I walked the roots

I dreamed the here-now-soil ,

It’s growing through my feet, its vine twisting golden bone

River fills my lungs of realization

This is it, isn’t it?

Yes, of course. She’s with the round ruin,

Lying across the down,

Her arms in the sun.

I watched your lanterns in the air

Slate eyes,

Scrambled yolk.

My chest full of petals, my legs full of iron

The. 

Want

                Upon seeing the empty coffee pot, I knew something was terribly wrong. 

                I stood in the frames of the doorway as they collapsed on my reeling mind, but I didn’t dare move. If I stayed there, if I stayed right in that spot, maybe she would feel a pull in time, and she would come back to me. I fervently glared at the door, blurry without my glasses, and waited.

                Maybe this is what makes a man, I thought. I breathed quietly and surveyed my stained, sleeveless, white shirt, my striped boxers in their faded navy comfort, though they offered no comfort at that moment. Finally, I ran my knuckles through the black hair lining my chin and eased myself into the floor. I considered frantically checking the rooms, ripping through the closets, dialing her number—but I did none of those things. I just—I just sat there, pressing hands’ morning chill to my beard and allowing the distorted vision of the door to glaze over. I had seen it coming.

                The night before, the kitchen had shone with artificial light, and I could sense the growing falsity of our relationship like a dampening sweat. I sat on the barstool across from my wife, watching her simultaneously rinse potatoes and Quasimodo her shoulder to succeed in a hands-free phone conversation.

                “I guess you heard what she wants me to do,” she barked into the receiver. “Potatoes in the shape of fish. Yes. Fish.” A pause complete with rolled eyes. “Oh, I know! Her son is three—like he even cares. No, I just now started.  Look, Carolyn, I have to go. I’ll talk to you later. Uh-huh, okay, bye.”

                She hung up the phone and sighed dramatically, allowing the handful of red potatoes to drop onto the counter in a series of tiny percussions.

                “What’s going on?” I asked, biting into a banana and letting the soft mush spread through my mouth. Extra ripe, just the way I like them.

                “Nothing.” She glanced at me, eyes lingering, and it suddenly enforced upon me a feeling of nakedness. I swallowed my partially chewed bite and felt the lump travel down my throat. Suddenly a vocal exhale of annoyance came from my wife. “Gibson, those bananas are for bread. I already told you that.” She pulled the banana from my hand and cut the little slab still containing my teeth marks. She tossed it toward me, not looking to see its landing point, and bagged the rest of the darkening fruit.

                “Sorry, hun.” I paused, watching as she began slicing each burgundy-pale planet. “Are any of those for us?”

                “What? What do you mean?”

                “Like, for dinner. Any of those potatoes for us?”
                “No, Gibs. They are all for Beth Carter, who just has to have an underwater-themed birthday party for her son. He’s not going to care if these potatoes look like fish. He probably doesn’t even eat potatoes. But if I want to cater real events, I have to start kissing a little ass.”

                She became very quiet, then. I watched her hands—the rounded, rose knuckles, the turquoise of her veins, the tiny bones swimming beneath her skin. Her rings were gone—sitting in her white dish beside the sink. I wondered how she felt without the rings. Wondered if she felt free.

                The peelings fell from each potato like flaking, dead skin. She carefully cut slits in each blank sphere, the future holding place for fins, I assumed. She did so with precision, but it was gentle; she handled each potato with more affection than I had experienced in months. I suddenly had an odd perception. I sensed that the moment, the situation, the watching-her-cook—it was all ephemeral. I knew that it was the last time that I would look across the counter and see her standing there. I needed to tell her. Felt compelled to smash her hand into the butter as she reached for it, and bellow that I wouldn’t let it happen. That we could still be what we were.

                But I didn’t. Instead, I just followed the knife’s rising and falling as the slender walls of butter collapsed into one another. She dashed the butter like she had been cooking throughout the whole of her existence—like she learned to mix and boil and beat long before walking or words. In all likelihood, she probably had been cooking for the majority of her life. Three years of dating, five years of marriage, and I didn’t even know.

                “How long have you been cooking?”
                She scanned my face dryly.

                “Ten minutes.”
                “No, I mean, like, throughout your life. How long?”
                “I d’nno. I guess I started when Oskar died. Mom sort of stopped, and I sort of started.” She gingerly inserted a potato tail into one of the fish. “Papa would say, ‘That’s what it is to be a woman.’ Like he knew. He didn’t even understand what it was to be a man.”

                I wanted. Wanted everything in that moment. I wanted to tell her I felt sorry. I wanted to stop her chopping and slicing and preheating and yell at her. I wanted to press my lips to each knot in her spine the way I once did. But I didn’t want to wake in the morning alone, knowing she had left like an evening thief, soundless and wicked. I didn’t want to smell stale like sleep, staring blindly at the door, listening to the sink dripping endlessly in a house far too clean and a kitchen all too empty, with the exception of two rings in a white dish. But damn it all, if that isn’t exactly what happened.

____________________________________________________________

Reflections

                Between the grooves of my teeth, under the soft flesh of my tongue, the laughter rolls in artificial waves before crashing into the young, virgin swirl of his ear.

                “Oh, that’s so funny!” I encourage in my best falsetto. The boy sitting across from me has nineteen years behind him, at best. His beard, or rather, his tufts of hair, lay scraggly, unconnected—waiting for the years’ wisdom to fill the empty patches of his skin. He continues to relay his tale of drunken party mishaps, as I carefully eye each packet of sugar he tears, pours, and spins into his coffee— now a dessert instead of a beverage. I nod with each pall in the conversation, my face tightens into a smile with each joke. Tonight, with this boy, I’ll feel both experience and youth sinking beneath each layer of my spotted skin.

                “Here’s your coffee, ma’am. Can I get you anything else? Maybe a slice of pecan pie?”
                “Just coffee, thanks,” I nod at the waiter.

                As I allow the liquid energy to bitterly glide behind my lips, I realize the boy has stopped speaking. Glancing up to him once more, I realize he watches me with wide eyes.

                “Something the matter?”
                “No, no,” he answers. “You just—I don’t know any women who drink their coffee black.”
                I laugh lightly—this one partially real—and feel the embers of satisfaction warm in my stomach. I was the first. I would be the one he remembered. I breathe in to say something when I stop myself. Or rather, my reflection stops me. In the coffee’s gentle turbulence, I see an old woman. I am taken aback by the image, although I see it often—as often as possible, really. I am always finding it in car windows and computer screens, compact mirrors and napkin dispensers. Addicted to staring at my own face and abhorring what I see. Though, I am unprepared for the gentle push I feel inside my chest while looking at my coffee-replication. Unprepared for the memory it conjures. Who am I, honestly? The kind of woman who picks up college-age boys at coffee shops to feel wanted and young?
                “What did you say your major is?” I ask, now acutely aware of the conversational void at our table. I do not listen for his answer but instead delve into my own recollection.

*             *             *

                I awoke beside my sister, eight years my older and the deepest sleeper I’ve yet to meet. Silence had washed through our house during the night, and now the walls patiently waited for the hour when they could once again hold laughter and arguments and echoes of cartoon chatter. I pushed myself to the bed’s edge, aware that my eyes were the first to open that morning. The window-light spilled through the blinds as a bashful, glowing blue, and I dropped from the cliff of the mattress into the early day. With my nightgown long and empty on my small frame, I shuffled to the bathroom. Reaching my hands to the cream-colored counter, I peered over the top.

                In the looking glass, a ringlet-haired, small-eyed child stood. 
                “I am four years old today,” I said.
                It was the morning of my birthday—probably why I had woken so early. Children seem to have an unnaturally cognitive link with gifts bearing their names.

                “I am four years old today,” I repeated, somewhat expressionless. Thoughts of the rest of the day excited me, but I enjoyed being the only one awake. I enjoyed the quiet beginning, the realization that I had aged another year. After all, birthdays were rare then. Only after eternities of waiting did they grace the day with their perfection.

                If only they were still like that, I think. This June will be the fourth consecutive year I lie about my age. The boy continued to talk—something about wanting to transfer but signing a lease—ah, to be young and so able to discuss yourself.

                I thought about the milky, full skin of my childhood body. The smooth face. The quiet promise I had made to myself over the countertop. I was four years old, yes, but I had so many years. So many years to do as I pleased, to become everything I wanted. To marry and flourish and be a movie star, then to own and play in a beautiful garden the rest of time, because all of those things are possible to a four year-old. All of those things were possible to me.

                What am I now? Fourty-three, addicted to nicotine, dependent on coffee, habituated on young meat. Take this boy, for example; steal a few candles from his birthday cake, and this date would be a felony.

                Am I disappointed, though? I don’t know, maybe. My four year-old self would be disappointed, certainly. I’m disenchanted by the lines in my face; the whimsical vision of myself that I sometimes carry quickly blurs at the sight of noticeable veins. So, I guess I never envisioned myself getting older. I’m looking at the boy across from me, though, and I think that maybe he doesn’t see me as old. Maybe he doesn’t see the circles under my eyes or the fading elasticity of my elbows. He sees me as experienced, perhaps, as enriched. A person can’t be fulfilled by others’ perceptions of her, so they say, but thinking about it floods me with satisfaction, and I smile, this time completely genuinely.

                “How about another round of coffee?” I offer. “I’m enjoying our talk.”

*             *             *

One breath for hoping

The next for the touch

When three comes along, I won’t be ready,
And it will seize me by the lungs,

And another sunlit thanks will escape from my chapsticked pout.

With fingers colored guiltily
Blue and green
And red to death

Looking glass waters—
I’ll pull and part curled waves,
In hopes of you.

In hopes of

Plucky,

Little

You.

With a promise of us:

Cherry, chaptsticked mouths
And pleasure-red hands,
With our eyes, secret-dense.
And my words, full of nova-light,
Full of prisms,
Full of you.

Full of

Beautiful,

Frightening

You.
Careful, now—
I think I’m drowning.