Going to someone else’s house is like diving into a different world. You peruse their books and are sometimes surprised by the taste, sometimes envious. You listen to their music collection. You explore old doors and how to open them (especially if they have those really old glass doorknobs that sometimes fall off if you twist too hard).
You peek through their windows and sit on their sofas. You look at the pictures they’ve chosen to frame, wondering who is who and looking for familiar faces. You check out liquor cabinets and joke about stealing the Blue Label. You sit on chairs and ask for histories. Who lived here? How long? How old is the house? You know that children live there because of the toys scattered on the stairway steps, or the tiny bike leaning against the front door. You know that someone lived here, because they left their pistols hanging on the wall, crossed as if duels were still commonplace.
You know they have a dog, because a silver water bowl is full and you hear full throated barks when someone makes a noise. You wonder if you would have been a different person had you lived there. You use their bathroom and smell the soap they leave by the sink, washing your hands in peppermint or lavender or a Safeguard bar. You temporarily ride a submarine into their lives, delving deep into the things they leave out for others to see.
what who how why
polysyllabic questions
word of the month: fear
Past Words:
maps, thread, oh, crashing, sound, ends, birthdays, toilet, recipe, late, hungover, dilettante, next, busy, cold, transition, sore, fine, potato, missing, earth, lazy, hesitate, pain, wiggle, pilot, soap, soft, object, layer, fall, play
Read by postal worker:
Antonette
Melay
Pilar
RM
Past postmaster(s):
Nice
Guest postal worker(s):
Coming soon!
Her cheeks were sore, her tongue swollen. Tears streamed down her face, blurring her vision. She was trying to concentrate on the spot where the ceiling met the wall, trying to focus so she wouldn’t swallow. The bar was bitter and slimy and nauseating. The clock on the wall told her it would be over soon, but twelve felt like an eternity from nine. Just a little bit more, she thought, clenching her fists. She thought of her diary, with the tiny special lock that only she had the key to. She thought of the single word she would write over and over, because she wasn’t allowed to say it. Fuck, she thought, even as she wondered what it meant.
I was kind of glad when mom and I started going to those fancy soap shops as opposed to the boring soap isles of grocery stores. You know, the kind you find in nice malls, the ones with their candy smells wafting down corridors.
I thought, well I’m going to have to eat them anyway. Might as well add a little variety.
in your bedroom
the blankets tangle around our feet
we haven’t changed the sheets
in weeks and you and I
we sleep as one
settling like those decks
of cards
you handle so well
with expert hands shuffling
and cutting through
the way
we touch is soft
always settling,
I lie awake some nights
with my mouth pressed to your neck
and my hands clutched in your hair
It didn’t seem real at first. It started with the corners of my eyes. They started to shimmer, kind of like how heat emanates off asphalt in waves. Over the next few days, it started creeping in. Edges of things started getting softer. Colors melted into a strange muck-colored mush. Maybe I was starting to lose it? Maybe my eyes were just giving out?
It crept in. Slowly, slowly until all that was left was a tiny circle in the middle where my vision was clear. I had to move my head this way and that to put what I wanted to see into focus. But even then, the circle was getting smaller.
I felt like I was holding my eyes as wide as I could but I could never be sure. Mind you, I wasn’t inebriated in any way. No, no. None of that. Yeah, I’m probably losing it. I started imagining tiny hands turning my eyes this way and that, deliberately turning my eyes out of focus.
On the bright side, looking at hard objects doesn’t bother me anymore.
My girlfriend makes terribly pretty things with her hands. Out of emptied tissue rolls she makes lanterns with intricate tree cutouts. Out of old magazines she makes collages, swan sculptures and once, the prettiest scratch post for Tundra, her cat. Even that lovely name for her pet had to do with her hands. At a loss for something to call then-nameless Tundra, she pulled a textbook out of her bag, Geology, closed her eyes, and felt for a word. She also knits and crochets, much to the cat’s delight. Doilies, blankets, skirts. Herself into cocoons. The charming table on which I am writing is of her making, too, out of reject plywood and plastic cups. We’ve been seeing each other for three weeks now, and that her hands are excruciatingly soft is only a bonus.
I realize the fundamental importance of objectifying your lover. This necessary tool helps you create the detachment necessary to observe him and turn him into a person you continually desire. Beautiful hands, big back, the longest legs you’ve seen on a guy. Craving him as you craved coffee, or cigarettes, or drugs, mainly because attraction at its first and finest is always physical.
I see him walking towards me and I feel the same old rush, the one that curls up from deep inside your stomach and makes you flush. The one I used to get before we ever did anything just from the sound of his voice, when it would spread from neck to breast to cheek in this odd scattered way that somehow always ended in my ears.
Sometimes I take the machine of him apart: slightly curved hip, bend of arm, inside of elbow, secret taste of mouth. I pretend that I don’t know his body as intimately as my own. I forget that my favorite part is the line of muscle where his neck meets his shoulder. I pretend never to have seen his hands before. I strip him of everything else that I love about him. His easy humor, for instance. Or the way he always hums when he eats something yummy.
I find it essential and instrumental to make it a point to remember the old days when our love was mostly lust.
Sitting in a corner, minding my own issues. Then suddenly you spoke my thoughts. Actually, you set them to music. So that would be sang, you fucking sang my thoughts. What is wrong with you?
I stood up, elbowed my way through the thick enough crowd in a bar in a hole in the wall. I stopped right in front of you, wanting to slap you hard. Or harder.
But I didn’t. Instead I formulated a theory of likeness between us, speed concluded that love and hate are the same thing when you’ve easily become the object of my affection.
Objectify me, it said on your jacket. The design was peeling, because you had ironed it on years back, when making a statement like that was cool in an uncool way. The letters were barely there, more like a suggestion than an invitation. The design itself was off-center, somewhere above the place where tattoos are called tramp stamps, where your wrist would be if you held the small of my back. You gave me the jacket because it was raining, and you insisted. It was the gentlemanly thing to do. I took it, because it smelled like you, and it was exactly the sort of thing that is nice to keep unwashed, sentimental reasons trumping hygiene. Years later the jacket is still in my room, and I wear it sometimes when it rains. We are no longer seeing each other, not that way, but this is just something I like to do sometimes. You know how it is when there are rainbows in puddles and you can’t help but remember what a hug smells like. I don’t suppose you’d object.
