Corey Van Landingham
Some days I am living in a country that kisses women
before it kills them. Some days it builds them a home
of cloth bandages and tells them to stand on their heads.
The ones who fall fall out of the wound that is
home, which is the one dank place they can never
get back to. Some days the sun looks so huge
I duck for cover. I buy large, black tarps to drape
over my head. I reflect every stranger's face.
What they want. My forehead shines Sandwich,
shines Free gas for a year. A little violence to remind
how real this all isn't? Some days I am living with
a weather that never liked its own name. It acts out
against my tree house windows. I fall into a rain
barrel which is really just old weather and
isn't too keen on its backwater origins either.
Some days men look at me, and some times
they don't. Other times all the little girls
on the pedestrian bridge are carrying wands like
machetes and are the color of old bathwater.
The ocean is under disguise as acid-washed jeans.
The fish are rusty safety pins holding up the sagging
waist. When they try to touch each other, they open
yet another wound. Infection. Seaweed is a dirty
bandage, thus the house one can't return to.
Pin-pricks, the kiss I never wanted. I am the strange loop
siphoning the saltwater through a crazy straw.
Watering the garden so that nothing will grow back.
Only the tamped-down spoons. The spoons taken to
the persimmon taken to my mouth. Some days
all the old spoons taste faintly of silver.
I tell myself everything in this wish-cloud is mine.
Some days that helps like hair of the dog, myth
to make one more miserable. Some days the women
cut my hair so short it feels like it might bleed.
This is an airspace for all the monologues
worth flying away from. Some days coffee seems
ridiculous and some days it feels like apotheosis.