When I was four years old
I spent half a week
in a plastic tent,
struggling to breathe, water
dripping on my face.
I.
You don’t tell me to stay.
II.
A wadded-up receipt from BeBop for the
cassette of Little Earthquakes, ink splattering out
from a busted rollerball, Hey you there boy with a
boy head, I tried to find you but you weren’t here, even
though yr car is here, all this in the delightful wet
desert before there were phones you put in your
pocket, accidentally washed with the darks, fist-sized
computers, I am going home for Easter, maybe you
should try to find me yrself Try to call me. xx
III.
No faded Roman notion of beauty would
have arched those eyebrows that high or
splashed that many freckles across her nose
and you can’t talk about her eyes but
everybody talks about her eyes.
IV.
V.
Blue tulle I guess, okay I’m lying I don’t know what tulle is, she lifts her chin and sets her jaw and in gold script at the bottom it says Olan Mills 1995.
VI.
I see her face everywhere I go.
Right after I turned twenty-two I was staggering through the Alabama State Fairground in the monthly flea market, looking at John Buscema Avengers and deckle-edged postcards and Star Trek III glasses and rifling through boxes of compact discs from the guy with the promo records. Bored and poor I stroll past a booth with just old soul and r&b and they’re playing “If You Don’t Know Me By Now,” soft sad cries echoing through down the alley aisles, the record lightly skipping but not losing its place and I tell the soul record man that Harold Melvin died the day before, I heard it on the news at my daddy’s house, we stopped eating and turned around, thumbing the remote to turn up Pam Huff on Channel 13. The soul record man gets a look on his face like somebody punched him in the guts and I am real worried that he is gonna cry but he looks down and away, doesn’t say nothing back, and I feel like I betrayed him somehow by telling him the truth of it. I want to defend myself, say it was just facts, mister, but really I just wish I hadn’t never told him and maybe he could have found out later but not by me, and I should have just said “I really love this song and how much is this 45” and he would of said “three bones” and I would have bought it even though I already had a copy I just got the week before at the Bessemer Salvation Army when I got all those Otis Volt radio station copies with the hole drilled in the label.
This was on March 25th, 1997. I know what day it was because Wikipedia tells me what day Harold Melvin died. I do not need Wikipedia to tell me about what the soul record man looked like because I don’t need the internet to know heartbreak when I see it, I got that thanks.
VII.
Ten years ago she
looked at me and
smiled and tilted her head
down towards her shoulder,
squinching her left eye closed,
she is a little drunk on double Beam
& Coke, fiddles with her ear.
Pulls a little diamond out of
her ear, then leaned in to me,
eyes locked on mine, and clicked it
into my ear. “There,” she said,
“now we match.”
VII.
I’ll be damned if I know if my ears can even still hold rings, even though you can still see the holes, which embarrasses me sometimes when I see people looking real close, and then kind of tilting their head when they see the other one is pierced too, and I am like come on, who in the world just has one earring, do I look like Harrison Ford to you, I wore mine chunky silver and big like a pirate, it was the nineties and I am a rock and roll type person, this is just what we do.
VIII.
A memory from nineteen ninety-nine (and a half)
Sometimes when she is asleep I stare at her back and while I am one heartbeat from no phone and two from eviction, even with a red-hot gold amex on my hip in someone else’s name and sometimes I feel like I had a hundred conversations with her back, she gives me her cheek when I want her lips.
IX.
“Love’s Theme” is an instrumental piece recorded by Barry White’s Love Unlimited Orchestra and released in 1973. It is one of the few instrumental and purely orchestral singles to reach number one on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart in the United States, in early 1974. The piece was included on the albums Under the Influence of Love Unlimited (by the vocal group Love Unlimited) and Rhapsody in White.
Wikipedia, “Love’s Theme”
X.
I am sorry I didn’t
try to find you, and
it’s too late baby,
now it’s too late, &
I don’t even have any
earrings, & to tell
the truth I wouldn’t wear them
if I did.