When I Said We Should Sleep With Other People

I laid on his chest listening to his heart click. I heard a leaf blower outside, the words of a friend saying, “The world’s ending and leaf blowers are what we’re left with.”

“You’re very quiet,” he said. I looked up at him. I thought puppy eyes, I thought eyes are the sewers of the soul, I thought look away.

“I was waiting for you to say a miracle,” he said.

He collected his things, his gadgets.

He said, “I have a lot of work.”

He went into the kitchen. I curled into a ringlet on the bed. I listened to him microwave his coffee, test it, microwave it again. Outside with reverse vacuums there was whistling, men communicating like birds.

 

May, 2020

We smoked outside and talked about rape fantasies, tenuous sanity, the sex appeal of a cigarette. She looked cool, American Spirits in her breast pocket. She tied up and pulled down her hair, tied it up again, worked quick magic on the shape of her face.

She told me she had fantasies about being a milkmaid. “Farmer’s wife,” I said about myself. She laughed.

I said, “If these were the fifties we’d be depressed homemakers.”

She shook her head. “We’d be plump then underwater.” She pinched my nose and tugged me side to side.

We were sitting at a little wooden table the color of cinderblocks. Last year I found it curbside and lugged it six blocks to my apartment. I broke the bottom bit of a leg I was so beat, full of splinters, hot and angry. Now it’s not safe to leave laptops, tea, full bowls of soup.

It was warm for May. The seasons had turned on one another like nervous dogs. It was muggy, the air like the inside of a mouth. I was whining about what humidity did to my hair.

“Licked,” I kept saying. We were splaying our legs like it was a competition.

No one was ready for another summer in the Central Valley. We made cracks about big industry, men in power – Chevron pumping liquidized dinosaurs, Bolsonaro hacking the Amazon to toothpicks. Someone somewhere was sucking all the rainclouds out of California. Maybe it was plastics. We didn’t know.

I scolded Nina for being an addict. I told her that the Thai printed black lung onto every pack of cigarettes. She told me how smoking was in Europe. “Intimate, social. It’s different in Europe.” Nina’s dad was Norwegian. A silence passed in acknowledgment.

Above us, crane flies fucked abdomen to abdomen in the twitchy hall lights. Mosquitoes ate our shins and left love bites. In the interior of the complex a woman kept yelling “Be a bitch! Be a bitch!”

I ashed into my Christmas cactus. “What’s the horse you’ve got over there?”

“I’m gonna need you to be more specific.”

“In Norway. Freud ponies?”

“Oh,” she coughed. “Oh, I wish.”