1.
radio bar was an old mechanic’s shop
before becoming blacklit and hung with
lamps like upsidedown cauldrons, sells
drinks called hibiscus fizz that smell
like a subtle bouquet and wrap around
the tongue easy as a liquid corsage,
and as i look over at the bar sleek
and dark as a stilled jaguar’s back,
i see that radio bar now employs
you-
she stops me before i scratch
my arm off.
2.
the nightmare goes like this:
we walk around a rotting boardwalk, water
gushing through holes and hollows, sunless
and sallow except for the bordering
mountain soursops and the chewing gums
and piassava palms giving their surroundings
a beastly stentorian air; my sister
and me and you, transparent and ghostly,
until i lose you in the buzzing crowd and
end up in a coffee shop, jarring and
civilized after my eerie meandering, and
the girls at a table look over and say,
“you’re disgusting,” and i ask, “what?”
they say, “you’re disgusting,” and the
careful cautious clenching ropes snap.
i grab one girl (so young, too young to
be grabbed by anyone, much less in anger,
much less by me, let her go, let her go,
but i don’t) and lean in nose-to-nose, say,
“do you know what it is to be dehumanized?”
i drag my thumb from her navel to her chest.
“someone cuts you open, destroys your organs,
sews you back up, and laughs at you. you
disgust me.” i wake up, the words pounding
nails into my gums, wanting so badly to
be used to construct something other than
internal shrines to my soundless silent cries.
i doze for another hour, my pulse an
ardent lover eager to keep me up.
3.
there’s more to worry about now than you
and your entitled honey-suckling hands, but
to know you are alive and well in the world
to know you are alive and well in the same
city, as handsome and divisive and monster-masked
as ever, imagining you talking persuading cajoling a girl
into bunching her shirt up under her bra
taking her mouth to you, demonstrating the
lightning and thunder of a storm i have never
experienced
in part
because of—
4.
you can’t know how bad i am with a myriad
of easy tasks: feeding myself, not letting
the abyss take me, inviting a boy closer.
your hold on me means nothing in light of
the choke collar you gave me the tools to
create and encircle myself with, full-body &
constricting the lyrical lungs the dove-dimpled
cheeks the curve-hallowed hips the voice
oh the voice
and its rumpled and fumbling attempts
appearing over the years like pillowcase
creases and fading by the time i brush my teeth.
5.
applying my nails to my forearm furiously
until she wants my hands on the table where
she can see them and i love her and i hate
this—not you, how can you hate a blue-eyed
bloodless man, how can you truly have feelings
for something so intrinsically Other.
the radio bar blurryedged with gingerbread
crumbs and two-faced colors, flickering blues
flinching greens frightful ferocious reds,
the radio bar as an arm sweeping back the
curtain rustling between my luscious humid
world and the kingdom of fey, of bargains
made simply by falling asleep next to one
of gifts given for the purpose of taking
innocence, of stealing the child within the girl
from the girl and leaving her a cold-iron woman
the radio bar imbuing its foundations with
the tired thankless question: why remember
your changelings, your entrapments,
your desire-driven crimes?
6.
simple.
when you touched me, you gave birth to
yourself in my jade-combed eden my summer garden,
manifesting onto leaves like dewdrops, wholly
black as rotten teeth, passing sunrises with
me like you have a right to my bent elephant
ears. we are floral bedfellows, as tangled
together as english ivy. to see you in the
flesh, as if you crawled out of the trapdoor
you installed to enter my head and pulled on slacks
and began slinging booze into clean clear glasses,
to see you double-timed and overlapping, the
past creeping its fingers up the future’s
belly, is like hearing your stuttered cement-heavy
breaths in my hair and there are two of you
too many of you
for me to ignore
the rosettes of foliage
the fear of facelessness
that you and i
have tended to
for so long.
Hannah is a poor college student studying literature in Baton Rouge, LA, who has a beautiful close-knit family and a lot of things to do before it’s time for her to hop onto Charon’s ferry and hightail it down the River Acheron.
Red Berries by Jasmine Diez