Tennis Courts
June 1, 2016
1. What did you make before you were gone? What would I remember? The latchkey fireflies on the ceiling of the schoolbus. The impressions on a courtyard’s grass in a wet heat, like the shading of a helicopter’s wings. The last branch that broke before we knew that we had gone far enough. Your visage, like a religious painting. The breath of the tungsten above our heads and the avocado of the tennis courts, unseasoned in the darkness. The tractorclaw shadow in your faraway, beheld between spells of averted gaze. Drunken noodles in a dim restaurant and my sad feeling: preemptive. My body felt weird. The mustard color of your coconut curry, the musty curdle of close quarters. I lied before, but it’s easier this way. How do you make a room unbearable? What is this thing with a thousand names, that I call a dream? I loved the baboon’s eyes and the sounds you seemed to make, like icecream in an amplifier. |
| 2. The tattoo in the thatching below your breast, of iodine and ink; of pin and pencil. I might not know what we are for, but I do know that when my cheeks get red, I would like to give the color to you. I said the things which made me feel less lonely, but were you alone? I couldn’t tell. The trembling crest and the flowing cleft and the spaces and places that I didn’t know, do not know, and all the other parts that make a woman. Georgia O’Keeffe went blind and Frida Kahlo died three deaths and you are alive. Who was I on those tennis courts that I didn’t do more than feel sorry for what I might do? The moonlight was wet and the water was water and I felt alright. I wore that night’s mosquito bites like how some people in Egypt marked their doors with lamb’s blood. I thought you wanted to be eaten. |