White girl in headband eats rattlesnake, confesses fear in closed caption, coconut mise en scène.
Dorky voice, ribs and muffin tops. A smoker’s body.
White girl, white girl, don’t lie to me
Tell me where did you sleep last night?
In the pines, in the pines, in exotic climes
I sit home and think of you
And so, all over, my girls become girls.
We are married now we have our own rules and our own arguments. What is the proper orientation of a roll of toilet paper? We are watching a man and his son squeeze out their socks for drinking water. Why do they wear socks on the island in the tv. The cat is on my chest, the first paw forward, claws at full flexion. The cat is thinking:
I am the body and I lay on the thing with the ball bouncing inside that I cannot see.
I am the body and I lick the large nude paw. I am I am the body.
On other channels, there are news stories about women and men who’ve become stuck in armchairs in front of their tvs. Firemen cut open the walls and pull them out like paw-paw seeds.
Then they found a beautiful white baby in the blue, blue ocean.
I used to stand in front of the mirror and slice off the parts I didn’t like. My hips in a certain half shadow are shaved down to slips of themselves. Now, every night, husband helps me, offering a hand to bite when the slicing hurts, taking the excess hip tenderly in a slip of waxed paper, putting it away in the downstairs freezer.
Husband hand runs over my face like Big Spider and underneath I smile.
My father once buried himself alive. He found a nice plot right under a little baby maple tree at the base of a hill. The hill was his mother, just the person for watching over such a tricky operation. The first part went smoothly enough, as my father was young and strong and a very capable hole digger, but once he was in the hole, he couldn’t reach the pile of dirt on the ground outside. He turned to his mother and she hauled herself out of the armchair and caused a small earthquake. The hole fell right in on my father’s head, which cracked open a bit.
And I flew out, fully formed.
Husband finally let me out. My ass shaped like chair now. Went to a sandwich shop, looked at the freedomofchoicemenu. The man said why are you pointing at that and I said because it’s a silly word I’m embarrassed to say it. He laughed at me and pointed to his own nose,
“I’ll make this easy for you. Lettuce? Tomatoes? Mayo?”
“Didn’t think so.”
Leaned up against the driver’s door side of a car, both hands on the warm metal frame, one hand lifting from time to time to form a fist with thumb pointing backward toward Oak St. or forefinger pointed forward to Church Ave. or both at once in a gun shape that swings forward and back over the shoulder. A hand held out casually and offered to the driver, who in turn takes one of his hands off the steering wheel to grasp it (the hand, not the steering wheel). The two hands meet, a fluid crash and loose grasp slowly tightening, splashing first up a bit with the impact and then falling down and solidifying with the second rise. As now the window-leaner’s knees bend to take back his body’s weight and the other hand, no longer supporting, moves from sunwarm metal to meet the two clasped hands; the driver’s hand is now the meat of this praying-hands sandwich, which contracts warmly and shakes up and down as the leaner cries out:
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