Friday, January 14, 2011
Laur @ 5:47 PM
Gate 86
At the airport a little girl tries to play with my stuffed walrus. Her daddy says “That’s not yours.” I’m sipping my chai latte, pretending not to notice. I’m full of observations and breakfast tacos. I need to lose weight. If we didn’t have gravity it wouldn’t matter. This is not a test. The security guards block the walkway. This is not a test. I’m sitting in the Denver airport. No, he’s already in Minneapolis; we had at least two bottles of wine with dinner. That explains it. When I close my eyes I can almost will myself out of existence. It’s the caffeine. It’s the inability to accurately represent reality with language. I must be getting old. I need to lose weight. This is not a test. Let’s make out in the snow so I can get numb and stop touching things.
Laur @ 5:47 PM
in the waiting line
Is there a vocabulary for this? I would recognize this room anywhere. Let’s sit at the bar. You want to watch me spin in circles, dizzy from performance; I just want to find a pair of boots to wear with these socks. We have priorities but they don’t match. One of these things is not like the other. He knew that I would do drugs in college. Now I just do whiskey and breakfast tacos but it doesn’t matter because he still looked at me like that when he noticed my tattoo. I need to go to confession. I wear this Catholic guilt like most women my age wear UGGs in the Midwest winter. It’s not fashionable. It’s fashionable. I wanted to tell the Pope about the time I cheated on my boyfriend in Dublin but it was cheaper to fly to Barcelona so I ate chorizo and patatas bravas instead. You don’t wear scarves. Nobody’s perfect. No, no more coffee, thank you.
Laur @ 5:44 PM
Performance Theory
This is not the story of a happy girl. She believed
in Shakespeare and the London Underground,
but in Arkansas
nobody believes in anything—not
even the tornado sirens
that go off two
to six times a year; in Arkansas
the boys pretend to be Christian but they will ask you
to be in threesomes anyway
(you appreciated the kiss from the Swede at that club on Tottenham Court Road because you knew that’s what life was supposed to be like, really, with the drink specials and the flashing lights on the dance floor; you wore that tight black dress for a reason; in London everybody wants something)
She never plays the piano in public. Her wrists stay stuffed
in her pockets, pale and unpracticed, but
sometimes he will yank them out in a frenzy of limbs when they
rendevous
once or twice a month in hotel rooms; in Arkansas
nobody asks questions
because we are all cheating on somebody: our
husbands, bosses, our husbands’ bosses and
tax returns, but
she wears a Claddagh ring on her right hand just to let you know
her heart is engaged by someone somewhere
(in London everybody wants something; you wanted to laugh on your way down the stairs to the ladies’ lavabo, but the pub was too stuffy like a Tube station in November with everyone else’s romance; on Thanksgiving you wore a turtleneck dress and thought you might choke to death on a mixture of pumpkin pie and hypocrisy because in London you were all so damn thankful to be together as you hugged the stone lions in Trafalgar Square and prayed to be apart)
This is not a complete thought; she does not wear a complete
outfit; in Arkansas it is not normal to
wear so much plaid but
it’s okay, she whispers,
he’ll tear it off so soon anyway
(you hugged the stone lions in Trafalgar Square and prayed to be apart, but no one can tell in the pictures; in London only the tourists take the Tube from Leicester Square and so you walked home in the cold without anyone to hold your hand or stroke your hair ambiguously which was fine and you weren’t jealous of the ghosts writhing beneath starch white sheets because you could just go see Hamlet for the third and fourth time; if you could go back in time)
you would only go forward to the next performance
Laur @ 5:43 PM
Disconnect
He said that love is seeing the world through another;
I just want to kiss you between bookshelves
in a library. When
I think of London it is in terms of Tube stations and
sometimes when I read Jean Rhys
lavabos.
In class I take a bathroom break.
I wash my hands and look out the window: the
leaves are changing—have
changed—and tremble
in the wind like my own nervous fingertips
as I reach for a
paper towel.
In London I remember trembling, too,
ankles swaying on the staircase in slow motion,
en route to the lavabo in the basement of
the pub; my reflection
belied my calm—
just one more pint of Strongbow, please
--now I lean back in my chair to watch you
watch me eyes deep behind
high cheekbones like Ernest Hemingway on the lookout
for his next wife but I
am only picturing you naked.
Is this the eternal disconnect
between representation and reality?
The inability to know
the mind of the other? Your philosophy
is permanently etched on your left forearm,
but if I ran from Russell Square into the Underground
would I be any less the
object of your gaze?
Would you chase me?
Laur @ 5:42 PM
Drunk Thought: Sestina
It occurs to me: I am going to have to move
out of the way; the problem is the heavy influence
of the yellowing leaves that fall aimlessly—I thought
I could be more like them and possibly kiss
your cheeks, your nose, your earlobes but that’s a level
we haven’t reached yet, I’ll just
have to settle for a smile and a nod. Only just
now I am in the middle of the road—move!—
that’s better. Keep walking. I’ve got to level
with myself, under the influence
of scotch (what else?) my boots kiss
the pavement with heavy footfalls, more tight than I thought
(“tight” in the Hemingway sense—you always thought
people should use it that way more often) and if I could just
make it back to my apartment I think I might kiss
the carpet like a Greek soldier returning from Troy; if I move
it will be somewhere with more windows where the light might influence
my moods, so that at my desk I may reach a certain level
of calm, but you like my apartment here on the third level
because I think you like to descend the stairs. But the thought
right now of climbing them is a little much, regardless of your influence,
and I stop at a street sign to let a car pass. It’s unjust,
you tell me, that this city isn’t more pedestrian-friendly. The cars move
more quickly and with better climate-control—what’s their hurry? Kiss
me, I would demand, and you would. Only this is a hypothetical kiss
because these days we are on a different level,
one where we ask permissions and take turns deciding—your move,
my move—and it is a little like a giddy chess game. I thought
that my 20s were going to be different, like a sitcom, but TV just
doesn’t emulate reality, even if I feel like it sometimes will influence
it. You say you have a “filmic mind” and under its influence
you vividly rehearse the pontentialities of life, but this kiss—
the hypothetical one—might be just
outside the realm of the potential, on some other level
we haven’t unlocked yet. But isn’t it the thought
that creates potential? Good. Then, your move.
If I could just walk home, regardless of outside influence,
I could make the move to invite you over, to set up the kiss;
I will put us on that level. Pretty coherent for a drunk thought.
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