Black and Blue and Red and Green

I find it strange the way people can pull themselves from each other so quickly.  I feel similar to the green, slime filled traps my dad use to set in our garage to catch the mice that were eating through our memories some days. No matter the strength of them, their bodies have become one with this piece of plastic, goop, death. So tragic and trivial.

There is no winning there and things just keep going on, the boxes start being moved around, the mice soon aware of what this place means now. 

I wonder what it’s like for you to sit across from your girl with her lips pressed to her coffee cup in the morning. Her hair falling just so. A way that nauseates you and pulls you in all at the same time. Sticking you there.

How many lips have sat across from you like that at the edge of something hot?

And when you lay behind her at night do you ever wish her ass caved around your manhood like mine did? Or maybe that feels just right. 

I’ve tried many times not to think of you. In fact on most days I think of you as the worst thing that has ever happened to me. Other days I think you’re the best thing that ever happened to me. 

I was the one little mouse who got away only to be missing one organ instead of a whole life. 

In case you're wondering.

Happy New Year.

The momentum of him is similar to that of a an old tire swing I used to play on when I was five years old.

A woman I don’t know, sang to me of the moon every night, loving me like my mother. 

Similar to the way your woman sent you there and back with words running from her ancient lips.  

Words that mean so much to you still.

A song that means so much to me still. 

We pass through the air between us like that rubber swing. Back and forth.

Back and forth.

Closer to that milky white amore.

 Feeling the safety of hands upon our backs guiding us up. 

Pulling me back.

Promising of a destination of there and here.

“I see the moon and the moon sees me.” I hear in my head.

“To the moon and back” he writes in his skin.

then.

I’m doing ok now

doing all the things I should have been doing now and

I’m playing the guitar now like I said I would then

and I’m not allowed to miss you because everyone says so

and I’m doing ok now when I turn the lights out.

I went to a party and everyone was there and she asked about you and 

I just stared. I realize that rhymes when I try not to but the words of you

have always flowed just they way they should. I still think about the way 

you circled my shape in the same manner and the way you said the things you say.

but im doing ok now. I think of you sometimes now. 

They’re playing my song now. You’re happy somewhere else now.

5

Amber glass sits so before

me memories float to the

top. Little foamy dreams and 

yesterday you were sitting across from me fingering

my palm and asking if I was his and if I could be yours and

Iggy Pop was singing your praises. My throat was

wet with anger, yours with words

but today you’re a pale ale bitter.

Full of bad ideas and lost opportunity and tomorrow we’ll be

gone forever.

My glass falls empty.

My belly full.

My throat wet.

Charlize Theron for Best Actress.

I haven’t done anything today. I haven’t even penciled my eyebrows in. Not a necessity to some, however when your face is comparable to Aileen Wuornos, you pencil your goddamn eyebrows in. Its all you have.

I sat here doing nothing, slipping my index along the pages of the internet. Looking at pictures of people I don’t know. People I don’t even want to know. But somehow this feels like im doing work. Investigative journalism is what I call it. Making mental comparison charts. I should really start doing my hair like that.

I have heat rash on the foreskin of my arm, at least im calling it foreskin because it sounds punctual, also I’m not sure what this part of the arm is named, but its where you go to die. Beforeskin? It’s bumpy and red and has a similarity to razor burn. But I don’t shave my arms. I don’t have to.

I typed “heat rash” into my search engine. Its from sweating. Sweat getting trapped in your hair follicles. Unable to get out. “HELPPPP MEEEEE!” I picture their little frowning faces saying. Drowning in my moisture as I graze my fingers against them.  I apply cream. Laying here, trapping myself in summer.

Milk.

I carried you through seasons. Through a fog ridden gray and an ecstatic heat piercing our skin with warmth. 

I made a lot of plans for us. I made sure to mark in February. That was going to be a big day for us. 

Days tend to melt into one another for me, a lot like the “fragola nel cono” I tried to order with conviction during the holiday we spent in Grado. But not your day, no, I would remember your day. Even if I tried not to and in fact I did try not to.

I talked to you so many times before then, heeding your advice, needing to feel your answers pulse through me so that I could understand them. I was left alone to make our plans. It shakes me now to see how you changed me when I hadn’t even met you yet.

I’d see you when I looked in the mirror, steamed, from the ocean off my body. I’d run my hand down my breast and feel you there. You hadn’t touched me yet. You weren’t ready to touch me yet.  

At least that’s what I kept telling myself.

By: Kaitlin Chamberlain

First Kiss

Afterwards you had that drunk, drugged look

my daughter used to get, when she had to let go

of my nipple, her mouth gone slack and her eyes

turned vague and filmy, as though behind them

the milk was rising up to fill her 

whole head, that would loll on the small

white stalk of her neck so I would have to hold her

closer, amazed at the sheer power

of satiety, which was nothing like the needing

to be fed, the wild flailing and crying until she fastened

herself to me and made me seal tight

between us, and sucked, drawing the liquid down and

out of my body; no this was the crowning

moment, this giving of herself, knowing

that she could show me how helpless

she was—that’s what I saw, that night when you

pulled your mouth from mine and 

leaned back against a chain-link fence,

in front of a burned-out church: a man

who was going to be that vulnerable,

that easy and impossible to hurt.

By Kim Addonizio