Homesick

The house sits old and grey beneath the infinite white sky, stretching for years and doubling back into oblivion. There is no sun—the only color comes from the bright red rust on an old Chevy pickup, popping like welts in the 2-D landscape. Ava’s breath comes fast and white, vapor exploding in front of her and dissipating against the distant white cliffs. Her boots on the gravel crack in her ears, heels digging in with gunshots, while all around the earth lets off not even a sigh.

Home, she thinks, but her smile is a snarl. She remembers it like this, silent and white, grey and endless. Even the white door is the same, thought it’s less white and more grey and more chips of paint dust the front step. Her knock is the same sonic thrust as her boots in the gravel, and it’s enough in the utter silence to send her heart up into her throat.



Six years old, clutching a hand, a big hand, she can’t see whose anymore because everything above her own head has faded into black. She is crying, screaming, in short bursts. Her foot is on fire, it flares and subsides but still she can feel the flesh sizzle, searing in the lightless flame. Overhead, knuckles on peeling white wood rip through the focus of the pain, and her crying quiets but she can’t tell if the gasps are for her lungs or her limb.

“Elena, Elena, open the door!”

The voice, man or woman, is lost with the face, with everything but pain and a hand, but the words are there, written over the memory like a comic book caption: “Elena, Elena, abre la puerta!”

A flood of light comes as the door swoops open, but Ava still can’t remember faces, so high overhead, but she remembers warmth and shrieks.

“Ay, dios! There’s blood everywhere, what happened? I’ll call his mother. No. Call his mother. Gordo, gordito, come to the bathroom, don’t cry! Pobresito, what did you do?”

And then she remembers the bathtub, hot hot water, clothes still on, the blood and the pus, the bubbling burning flesh as the hydrogen peroxide cauterized her mistake. The crying was quiet, but still Elena, with her big soft white arms and cobwebbed dyed hair, mumbled, “Shhh, shhh, pobresito, your mother will be home soon. How many times has she told you not to go near the ants?”

She doesn’t remember her mother coming home.


The man at the door isn’t old, but he’s already grey, and for a split moment Ava wonders if it were the cliffs that turned him grey. His smile is congenial, amiable but bland, entirely civil and entirely societal. She smiles back, her practiced, perfected one, full and warm and bright and entirely false.

“Hi, I know this is very strange, but I’m Ava Foglia… my family lived here before you, I grew up here.”

He smiles, and she smiles, and she says something that means nothing, explains something without an explanation, but he lets her in anyway, and under the kitchen halogens she wishes for a moment that she were a murderer, a robber, anything. For a moment, she wants to violate something in this house. She wants the walls, calm, she’s sure, for so many years, to remember the sound of crying. She smiles, though, like she was born for it, and the grey man looks uncomfortable but he smiles too and lets her stand under the kitchen halogens, white and blank like this smile, like the cliffs.


The dead roach, a dark spot in the opaque fiberglass fluorescent shield. There for months probably, before she noticed it, and months after she did. Under blank white halogens, she stands, and the dark spot is gone, removed by the man her mother introduced a few times, one introduction between others, but always recurring, a big man, big hands, who fixed sinks that gurgled and cleaned dead roaches from the lights.

The roach is gone and she moves, six years old, out sliding French doors into breaking morning light, the warm grey quiet of dawn. On the wall, she sees as she breathes the warmth, are three roaches, big big and big, precisely aligned, perfectly huge, hideous, horrifying, perfectly black against the white wall.


As she wanders through the house the man keeps close behind her, chatting, asking, smiling, anything to keep back reality, and she plays the game, smiles back, drops little differences now and then in rooms and about placement and pretends not to notice his falter as she runs her fingertips along hallways’ white walls. Then, a familiar doorframe underneath, ridged, not smooth, the divider breaking endless white and giving birth to blossoming blue, soft like her old blanket, some cheap cotton thing meant by the color to advertise “boy”, then thrown out when the color was thrown up on these four walls.


Tall man, big hands, big face, big big big. He stands, eyes on the ceiling, walls, her, and everywhere the smell of paint soaking into her clothes and nose and making her dizzy. He says, “Better,” in his big voice, and his eyes are still on her, hard.

“Now you’ll remember not to get dirty handprints on the walls, won’t you?”

She nods, because his eyes are so hard, and she silently begs her mother to come home.


The grey man is quiet, finally, and she knows it’s time to get out. She’s almost done, anyway, laughed at all the little trivial changes, and back in the kitchen she shakes his hand under the burning halogen. He looks surprised suddenly, a flash in his grey eyes, so she just smiles and grabs her hand back and looks around at the silent white walls and smiles and smiles under the halogen lights she’s staring at that dark spot in the fiberglass, just staring like it’s the only thing that’s real, the dead roach, trapped in the heat of the burning gas, as a big hand tightens over her mouth.

She’s crying, but it’s silent, like everything else, everything but big groans, and the fire rips up from between her legs through her belly and chest to her head, making her dizzy while her flesh boils and bubbles under big hands.

When she sits, alone, in the center of four white walls, her whole body’s on fire. She’s watching it blister and burn, melting out between her legs, seeping slowly, and she wants, tries, to catch it and put it all back inside. The walls watch, and when she can’t feel the burning anywhere except everywhere, she watches herself melt from the inside out and it’s the only color in the room, bright like the rust on the old Chevy truck big hands drive. She burns the white of the walls with herself, and her hands are covered in color, her hands and legs and feet are so bright, she slaps her palms across the unforgiving whiteness again and again until the fire consumes her.



When dawn breaks, slow and grey, the only color comes from long strips of rust on an old Chevy pickup, the grey man notices it parked in front of his home, it’s been there all night he tells the police on the phone, and when the police ring doorbells on the block no one knows whose it is, but finally an old Spanish woman in the last house goes white. She follows the police, silent, and it’s been years but yes, she says, that’s Adam, though the driver’s license says Ava, and color spills from wounds on his wrists and between his legs, a brash rusted red against the worn grey of the seats.

Oh My God, Whatever, Etc.

Leo met Lisa in a bar. It was the beginning of a long cliche: he sent her a drink and she looked suspicious, but he made no other move, just smiled and raised his glass to her from across the room, and kept his off her legs, Jesus her legs, and eventually she came over to say thanks. They didn’t go home together that night, but he called her the next day like he said he would and two weeks later was having to pull her hair out of his shower drain. After four, he was finding her clothes in his laundry, and at two months they were both calling his apartment “home”, on the phone or in the morning when they were both half-asleep and it just slipped out.

But it had been six more months since then, and Lisa was still getting up early to catch a nine-o-clock train and Leo was still staying out late to meet this kid for drinks to talk about some stuff, or going to a show to check out this band for that company. And eventually, on Saturdays when their schedules finally coincided, or at least overlapped, they had bags under their eyes when they looked at each other.

But Leo was okay with bags, okay with the amount of hair he’d pulled out of drains in the past eight months, because Lisa was still mostly really cute when she would storm in the living room after he got home early in some morning, rumpled with sleep, and snatch the cigarette out of his hand and tell him for the thousandth time not to smoke in the fucking apartment.

And so, sitting outside in a patio cafe, he’s taken aback, at the least, when she reaches across the flowering iron table to slip a cigarette from his pack. Parliaments, just because he thinks the recessed filter is hella sweet.

“When did you start smoking?” he asks and holds out his lighter.

She pauses to light it, and when she speaks the words tumble out shrouded in smoke.

“About a month ago.” Leo scratches his jaw and furrows his brow, and turns his gaze down to scan over the menu intently, even though he comes here at least twice a week on his lunch break, and always orders falafel.

“Leo,” she sighs, around her third cigarette and over her empty glass of Chardonnay. “Is this really how you want to be living?” “What?” he asks, and moves his fork to the side of his plate, next to his knife.

“With me, I mean. Us. Never seeing each other, arguing when we do... You know.” She waves her hand in a quick flip, sending smoke spiraling through the air between them, and for a split second he can’t see her for the silver-grey threads.

“Yes,” he says. “It is.” She sighs and crosses her legs, then uncrosses them again and leans back to let the waiter clear her plate.

“Well, I don’t,” she answers at the waiter’s back.

“So... what’s the alternative?”

She leans forward and touches his arm, rests her hand on his wrist. He doesn’t move, doesn’t even twitch, because he knows exactly what her alternative is and he feels like he’s sixteen again, when he accidentally fell on his favorite Fugazi album and it snapped in half right down the middle.

“We’re not getting any younger,” he can hear her saying when he’s back in his late twenty-somethings. “I want to go out and find someone I can actually spend the rest of my life with, and I think you should do the same.”

He’s known Lisa long enough to know that look, that whatever he could say or wants to say isn’t going to change anything, so he says nothing. He also knows that look she gets when she leans back again, folding her long hands on the table top-- that whatever she’s about to say next is going to kill him.

“Besides,” she continues, with flippancy through a forced smile, “our names are way too similar. It’s like Samantha and Samuel or something.”

Leo remains in his chair for a long time after she leaves. Most of the time, when these things happen, Leo feels like he’s the only stationary point in the universe. Not paralyzed-- he can move, he just isn’t, while days and lunches and girls go flying past him. He thinks, as he watches a young couple, maybe eighteen, take seats at the table next to his, that Beckett wrote something about that. About not moving while everything else spins in periphery. He hasn’t read Beckett since college, but he’s pretty sure that’s what the gist is. He should go back and find that passage again.

When he goes inside, finally, squinting into the dimmed lights after the blinding brilliance of outside, he steps up to the bar and orders a glass of something very dry to counter the wetness on his face. The bartender doesn’t notice, or doesn’t say anything if she does, and he’s relieved and thankful and really, really wishes she just would.

It’s their anniversary, or it was an hour ago, and that makes him sick and makes him want to laugh, because it’s so cliche, everything is so cliche, and because this happens to everybody all the time, probably on anniversaries, like in the fucking movies, and nobody is unique and his problems, this “problem”, women problems, is meaningless and it means everything to him. It was their anniversary, and now it’s not, and that thought also makes him feel like he hasn’t lost a single day, outside of eight months. He’s exactly where he started eight months ago, and that makes him feel a little better and a lot more lonely.

He tosses down a bill to pay for the drink, but when the bartender comes over she slides it back to him and smiles faintly like she knows. And she probably does know. She’s probably seen a million Leos trying to dry their wet faces with drinks.

“It’s on me,” she says. She looks young, and her voice is soft, and even if she has seen a million Leos, this one in front of her now is glad she hasn’t been jaded by them. But, he figures, she probably has her own problems, with Justins or Ryans or Marks. So he smiles back gratefully and orders two more with the bill, and hands her one when she sets down both.

“To women,” he says, raising his glass when she takes hers, “and how I’m done with them for good.”

“Then,” she counters, with an easy flippancy Lisa had worked so hard to produce, so recently, “to your right hand. And arthritis.”

He laughs before he even remembers what laughing is, and his teeth hit the crystal of his class, and she squeezes his wrist where Lisa had last placed her own hand, before she moves back down the bar, and he knows he’ll never be done with women, not even close.

Madness

I didn't mean to break the bowl
really.
Just throw it.
Knock it around a little.
Maybe knock your skull in
a little.

But you have to understand
six days is six months.
and six months(hours,days)
is a long time
to be waiting for a long
phone bill.

alright,
maybe I meant to break the bowl
a little.
not to knock your skull in.
I mean, christ,
I like your head in my lap
too much.

if I meant to break it,
it was just to break
my soul out.
to get the madness out
get it out like you do
when you fire up your
whateverhorsepower engines
and roar out of town
out of my life
out of your life,
towards a life,
maybe her life,
or some dead life,
with the Boss
blowing out your speakers.

I can match your madness.
kerouac's madness,
bukowski's insatiable
madness.

My hands are too small
to break your heart
but I can break bowls
from here till Tuesday.

Brooklyn

i moved to New York on the day i turned
18
(a coincidence, but
it sounds romantic)
got the hell out
up to New York City

bad six months
then
first apartment
bad sublet
bad roommate
but at least the mice were cute.

i spent the summer walking
up and down bedford ave
and each person i saw
was more
beautiful
than the last.
20-somethings
girls thinner than i
not smarter, but taller
thinner
and men-children
growing facial hair just because they could
finally
because it made them look older
because it was trendy
because it made them
rugged, artistic, disheveled whatever
because because because

i fell for each one
and none of them would
ever
be mine.
all i had was $8 for cigarettes
and a
bad roommate
with her own revolving men.

then,
i had one--
a revolving man
revolving into my bed
and out my door again
into hers
(if it's yours, don't
tell me)

i spent a summer with
windows wide open
to chase out the heat
but really just
letting in dirt
but we did have cute mice
that made nests in my shoes
and a nice long walk down bedford ave
and bars
and hours and hours and
hours to pass reading
unfamous authors
knut hamson and bukowski
so much goddamned bukowski
while my man revolved
and long slow records repeat themselves
on a broken record player.

but the mice were cute.