the rain from those buses, not looking,

their long black hair in their faces, these little Vietnamese girls who are so precious, so small, so small really, with such tiny pelvises, like tiny birds.

This tiny person like a bird screaming in the street in Vietnamese: and me squatting beside her, fucked out of my mind because I had not been out all that long, really, and this just blew it for me, this girl writhing, terrified, and her little feet naked.

Little bright pale sneakers like angels in the rain on the pavement.

"Here's one, honey, I'm sorry I can't find the other one but I'll keep looking. Listen, I'm sorry-I'm sorry, okay?" and she was scared, scared of me, do not touch her, do not take the hand, smaller even than my littlest sister, because I am the oldest of six, I had to take care of them all the time when we were growing up, and really I could be okay and normal and help you, girl, if you would just relax. Let me comfort myself comforting you.

Then there were lights and the bulls with their notepads, they were nodding, recognizing me. Shaking their fat heads.

The girl believed I was a demon. Her voice was pure, glistening, like a bell. She wished me ill.

They picked up Jack three blocks away. He was just standing there. I don't know how they knew he was involved. People driving by, they must have witnessed it. We were witnessed.

He'd run from the car, didn't even close the door--I'd had to put it in park. I guess he lost his boner for me pretty fast. It was bad for him because he had something from before. "What were you doing with him?" That's what they said.

And I must have mumbled something back, and then one of them told me I needed to sober up. "I'll give you a chance, kid, because I know who your family is," he said. He turned around.

They had a hard time putting that girl back together, the way she was broken and how small. It was in the papers. Maybe you saw it.

But she was so young. She probably healed quickly. Probably does not even limp.

A couple years later they closed the Alternative School. Now, if high school doesn't work out for you, you can just drop out, like they do in regular cities.

Sometimes I see the old hippies downtown. Then all of us wave, like the old friends we are.

Screwjack the Yngr

Come up to me pushing, up rumbling, against my neck insistent—kisses, long hair in my mouth my eyes, mine i love you delicious little,

sit with me where we are warm, --still, be still—

between your dark lips the shine ivory fangs, wet smelling sweet musty-fishy, press against me kissy in the window,

little love beauty, your papa gone off out somewhere so we can, pressing

into necks hard fingers toes; wet stinking tongues to lips & ears,

are you thinking about biting me

about pointed pale bones sinking into me

into through me

i’d like it; i want it,

anything you want to me,

rape my vessels suck my bones break my teeth stab my womb with you full of you paint white the walls of me eat out all of my lining rip your glassy eyes take everything into

then somehow your neck into my fingers baby tomcat

writhing squirm squealing your marbled black and yellow belly

apologizing while I twist

your very thin neck I stretch your legs in opposite

everything—head full of blood & light—

you becoming,

still like a pond

perfect

Girls on Fire

At the church they come at us from behind some buildings, blurry eyes and walking strange, into the car crying like children: I look at their faces and see them children, babies with skinned knees, only Bette is crying that she can’t have babies now, any babies,

You’re okay, you’re okay. I’m turned around in my seat. You’re safe.

For a while they just breathe and choke; their faces rainy windows. One of them slumping out of consciousness against the window. People at the stoplight think something is going on.

Tell me what happened-

I can’t believe he’d dose us, one of them says, we’ve known him since we were in fifth grade-

He keeps saying, oh, that’s not my shot, that’s your shot, she says, and I think he’s being friendly, you know, being polite, and then I wake up in his bed and he’s on me passed out—and my pants are undone—and then Ainsley’s in the bathroom on the floor and Kyoko, and they won’t wake up and they didn’t want to get up—

And he said he’d been on the McCormick yesterday, but it was full when we got there-

Where were his parents?

They’re out of town—

Is your friend okay?

She shakes Kyoko, my dentist’s daughter: Imma kay, imma kay, she says. Presses her face against the glass of the window, and I turn up the air.

Should they eat? I ask him.

Probably not, he says. His sunglasses with the light on them; the going-down sun. The light in their faces, I can see that their hearts are all moths, beating against grey slatted grab of their ribs: throbbing for the light coming down with the air they breathe.

At the house they keep repeating their story, dumbfounded still, but calming down. Kyoko throws up. She barks like a seal. I keep checking on her, make sure she doesn’t pass out. Every time she’s got her arms wrapped around it, smiling gently at me. Imma kay, she tells me.

All right.

Ainsley hugging me tight. I stroke her shiny hair.

Oh, here’s a little bit of barf, I say, picking it out. She smiles.

Bette woke me up saying we had to call you guys. Call Johnnie and Pauline, she said, call Johnnie and Pauline.

Little girl I know so well and yet not at all: a loving stranger to me. But I’m such a good judge of character! she’s wailing, and I’m thinking how this is part of it, part of the wheel: she grows up and I am given myself ten years ago, a girl becoming in another woman’s arms. It was my youngest aunt held me, tiny pretty with red nailed hands: smoking cigarettes and wearing black underwear in the morning (my mother wore soft ratty things).

Part of becoming whole is putting another girl together again: pieces of Ainsley fitting into what is gone from me.

I didn’t have anything to eat today, she says suddenly, through my hair.

Are you hungry?

Not yet.

I’m such a mom, I say, trying all the time to get you to eat.

Yeah you are! she says, hugging me again. Paulie, she says softly.

Kyoko mumbling on the sofa. This is not normal, she says again. This is weird.

Yah you’re weird, says Bette, walking past Kyoko unfazed, and they’re going to be all right.

But this is unending, Kyoko says. Bette takes her onto our bed, until I think she probably shouldn’t be lying down. She goes back on the sofa, slanting there with her black eyes closed looking like my dentist’s daughter, until she lurches up for the bathroom again.

She only had one shot, Ainsley says.

It probably wasn’t mixed evenly, he says. She had the biggest dose.

I hope I can still have babies, Bette says. He has that STD, you know, and all these girls can’t have babies.

Your pants were on?

Yeah, she says.

It’s hard to pull off somebody’s pants. You ever do that? Play limp? —and if he had gotten them off, he wouldn’t have got them back on. He passed out.

Yeah, she says, thinking. I’m gonna get him so bad.

Yeah, Ainsley says, we’ll ruin his life.

Someone like that, I say, shouldn’t get to keep his dick.

They laugh.

You should get your buddies to hold him down—you can carve RAPIST on his face, so everybody he meets will know.

Yeah, they tell me, but we want to do it ourselves. We’ve got to do something ourselves.

Only not violently, they say.

Violence is not the answer, says Bette. She touches Kyoko to make sure she’s still awake. Hey honey, she says.

Cats on the floor in yellow lamplight and Kyoko whispering on the sofa. The sisters tempt him outside for a cigarette. Their smoke, smelling stale and somehow like leather, drowses back on itself through the screen door. Unrolls itself like something living.

After a while they’re texting their friends about it, they’re talking about how they’re gonna get this guy. Ainsley showing me pictures of her favorite pipes online. She wants one looks like a mermaid. Have you been on here? she’s asking me.

She’s telling me about mushrooms and talking her friends sober, about someday maybe working in Africa, taking pictures and helping the people. About finding old wedding dresses in bins at garage sales: and then Johnnie and Bette are coming through the door bringing tacos and another girl.

They’re getting ready to go again, Kyoko still sick, Ainsley hugging me saying she’ll call later, let us know she’s okay, that they’re all okay.

Even as she says it we all know the call will be tomorrow, asking can we get her something, and that way Sunday too. Then on Monday cigarettes and boys and French fries: high school forever and ever amen until the day they are eighteen.