Wednesday, June 3, 2015

I suck lemons,

my tongue remembers the familiar, the girlhood it burned over onions eaten like apples,
brought empty tears as I binded my barbie's hands, feet with toilette paper so she couldn't move I called her Sexy, did a dance for my mother's camera but her eyes didn't blink like my own at times didn't blink. I sucked on a quarter got stuck in my throat no one saved me my throat learned early to save itself by gagging. Peeling back the bark from a birch tree to leave raw skin beneath I imagined the tree feeling as I did picking the edge of each scab till it bled-fell to the pavement and wind to the smell of juniper, always takes me back to that little white house with the picket fence and inside it the attic of my room swallowing me in its pale pink, my magic rock collection arranged according to color: the blues, then the yellows. And the giant bear I played boyfriend with though it hadn't all the parts, had soft, stuffed hips I mimicked the act and later peed in a bucket for release, to be more bear-like: more free with less bones I left the forgotten bucket beneath the bed. Like a memory it filled the house full in a week with an unattended stinch, so foul even denial couldn't keep my mother away. Girls will be bears she never said and that night I renamed the constellation Bart Simpson on a motorcyle from the star-pieces of Orion's belt. No one could see it but me, out on the roof, bird's-eye-viewing the street lights, each house I imagined, lonely as my own.

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