I once lived in a three-story mansion on 17th street
by Kaitlyn Airy
but the scuffed mahogany banisters were all that remained
of its former glory. It was sectioned off, sheet-rocked and spackled
for twenty-five low-income tenants. My portion was in the basement:
musty, faintly humid, with moss green carpet and a ceiling of snaking
pipes that hissed and gurgled like the bowels of some strange
and awful beast. On one side: dinnerplate dahlias with their bright orange
manes, though I had no window from which to see them. On another:
a veteran huddled in his room on a metal folding chair,
gazing from his perch with red-rimmed, cornflower eyes
at a single, foil-wrapped poinsettia long past its prime.
Across the hall: Carlos, with his long, stringy hair,
leather duster. He offered me wine
sprinkled with unseen dust that made me thick
and woozy. I stumbled to my room, latched the door
before retching a puddle of alphabet soup on carpet.
No amount of chemicals could lift that stain. Those days I wore
a shell pink negligee with lace like cobwebs, and my one good
coat: gray suede with a mink collar, cigarette singe on the sleeve
like a little black kiss. My hair was waist-length, the color of mud,
a red-tinged, braided mess pinned back with rhinestone butterflies.
I didn’t do drugs. Boys were my poison. I lived
for male attention, starved for it, let them feed me lucky strikes and beer
frothing from green cans iridescent as bottleflies, let them visit my stoop
nightly, kickflip down my alley each morning. I was dumb. I was beautiful,
but I didn’t know it. I was dripping with my grandmother’s jewels:
strings of black pearls, rubies cut from glass, gleaming huge
and deadly from my knuckles. Get fresh with me and I’d knock
your teeth out. Amethyst wrapped around my throat
like grape jolly ranchers. I lost my grandmother’s jewels one
by one. The first I lost smoking in bed with a shakespearean actor,
Mercutio, who pulled red kerchiefs from his stomach night after night
in Ravenna park. My wannabee Romeo, who made little cranes
from old roadmaps to leave in my shoes come dawn. The rubies
I lost in a poker game. Jesse, the cheat, with craters
in his cheeks and a scraggly dishwater beard. Wouldn’t
leave me well enough alone, two gins in and he squeezed
my thigh beneath the table, said he’d give them back
for a kiss, but for all my amorous ways
I couldn’t bear it. The black pearls–those I wrung like a rosary,
thumbing the sheen until the plastic shone through like bone.
I wanted to be good. I did, believe me. Sometimes at night
when Carlos fucked the runaways, the ones who arrived too late
at the youth shelter and had lost the raffle, I would knock on the door
of the Taiwanese exchange student upstairs
and we’d hold each other. No common language but I understood
the fervor of her religion. Come Sunday we’d attend church
and I’d line my pockets with coffee cake, dollar store shortbread,
fill up on instant coffee, let the sugar melt in my mouth.
God is everywhere, said the youth pastor with his good teeth,
and I believed it. Everywhere. Walking down the ave
past ramen stands, smoke shops, and the fetish emporium
with its blacked-out windows shielding the world
from its cockrings and pleather whips; past the peroxide blonde
going down on some guy slinging dope in a bus shelter, past
the university where in some other life I had once scribbled
mathematical proofs across green graphing paper. I’d lost sight of God
in the frenzy of grocery store kleptomania, pocketing peaches
and french wine, in the brevity
of my huge, unyielding want. Eventually, I lost myself
in the notion of absolution. I wrote bad poetry,
burned prayer candles, soaked old wine bottles in vinegar swill
and scraped the adhesive with my long fingernails. I stuffed them
full of pilfered roses from the yards of the rich down the road
while my lover slept the mean-drunk from his beautiful body;
an offering. I wanted to be good, believe me.
I was desperate. I was sincere
in my desperation,
a fool who licked her plate clean.