The ricochet continues

The cafe’s menu matched her Technicolor jellyfish shirt cut low.  She was wearing a necklace made with a vintage typewriter key, and I pictured my fingers finding the rest of the keys across her chest to spell out this story. Pictures of the neighborhood throughout the years hung on the walls, and the city of then and the city of now loomed over us mimicking the scene we found ourselves living: a scene so familiar, yet so distant from what it had once been, and haunted by its memories and its unfolding present.

She had the chicken noodle soup, and I smirked when she added salt to it. Steam slipped and streamed off the spoon leaving a soft fog on her glasses. Her hair was up, and earlier she had me run my fingers through it. I let it flow like a stream over my fingers and everything felt right.

Dessert came in a coffee haze. We shared pecans, chocolate and peanut butter across a cupcake and a truffle. I wondered how sweet she tasted after we ate these pastries.

On the drive home, she bundled up in a coat and pink scarf and set the soundtrack for the ride. The stereo sung the words I couldn’t say and we sung along.

 

The only impossible thing has happened

Anticipation beats blood anxious, and I swim inside it. It’s a house of cards built to collapse into her arms.

Art History

Barbara Kruger – Untitled [Memory is Your Image of Perfection]

I can’t even picture where you’re living now,
So I build these stupid crushes
On all the pretty girls here

And I sing songs like,
“Tonight, I’m throwing gasoline on an old flame.”

Talons’ – Fuck Everything

Kiss and talk and Donner Party conversation

Her voice hums, habit-forming beautiful, over the phone. Pieces of her words linger and murmur, soft decibels blooming. I swallow them and their radiance scorches my throat before they fall like rain to my stomach. My guts work on the words, breaking them into syllables and then phonemes , eventually becoming pieces of myself and moving through me making the sound of sentences against muscle and bone. It is a symphony, long and slow, waiting to be heard.

I hearby declaring myself a person

I’m drinking, taking long labored sips from my glass. The women next to me is skating across her stool, steadying herself with hells planted firmly on the ground. She grabs my coat, taking a wooden buttons between her fingers and undoing it.

“Nice coat sailor.”

She shifts slightly in her seat still holding onto my coat and signals me to come closer.

“Are you a model.”

“No.”

“Are you an architect?”

“No.”

“Are you a Pisces?”

“No. Three strikes, you’re out.”

I turn and walk away, but she still has a corner of my coat.

“You must have a girlfriend.”

I lie. “Yes I do,” and then I tell the truth “but I’m flattered.”

She lets go, and I walk away and collect myself. I look at my phone and the time, scroll through the contacts and hover on a name, think about making a call, think about her melting like snow on my tongue. My heart hammers harder like a bad love song, and I close my phone. My friends and I talk about the fossils of ex-lovers.

Mountains of a magnet are the mountains of you

She drinks whiskey and soda, sipping it through the small bar straw. She winces ever so slightly at the first taste but is fine after that. Her lips are wet and sandy strands of stray hair cling to them and flutter with each of her low whispers of electric peppermint candy.

I keep breaking ice into my drinking glass, and keep drinking glasses to break the ice. Her hair is longer than when we knew each other, and I should know this by now, but I’m surprised each time I see her. It’s new again, every time, and I’m swooning, but I forget that I haven’t changed that much, and this swooning is probably a one-sided wishbone and what good does that do either one of us?

I’m a kerosene lamp, bright and beaming around her.  She’s a thousand decibels of porcelain snow blooming soft and serene. I want to spread my arms out around her like wings, make angels and sing “forget me not.”

Art History

Vitas Luckus – The Feast (1979)

The sun comes up a little later, so you can drink a little longer.
I wish I had a dream last night, so half the time you’d be here.
I’m on your vine now, so high, I can see Italy.

The Promise Ring – Scenes from Parisian Life

Tuesday Side of the Street

I’m waiting, playing drums off beat on the steering wheel and singing off key. The vinyl seats cling to my back even in this mild heat. She’s in a checkered shirt, and I’m lost in the landscape of her angles as she runs her hands through her hair drenched in sunlight. She’s electricity buzzing, hammering out ribcage rhythms in 3/4 time. Her hips are porcelain bows shooting whisper shaped arrows towards my shaking pulse. I smile radiant crescents, the blueprints to spell her name, and I want to break ground on the first syllable on her lips.

She leans in and tells me that the world only goes as far as the route we’ll walk today, but I already knew that.

Country Hymn, Secret Hymn

She stands next to me. Her presence is a winter hymn sung against my chest, telephone speakers blasting vertigo static.

William Telling It

Bow: check. Arrow: check. Apple: check.