A Brief Attachment

I regard your affections, find your teeth have

left me a bruise necklace. Those lipstick

marks leech a trail, ear to ear, facsimile your

smile. Your 40 ounces of malt liquor, your

shrink hate, your eyes dialing 911. The hearts

you draw with ballpoint on my cigarette packs

when I've left the room, penned in your girl's

cursive, look demented, misshapen approximations

of what I refuse to hand over. It's a nice touch,

though: a little love to accompany the cancer.

My thought follows you to where you spend

your days lying in bed, smoking and reading

the Beats. The accumulation of clothes and ashes

circles you, rising like a moat after rainfall.

Often you are a study in detachment—the trigger

eye is your eye, still as a finger poised to press

should one refuse to cooperate, and I wonder

how you can hate men so much when you think

like one. Think of what I could be doing outside

if I could unlock the door of myself: think bikini,

think soda fountain, think tradition, a day lacking

entirely your brand of ambivalence. If you were

a number, I'd subtract you; if you were a sentence,

I'd rewrite you. Are you the one who left these

wilted flowers, are you the one whose PIN spells

out H-O-L-E? Why are you wearing my clothes?

If you are weather, then I am a town, closing down

at word of your coming: you're a glacier on fast

forward, you're direct as a detour, when I say

good-bye you move in next door. You say you

want to have my baby, you want to buy me a car,

and you're too young to enter a bar. I should tether

you to a tree in the dark park, allow the moon to stroke

your white neck. I should give you a diamond collar,

walk you around the block and show you off.

Source: Fragment of the Head of a Queen (Sarabande Books, 2007)