Breadcrumb #84

ANNA PICAGLI

What is gone? 

Everything but a small room full of clothes I have worn threadbare, a scattering of paper on which I cannot write, and a pair of tweezers, dull from obsession.

When was the last time you were happy at all?

When your head was in my lap and my hands were in your hair and I had no idea that I’d never touch you again. Before the whole world shrank into a padded room of impossible. Before everything I loved turned to dust and blew so far away it was forever out of my reach. Before the proud compass of my heart forgot how to do anything but spin wildly. Before the only “route” laid before me was the one in “routine.” When words used to form at the base of my dry throat and drag themselves upwards, wild and wet and useful. When awake was better than dreaming so I didn’t need to sleep. There was a sharpness to my mind I cannot get back, a razor-edged memory that has softened to pulp. A miracle now is finding the house keys, dressing for the weather, keeping a meal down. There is an endless war between me and bile in my stomach, the oil in my skin, my too-tight joints. 

What is the lullaby that soothes you to sleep?

That dense, soaked sand at the edge of the ocean. I loved a boy once with hair that exact color. He was made of a terrible magic: caught all my shots in the dark like bullets in the teeth and then vanished. I evening-dream of long, white skirts blowing against my ankles. I dream of walking into the drowning room until there is nothing but depth.

• • •

Breadcrumb #83

RUSS COPE

I heard screaming sounds
and wondered when I order
absinthe what they substitute
the green fairy with

I wondered what poison burns
through my system
in this late night, the floor
crawling up to meet my trousers

I stumbled away from her,
from myself, from the person
I used to think I was, stumbled,
muttered fuck three times

I wanted to order another drink
and wondered again what they
use instead of absinthe
wondered how small changes

affect the taste of life.

• • •

Breadcrumb #82

JOANNA C. VALENTE

This is America:
I have a hundred dreams of you
Crashing your car

Into stop signs, off the Verrazano—
Each time your car falls out
Of your control

It always takes longer
Than it should—the longing
Comes too late.

Sometimes I wait all night
For that low, deep growl
In my ears,

That animal understanding
As if I knew it was there
All along—what some call

A woman’s intuition—that
Intention to murder someone
Else’s god

Just for fun—when the R
Finally arrives, I shut my
Mouth & take off

My clothes, forgetting what
We were fighting about
& wave the white flag

of my skin, praying someone
else’s god will bestow
mercy.

• • •

Breadcrumb #81

STELLA PADNOS-SHEA

In the ground, in the bed, in the streets.
Where I was is a location without location, a gem lost deeply in miles of soil,
the brilliant cuts without hope or safety.
I saw you, I saw where you entered the room, I saw you come into my body
in unspecified places. Parts of our bodies were joined, merged, 
the parts I instruct the daughter to cover— 
this isn’t for everybody, I say— 
and your eyes closed, your mouth shut, 
any small exit for the psyche was cement.

Where were you when you were in me.

He doesn’t ask me where I was, the lies and truth
are simmering somewhere we don’t see, or don’t touch, don’t kiss, 
no moan, no moon in our black sky.
A look may convey confusion, misunderstanding, 
we have lost agreed-upon meanings.
I like to watch the looks between couples, between pairs, 
between self-proclaimed better halves, 
and pretend I can read them, imagine myself
an evaporating tear carrying mascara, 
like I have meaning everyone could see.

Matthew told me when the frying pan hit his leg, 
flung cast iron across the living room floor
and the accusations trailing like strobe lights,
he knew it was over. She had shaped her own answers, 
the truth was useless, there was no use for truth, there was no use for the body
any longer. 
For all my flailing, I could not see the cruel thing that stood before me...

• • •

Breadcrumb #80

JESSICA SCHNEIDER

I try kissing you, as I normally do when I want you to remember I exist. You turn your head with a smile and place your hand on my thigh. Without words you say “not now,” which is a phrase, a concept, a feeling I have grown used to in loving you.

     But I am persistent.

     Feel my warmth. Feel my love. Remember me. Remember that I love you.

     I touch your face. Maybe you have a beard; maybe you’ve shaved it. I tend to remember you with a beard, because I love the way there’s a certain pain every time we kiss, a physical pain that mimics what happens inside me. A discomfort I am addicted to, like flossing until I see blood.

     My thumb traces the scar that runs through your right eyebrow.

     “Tell me the story again.”

     “It’s not much of a story.” You let out a sound somewhere between a scoff and a laugh. Without words, you say “not now.”

     “Oh, come on! It makes me smile.” I am persistent.

     “I was like 4 or 5. It was before my mom left and Mike stole one of my Nintendo controllers when I beat him at Street Fighter,” you begin with a smile, not a smile for me, but a smile for a simpler time, a happier time. “I always tripped over my own feet. I guess I hadn’t grown into them yet. Anyway, he was running off with the controller and I grabbed the wire that was dangling behind him. I wasn’t looking and I ran right into the doorframe. Blood was everywhere. And right as I fell on my ass, Mike shouted 'HADOUKEN!' like Ryu from Street Fighter. It was really funny and I wanted to laugh, but I couldn’t stop crying.”

     I smile, like I do every time you humor me. I like imagining you as a child. Your scrawny legs and tiny ankles that make your basketball shoes look so big. Your curly hair that grows upward, like the tall sculpted bushes that grow and shrink outside the gated communities neither of us grew up in. You — alone — the youngest of the children who your mother abandoned. You — the only product of your mother and father’s marriage — two people who never learned to love. Not one another, and not you.

     There you are, stepping off the school bus with your tall hair and your big shoes, at age 6, a latchkey kid. You are trying to make sense of why half of the stuff that once filled the empty space of your father’s home is now gone. You tell your neighbor you thought you had been robbed. She hugs you until you put the pieces together and realize your mother has left you. Left the brothers and sisters you grew to call family — the sons and daughters of a man who is not your father, a man you never met, but might as well love you the same as your own. Both men are absent in your life; it’s just that one manages to do so while sitting at the same dinner table. There you are — alone. How I fear you feel when you sit at the same dinner table with me. Afraid you’ll come home to one less toothbrush in your bathroom, to missing framed photos, to a half-empty top drawer where I keep my most comfortable T-shirts that always end up smelling like a strange combination of the two of us.

“Both men are absent in your life; it’s just that one manages to do so while sitting at the same dinner table.”

     “Why do like that story so much?” you say, shaking your head, in confusion or annoyance, I can never tell with you.

     “I like to imagine I was there,” I say, tracing the scar again. “Then maybe…”

     I think about how I could have helped you. I could have stopped the bleeding or held your hand while you cried. I could have ran and gotten your mother, and convinced her to care, to stay. To not just follow the steps a parent knows to follow when a child is hurt, but to really care — to stitch above your teddy bear’s eye so he had a scar just like you — you know, to really, really care. I could have stood by your side as you scanned the half-empty rooms of your father’s home, wondering where your mother’s hairbrush, throw pillows, and floral loveseat had gone. And I would have been the one to hold you until you realized she, too, was gone.

     “It’s OK.” You smile at me, knowing that I live in a constant state of guilt for never loving you enough to make up for the years you never knew love.

     I run my fingers through your hair, as I often do when I want you to remember that I’m still here. That my toothbrush, my most comfortable shirts, and my dark brown hair that clogs your shower drain are all still here.

     I pull my body close to yours, but you’ll only let me get so close.

     Feel my warmth. Feel my love. Remember me. Remember that I love you.

     You are sure to leave space between our bodies. Without words you say “not now."

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