At night, I wake up, and Daddy’s in the bathroom with a hanger in his mouth. Momma stands beside him, puts a hand on his cheek, his head, prays for healing, but he bats her hand away, tells her she’s hurting him more. I watch Daddy pull, eyes closed, spit, pull again. Blood on him, the sink, the floor.

He spins around, pushes past her to the kitchen, pulls out the knife drawer, picks the long skinny knife we use for cutting meat, and saws two teeth loose. Closing his eyes, he hunches over the sink, holds one tooth in his hand, the broken half of another, rolls them across his palm, then feels in his mouth for what is left.

Momma cleans up the mess, and I give Daddy paper towels, ice as he sits down, spits blood in a pot.

“Sometimes, we have to be our own doctors,” says Daddy, his voice garbled by soggy red towels. His breath smells like wet pennies.

I think of when Daddy had an accident in the garage in the house we lived in before we came here, a saw missing the mark, cutting his thumb through. The skin and muscles were gone, but the bone was still there, I knew, because he showed me before he poured alcohol over it, bound it tight with ripped sheets Momma cut from the linen closet. I think of when he cut his head open, a wrench snapping loose when he fixed a pipe under the house, a towel held to his head until the bleeding slowed. When the blood still seeped through band-aids, a piece of duct tape held his skin together, leaving only a jagged scar when he pulled it off. He had said the same thing then.

I watch Momma as she washes Daddy’s teeth and sets them on the counter. I pick them up. They’re chipped, black grooves on the side, but the teeth are large, flat, much bigger than mine. Momma’s whispering under her breath, closing her eyes when she dries her hands. She’s praying, her lips forming the same words over and over again.

She goes to Daddy, empties his pot in the sink, brings it back, and they lay together on the floor, him up on one elbow, leaned over. She mirrors him, except with a hand she brings to his head then down his arm where his burn scar is, then repeats the same motion until Daddy is still. She doesn’t say anything as she does this, but moves her hand gently, so that it barely touches him, but does, and he doesn’t push her away.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_14/Bolin.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″]

Early autumn, I go on the narrow path that extends from my backyard between two apartment houses to the fence surrounding the vacant lot.  The dandelions haven’t died yet, but more of their yellow heads have grown gray and fleecy, so the path is grimmer than in the summer, and the apartment houses cast heavy shadows.

From the path, I can hear the thudding voices of the older boys in the vacant lot.  My spine tightens and I clutch the hem of my t-shirt. Their sounds crowd the air between apartments so I have to tuck my chin to my chest.  I imagine myself shrinking, fading pale as the day.  I know I can make myself a silent animal, but I can’t disappear.

I step from the dark path and no one sees me at first. The boy with the black cap and the boy with buckteeth are playing catch with a water bottle filled with brown liquid.  The short boy with freckles, the boy with the purple coat, and the boy who lives next door to me are dragging a rusted yield sign by its post to one corner of the lot.  I take a right turn at the chain link, hoping to avoid the boys’ attention as I walk the lot’s perimeter.

I hear it and I go rigid but I’m not surprised.  “It’s the tadpole!” the boy with the purple coat yells.  I can tell it’s him without looking.  I’m breathing quickly but I walk at the same pace and keep my head straight, peering as far as I can toward the horizon.  “Hey that tadpole!” the boy with the purple coat yells.

“Tadpole, come here!”  As I turn the lot’s first corner I can’t help but glance inside.  The boys are bunched together near the middle of the lot.  They see me look at them and they rush at the fence where I am walking.  “Your face is a sinkhole!” calls one of the boys.  “You are French, French, French,” says another.  They’re following me, swarming the edge of the lot and I speed up, nearly tripping at a corner.  “Eat me, tadpole,” the boy with the purple coat says.  “I’m tired.”  He’s in front of the other boys and his fingers clasp the fence.

Then I’m running and the chill air is sharp in my chest.  The boys are frenzied, yelling and running along with me.  The boy with the purple coat is shoving his body against the fence, like he’s trying to thrust himself through the chain link.

I go so fast I feel my heart ripping from me.   Finally I make it to the other side and jump the row of bushes behind the lot and lie on the ground for a minute.  All my insides are throbbing.  I still hear the boys hollering and thrashing against the chains.  I breathe in and draw myself together-the thought of my destination quiets me.  Right ahead of me, the gap in the privacy fence where two wooden slats are missing.  I step through the slats into the backyard of the abandoned house.  Its decrepitude is comforting: the paint peeling from the frames of the French doors, spider webs and dust thick as wool at the windows, the grass and its pelt of damp leaves, the paneling streaked with spray paint, the emptied pool gathering rain and twigs.

I step carefully down the swimming pool’s sloping side.  I sit on its floor, leaning against one of the walls and draw my knees to my chest.  In my mind I hold the image of the boy with the purple coat grinding himself against the fence. The acid blue of the swimming pool drenches everything but I still see his tongue held out, his face contorted with effort.  I want to drain myself, but I know even the abandoned house is gathering dust and birds’ nests, even this pool isn’t empty.  I lower myself and lie on the swimming pool’s floor, curling inward like a fist, like a fetus.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_14/Bestwick.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

Grandpa had a chin cut from solar flare,
his arms felled comet tail,
his mouth full of Hubble lens teeth.
Nothing broke him, not the bricklaying
or bread crumbs, not a love wanting to see the size
of its shadow. He held all the quiet of night,
all it’s dark in the black hole of his belly,
never to wake us, not to stop our ascent.

Grandma curled her ribs into swing sets,
all her children touched the moon with the tips
of their fingers. They kissed astronauts on their
foreheads. She was all rise, her hair curled nebula.
Every ocean she will never see pools in our palms
if you ask her. Her grandchildren, the great tide pullers.

Some evening, I will take their love into orbit, tying the stars
into rope around my waist. I will pour all this light over
mountains they will see from the flats of Kansas.

I have grown so tall this way.
I am the moon program.
Once, only Seattle Space Needle,
but my grandparents, always a solar system,
even now, they hum and spin, they turn like dancers,
a music box holding heavens of hope.

The Head Is Shorn

The head is shorn and bristling
and once you look at the neat row
of staples cinching skin closed
above the hairline, it is hard to look
away: the metal teeth glint like
a zipper sewn shut and the skin
holds no pucker on either side
of the seam: this is fine upholstery,
you think, above re-soldered
bone: a saw has been used
and probably pincers to tug
the scalp taut while a somewhat
gentle staple gun riveted the length
of the opening neat as railroad
ties seen from the window of a plane.
All of this is as real and quiet
as a hammer on a table. It is
not the stuff of summer cinema.
For that you must leave the brain
injury unit and go into an ocean
made of hair or a forest of woven
bird-bones where wind rasps
through the honeycombed wood
and out across the tufted sea
where you will relearn to swim.
You are beginning to resent this
second-person bullshit that keeps
announcing how things will be,
as if you are not an independent
choice-maker, as if you have been
so conditioned by various author-
ities that you will simply relearn
to swim in an ocean made of hair
simply because you have been told.
At first you hold your breath
while plunging into the giving
depths but after a while you
realize your mind has been un-
casked without leaving a mark
and so you float above the soft
undulations of hair spread wide
your sex tingling as you seek
out another of your own kind.

Eavesdropping

Every day people walk
in circles on a footpath
designed specifically for that purpose

around a lake near my house.
When the clockwise
pass the counter-clockwise

about four seconds
of conversation
can be overheard

prompting my friend and I
to generate haiku
of dark provocation:

With enough gasoline
nearly anything
will burn.

A matter-of-fact tone
is important.

I don’t know why
she quit loving him
at exactly three o’clock.

Let questions linger.

How do you know
a human head
won’t float?

The manner
must be lackadaisical
yet understated.

The problem with the twins
was that one of them
was a triplet.

It is a form
Ibsen would appreciate.
Or Beckett.

What does he expect me to do
with six hundred pounds
of nut-meats.

Let the final syllable
carry the freight.

If he was insinuating
what I think he was
then-

If any response
is generated,
it must be ignored.

Wrap it in plastic
and bury it
next to all the others.

A Streak of Light

In the shower, you wash my back
and at the same time you sing
the Spider-Man theme song.
The soap foams, webs
across me. From our window
we see the kaleidoscopic lights
of the hotel sign.
They are singing in bursts.
And the day has decided
to end itself in rain.
Water on us, water outdoors,
one dry layer of building between.
Inside, I lean into you.
Outside, the cactus crooks
to the will of the purpling sky.

Your Boat Slipped From Her Mooring

in the olive light of June, the soft hand of high tide below. My skin was tender from a new tattoo, a bird on my hip, a wound, which sucked on my dresses, dyed them yellow and brown. You undressed me there on the river Frome, fanning air over my skin, telling me a story about King Cnut, who left this place in ruins. A town made famous by the people sunk into the belly of its earth.

The Wolf

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_13/Stokes1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

After love he cannot hear the wolf
lie down outside our bedroom door

or feel its wild ache twisting through the mountains
inside me, this bed a terrace empty

of heaven’s marble figures. No twice-
barricaded walls or sky full of hollows,

just he the blind shepherd counting
drops of moonlight with his fingers,

the man who sees the lamb before he sleeps
while I’m corralled between four walls

with no excuse to wander. Me the wolf
that lay down waiting, the hunger that sleeps

in darkness tufted white, slack ears tilted
under half-moon. I’m outside the door

with teeth that motor in the mouth
to words of Aesop’s warning, me the beast

that troubles the tree line, mitt of claws pressed
down the dirt road throat of instinct.

Memorial Day

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_13/Stokes2.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

Over basil and bread the earth is drying.
Three copies of the same woman are choosing
their steps home. From the back porch we watch
windows light up high, the potted plants and stainless steel
of single wine sippers creeping slowly into frame.
The fluorescent kitchens of childhood rise up from below,
wet laundry lines drooping over weeded plots. But this time
there are fire escapes and the world outside is alive. No two rooms
are exactly the same. She says something that turns you inside
and all the aches are familiar-fear scurries from the table
through the heavy door and we follow into the bright fog,
the group of us I mean, sweating out the words
to a song we don’t remember knowing. The bar ahead
is a shuffle of elbows and gold, the world a strung up glow
of days spent listening. Of love letters hand-written to the cosmos.
On every neck that bent to hear the rain after it passed,
a silver chain of nights hangs solemn as a promise.

Sunset Over Empire Casino

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_13/Stokes3.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

As if from some primordial bed of neon,
knots of vapor rise gold over the jagged tree line
where I first learned sadness
was a matter of light
and each bout of condensation
could gather like a medallion
under the right sun, where they are
suddenly palpable, stacked like coins
for the meiser of the human eye.
Bouquet of terrible aches restored, the sky unravels us
into the raw material of breathing
beneath one sun. The softness we
can never quite reach. Our anchor
to the push-button promise of infinity.

I Fall in Love with Every Attractive Woman I Meet (#5)

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There’s a space between us, I shout, but Cammie thinks I’m speaking in car-lengths. Above us, an aluminum net sparks & whirrs. We pin a young boy’s bumper car into a corner & laugh like Kansas is on fire. She tells me she likes my gold stripes, the way they sparkle like busted headlights on the turnpike. We park our vehicles & I tell her sometimes I try to write & 2% milk pours from my head. She buys an ice cream cone from a man with three disparate chins. I say I’m lactose intolerant, but I hide it well & she lets rocky road drip in between her knuckles. We stand in line at the teacups & decide that sitting in dishware is for ladles.

I Fall in Love with Every Attractive Woman I Meet (#17)

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I meet Marcella in coach, aisle three. Her posture suggests she once was an inner tube. I whisper lines from a Taoist quote book & imagine my feet as heavy mallets. The floor hums beneath my rubber appendages. I nickname her Elastic & blink braille onto a napkin from inside my eyelids. Those bumps mean reduction, deflation,’ I tell her, & these bumps, turquoise.’ She admits defeat & orders a light beer from the drink cart. In five minutes, I have her blowing hot air into familial recollection. She says my father was a manual pump, my mother an inflated dolphin with a tear in its stomach. I steal coffee beans from the snack cart & spell out resolution on her tray table. I spell out connection & fate. She writes her number on a water balloon & slips it between my thighs.

I Fall in Love with Every Attractive Woman I Meet (#20)

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_13/Welch3.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

Barbara cuts my mess into a pompadour & I feel like James Dean or Rihanna for a moment. There’s a line that stretches into the road, so I ask her if she’s ever been to Finland & how long she thinks my sideburns should be. She tells me yes, & in Finland they have bare faces. I think about bending her over a booster seat, but instead say it’s Tuesday-nice weather, for a Tuesday. She agrees & stencils a flame into the side of my head. I pray to the ceiling that she landscape my hair with her fingertips just one more time. She brushes my face with a towel, & I pray for a power outage. I pray it rains sideways so we can dance like broken clippers in the street.

I Fall in Love with Every Attractive Woman I Meet (#25)

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Darla picks the high-top table in the corner. She says I want to catch them cheating & stomp out their smart phones like a gorilla. I tell her don’t get too worked up about it, it’s only bar trivia, then take two shots of whiskey & begin beating my chest & chanting vulgarities. Darla wants the team name to be “My Couch Pulls Out, but I Don’t” or “Wilford Brimley’s Mustache,” but I tell her that’s rookie shit & write down “I Cry When I Throw Up” in bold letters. The old couple next to us stares & I secretly think about spilling hot soup into Grampa’s lap.

Round two ends & Darla looks silently defeated. We are in fourth place & I misspelled “Mediterranean Sea” on question twelve. It is 9:30 & the bartender has margaritas pouring out of his shirtsleeves. I turn to Darla & say you look like a poached chimpanzee. She smiles loosely & carves a hash mark on the back of her hand with a tiny plastic sword.

History of a Hymen: Age 7

Bike-riding along Kelso Road-

the front spokes caught my purple purse.

With the seize and stop my crotch launched

banana seat into bar-hard.

Pain water balloon burst and clot.

My steps small, slow all the way home

told Mom I was torn like cardboard

and ached like the bleeding gum

of a tooth just kicked out.

On the couch I held paper towel-

bound zip top baggies full of ice

against my down-there parts.

She couldn’t Band-aid it better.

When I pulled my underwear down,

I ripped the scabs holding cotton

to my small flesh folds. If the hymen

I’d burst was thick, it would re-seal,

she said, taking the blood-rusted panties.
?

History of a Hymen: Age 14

Those February nights in Kirk’s Taurus,
he roughed his right hand into me
and used his left to jerk off in his jeans.
Fingering-he was all rat claws and teeth
tearing an tunnel. When it was done, he
wiped up his white slime and my clumping red.

By March it was the motel. He spread me
out on cigarette-scabbed polyester
and pried the rip he’d been working wide
as I breathed in ash. Pieces broken
and sucked up with each pump. My blossom gone,
stem snapped, everything left brown and rotten.

Time stills at times like these-puddles frozen
solid that seem like they will never melt.

History of a Hymen: Age 17

Johann, my artist-his thin fingers scarred carving off warts,
calluses with Exacto blades-was first love like crocuses up

after the worst Snow Belt winters. He knew of the trespasser-thief
stealing my virgin mucus ruby years before.

Neither understood a hymen’s resiliency, that tissue threads
and tatters can heal to a complete gown again.

So imagine our surprise during first foreplay
when he stuck in one slim digit and felt a pop-

stretched raw chicken skin burst. He withdrew with viscous
blood Jello-red tip to first knuckle, and I zipped back up.

Panicked we were small spiders clinging web corners,
awaiting the hornet’s thrashes between us to end.
?

Flashback on a Hot August Day

115 degrees and we carry heaped
plastic baskets of frayed jeans
and cotton underwear, hope to avoid
the lightening limbs’ approach, branching
and cracking just a few miles off.
Yellow beaks against flesh puckers
of heat stroke dead baby birds jar me,
their touching bellies like testicles-
out of place on the beige pavement.

Heat demons take root behind my eyes,
reach their hot hands down my throat, and
wrap burning talons around my wind pipe,
tangle up in my vocal cords. Their tongues
fork flames, and their eyes smolder charcoal.
They peel old scabs and pluck out stitches
of my oldest internal wounds. When you
kiss the sweaty back of my neck,
I’m a shuddering lawnmower that chokes
instead of starts:

What the fuck are you doing?

And I am fourteen again with the man
that steals me in increments, taking a chunk
every time his fingers are in me like I’m his
bowling ball. The motel bedspread stiff, sweat
slick, I feel pressed by the boulder of him.
He mashes up against me, a fist jamming
together puzzle pieces that just don’t fit.
His lips, rough and hard, sear me to blisters.

I just can’t be . . .please don’t touch me right now.

I pull-pick-pry the love knots you
and I spent the last five years tying,
the macramé holding us together.
But my skin doesn’t know you’re not him.
I want to throw myself into water-
a glacial Alaskan lake so cold the heat
demons shrivel into warts frozen off.
Maybe it will all fizzle out in fat rain drops
once the storm comes and breaks this heat,
so I bear the pressure of your lips on me.
?

Iron Heavy and Hard

The other girl that prosecuted Kirk
leads him into our sepia-toned bedroom.
He’s her rare vintage chair rescued from dumpsters.
“He’s changed,” she says as they get into my bed.
Like his venom that paralyzes
was left in some other victim’s lips.

His pressure stirs me a Great Lakes’ storm. I thrash wind, rain, waves, and take under massive steel-laden barges. I roll, a pill bug curled between mattress and wall. With jackhammer-violent shakes, I yell at him for ruining my life and sob a heaving Erie, Superior, or Huron. He says he’ll never leave me again. I’m Wolf-bitch, growling, and my teeth in his ankle flesh fat and drag him off. He’s ribbon I shake to rend. His blood streaks split my beige sheets. He, Terrible Giant, fills and bursts the room, kicks me to ground like I’m a teacup breed. His fist verging on a smash me down to flattened recycling bin beer can, I say “cops” because 1994’s restraining order must still be good.

A police-car-siren’s comfort.

I awake the dream iron heavy
and hard in my stomach. My body a taut,
set mousetrap. I suffer the foreboding-
the attack starts. My electricity
hums so loud, a wasp hive hit and pissed.
Jangle and clang my clockwork tighter.
Hairball gag and choke.
Heart skitter and slip.
He feels so near. By the medicine
cabinet I pop a 25 milligram
Alprazolam with a Dixie cup
water swallow for the loosening click.
Green and grey I look so old. Between 5
and 6 I convince myself he’s states away,
decades gone, but my jaw hinges
ache like I actually wrapped my mouth around
his Achilles tendon and bit in.
I get up and walk 2 miles, waiting
for his blood and dirt’s taste to dissipate.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_13/Sinykin.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″]

Pym’s second cousin fucked her when she was still a girl, is where it started, apparently. He visited frequently during the tender nub of her pubescence. Then, Easter, 1998 or 99: years blur into each other like letters at the optometrist. Pym’s mom woke before dawn and climbed the fence behind the trailer park where they lived in an exurb of Baltimore, back into the woods of scraggly pine and thornbushes to hide dozens of flimsy pastel plastic eggs filled not with candy because they were poor but little folded notes she had written for Pym when Pym was called Tash. Happy memories or nice things about her smile or eyes, mostly misspelled but that didn’t matter because Tash couldn’t spell, either. It happened back there while Tash’s mom sat in the trailer with her breakfast of Parrot Bay. The second cousin had come to visit from Atlanta where he worked in the Bethel office of the Jehova’s Witnesses, led youth isometrics.

Pym preferred to leave the morning’s details to e.h.’s imagination, is what Pym said. They sat in Pym’s bedroom in the moonlight over a bottle of tequila.

Pregnant. Was only a matter of time, Tash figured. Tash’s mom guessed the girl quit menstruating because she was so skinny. And plus either couldn’t imagine who she might’ve fucked or else in fact knew and didn’t want to deal with that. Tash’s father was not a part of the picture. So it was August and two weeks before eighth grade and Tash was well into her second trimester before no one had the option of ignorance anymore. Pym can’t remember by what means Tash found the wherewithal but she went alone to Planned Parenthood, took the bus into Baltimore, found the office, and met with a jovial woman with calm hands who set her up with a doctor right away. After the twenty-four hour waiting period, the hot night alone in the Motel 6, the faked parental consent, after, back home, coming through the trailer’s door, pale and weak, her mother saw what she’d done and slapped her around. God, she said, would not forgive her.

What happened next was not something Pym remembers as being a decision, as even involving conscious thought, which is that Tash gathered her few things – a brush, a pendant with a picture of a brother dead in infancy, a change of clothes, a shredded blankie, cash stolen from her mother – and left, moved to Baltimore and became a sex worker. She became ferociously deft with a condom, as one client would eventually tell her. She befriended other sex workers and stayed with Anabel Lee and slept through the daylight hours. She was twice beaten by cops in the first month. Thrashed with their nightsticks. Tough luck. A balding white man with bluish stretch marks, lost striae along his flanks like comets’ tails and on his fourth finger a wedding band, frequented Tash and would insist, after, that he could save her. They could run off to Aruba. He would do it. Tash had to remind him, each time, that she didn’t need his saving. Then he would whimper and redden around the rims of his eyes. When she told him to go his eyebrows would cut a sharp angle and he’d call her nothing but a dirty teenage slut. But he always came back.

Years go by this way. A parade of cocks. Occasional police brutality. A cum-stained copy of Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers found among a shelf of porn that changed the way words looked. She’d never finished a book before, barely started one, but this felt like her crazy dream. The prison shrine, the pin-up saints. None of it made sense but it all made sense and she read it Biblically and this was when Tash became Pym and right around when a cop beat Pym quite truly senseless and so Pym ended up on a bus heading west, again without any memory of having made any kind of decision to do so. Pym, a tee-shirt and jeans, Jean Genet stuffed in a back pocket. Several hundred dollars, crumpled and moist. Two condoms, their packets’ corners’ mashed and without integrity. No bra, never again. New fucking life.

Somerset, Wheeling, Zanesville, Columbus.  Worked for a week or a few in each, washing dishes with Mexicans for cash, flopping with folks “just until I get my feet on the ground.” No I.D., no recollection of a surname. This must’ve been around summer 2005. Worked a corner with trannies in Columbus a few nights, ran at the sight of the cops.

Dayton, Indianapolis, Champaign. All the college kids home on break, diasporic across the prairies of Illinois, dorms called Oglesby and Trelease rising in metal and brick, uniform windows, ideal squatting until the marching band from Normal arrived, horns and hormones, for band camp. Two fourteen-year-olds turned their key to find Pym on the floor in only a long tee-shirt watching reruns of the syndicated Batman series with Adam West. Before Pym could attempt to convince them that a third roommate might be fun, they both ran off to find the Band Director. Rather than flee again, Pym, still without any tangible memory of decision or deliberate, conscious thought, proceeded to make mischief. Found another empty room. In the madcap fifteen minutes before lights-out, the fury of teethbrushing and facewashing and bathroom gossip for developmentally healthy youth, Pym hunched down naked next to the farthest sink. Rumors spread, chaperones came with flashlights. Pym had already moved to another floor’s stall, still naked, head buried in a paper bag to frighten youth with a post-lights-out emergency. All day they practiced their field show. One afternoon Pym climbed the chainlink behind the bleachers and watched from the highest row. Several hundred youth stepping as one, forming constellations, crisp images, projecting a wall of militaristic sound. Two dozen flags spinning in unison. A horrible voice told Pym these were the options. No one came that night. They’d left. Pym woke up on the bathroom tile. Made the routine dumpster rounds. Bruegger’s at dusk, Dunkin’ Donuts at dawn. Not yet aware of the term freegan.

The mini-vans came all at once. Ruddyfaced farm youth off to college, to learn to drink heavily and fuck the opposite sex. Their parents hugging them, mothers enjoying the ambivalent failure to restrain tears. Luggage on wheels with pull-out handles. Furniture from Chicago’s Ikea. Lawns manicured these weeks before Pym’s very eyes and here’s why. Flowers chosen to appear just now in full bloom. Furniture that barely fit in the rickety elevators about which fathers became irritated and short with their wives or ex-wives. Youth obviously waiting for their parents to hug them and ambivalently cry and get it over with already so they could begin subtly testing one another through pop culture references and social power dynamics to learn who to drink heavily with and who of the opposite sex to try to fuck. At the height of anticipatory hope. Christian youth from suburban Chicago looking for cross necklaces, ever more desperately. Other youth who cried more than their mothers, whose eyes spoke of real fear. Pym watched them. The sun roared. Bees traveled from flower to landscaped flower. Pym sat on the steps of Trelease and felt a sort of awakening, like coming to the surface after having been underwater a long time. A kind of mental clarity. They were the same age, Pym and them. They had surnames and high school diplomas. But Pym had a secret. Little siblings tagging along, bored, ready to say goodbye and good riddance and to go afterward to Denny’s, as promised. University officials in nametags and professional smiles standing just off to the side, available for questions, shepherding the confused. They came with tasers and syringes and told Pym to be calm and make this easier for everyone. They in actual fact wore white billowing coats. Later they gave Pym a social security number and a gender. An institutional teal gown and a photo I.D. on a mandatory lanyard. Rictus after absurd rictus of condescending mental health professionals. “How often do you feel sad? How often do you think about killing yourself? Once a week? Once a day?” A parade of sickish smiles. Table tennis with the high-functioning in-patients. Institutional pudding.

e.h. attempting to moderate vigorous nods of empathy with this part of the story.

Lithium, then a quick 180º to Paxil. Often pistachio pudding. A series of halfway houses, New Beginnings North, A Safe Haven, Womens Treatment Center, which was awkward. The obligatory compulsive denial of drug addiction followed by the cliché insistence that overcoming denial is the first step. Actually trying meth for the first time behind a halfway house’s dumpster and mercifully not caring for it one bit. Not running away for reasons that are totally opaque to Pym now. Probably to avoid the cops. Finally finding work through the Womens Treatment Center’s placement service as an overnight stocker at the Walmart in Elmhurst at all of $6.65 an hour and a place out that way, too. A small room in Grenville Apartments with walls water-stained to a brownish-gold, the residue of ghosts, and, instead of a real oven, a double-burner Coleman stove that ran on gas canisters. Pym had to find a microwave on Craigslist and slept on a mattress on the floor. After work, around dawn, Pym would hurry to the magazine rack and stand before it like an altar. The bodies on Cosmopolitan, the pecs on GQ failed even to register. Pym wanted their eyes. In a pants pocket Pym carried a tiny scissors and surreptitiously cut-out the eyes of Cameron Diaz, Mila Kunis, Robert Pattinson. Isolated from the rest of their bodies, sliced into bands like masks, these fashioned eyes expressed for Pym a secret truth, the truth of yearning to hide, the barely suppressed terror of something unnameable. Pym scissored quickly and left dozens of magazines with eyeless covers, slipping them, the eyes, into the little pocket, the pocket’s pocket, for home where Pym Scotch-taped them to the ghosted walls. Diane, the night-shift manager, summoned Pym to her office and asked whether Pym had been cutting the eyes out of fashion magazines with a tone that implied both that this was not in fact a question at all and that Pym was a small, incontinent child, which marked the end of Pym’s career at Walmart. “This ain’t rocket science,” is actually what Diane said upon farewell.

Accustomed to staying up all night, Pym wandered the streets and eventually into Chuckles Bar. Epiphanies strike outside of any means of prediction, like patterns of smoke. It occurred to Pym, sitting at the bar with characteristically upright posture, that sex might be had for other than monetary exchange. At this, Pym laughed out loud. Pym had no money. Pym moved to sit beside a female-bodied person around the bar’s corner and asked to be bought a drink.

“Normally it works viceah-versa,” which Pym had no idea how to make sense of, “but,” this person continued, “yer cute. Whadya want?”

“Rum and coke with ice.”

The female-bodied person leaned forward over the bar, promoting about a foot of cleavage. “A couple of Jamaican sodas on the rocks, Karl.” The person turned and slapped a hand on Pym’s thigh, “I’m Suzanne, what’s yer name?” at which point Pym recognized that Suzanne was about fifteen years older than she’d looked from across the bar and was also liberally drunk. No television show or high school classmates or other set of circumstances had taught Pym that these might be inhibitory to a good night of sex for otherwise than monetary exchange. After the third Jamaican soda, laughter came more quickly. Pym squeezed Suzanne’s thigh.

“Wanna get some air?” asked Suzanne.

Elbows hooked, they stumbled several blocks and up the stairs to Suzanne’s apartment and began kissing with flapping tongues, Pym’s back to the apartment’s door. Suzanne’s hand moved brusquely down Pym’s flank and between Pym’s legs, which caused Suzanne’s body’s temperature to seem to drop about ten degrees. Suzanne paused. Suzanne cocked her head and looked Pym in the face and dropped to her knees and undid Pym’s belt and unzipped Pym’s pants and pulled them down and stood up and told Pym to get the fuck out, which Pym promptly did.

The moon was a perfect half.

Sometime later back home Pym fell asleep in the midst of failing to bring those own sex organs to an orgasm that Pym had never had. e.h. and Pym were pretty well into their own bottle of Jose Cuervo and the sky outside had begun to seep the milkiness of predawn. They lay side-by-side on Pym’s bed holding hands though e.h. had hours ago renounced anything sexual tonight or tomorrow night or the night after, also, too. e.h. felt warmly embarrassed at the romanticized poignance of describing Pym’s russet skin in this light as luminescent. There were dangers, here, temptations that e.h. would’ve rather stepped in front of a moving bus than’ve succumbed to. Blame the tequila.

Time passed.

Months, maybe years, the calendar’s way of counting. Pym’s memory fails now, scattered into fragments. e.h. wondered how much of all of it was true but then knew in that same moment with a surge of bilious shame that this was no moment for doubt.

Returning one night to Grenville to find several uniformed men asking for Sondra Thompson, which was the name they’d given Pym in the hospital. Other bedrooms, other towns.

Rockford, Waterloo, Iowa City.

Sandbagging against the flood, whole neighborhoods out together, and when the lines would surely break they worked en masse to move furniture and photo albums from basements on the brink of devastation. A family of redheads took Pym in, provided food and a roof until Pym found a job waiting tables at the Hamburg Inn. Sometimes customers asked about the tattoo of a garden scene along Pym’s forearm, or the bicep’s dragontail, or the blood-tipped thorns at Pym’s nape, or on those warm summer days in short denim shorts the phrase in latin around Pym’s thigh that Pym had no idea what it meant. Pym learned fast the quick over-the-shoulder smile, the flashing eyes, just the threshold of flirtation that swelled Midwestern boundaries and was tipped well for it. Pym paid the rent on time, Pym cooked edible spaghetti. Pym rose into or merged with some kind of surface time, logic of days, weekends, nights-out with coworkers. Made friends, picked up the lingo, the posture of cynical cool, how to mock “hipsters,” to ridicule the bougie climbers of the University town, the 1600 SAT, the 4.5 GPA, the coiffed mothers riven with Ivy-anxiety. Pym parroted the lines, and people by all appearances drank what they called the Kool-Aid, squeezed their eyes together, and laughed. Pym played the part of friend, pulled back hair when Sarah or June “got sick” in a Saturday night stall. Leaned in close and whispered about who gave who a blow job in the back of whose car. For awhile Pym even seemed to care. Months, marked by a calendar on the kitchen wall, passed. A boyfriend named Luke, a car mechanic. Until when Pym spoke, the words appeared visibly in reality as hollow. As in Pym could see them, the words, escaping from Pym’s mouth and sitting there in the space between people hollow as Pym’s empty heart. And visible not as in a metaphor but Pym actually physically saw them, the words, in the air, signifying nothing. At which point Pym hadn’t taken any drugs beyond the Holy Legal Trinity (alcohol, nicotine, and holy caffeine) in at least a week or two.

Friends began looking at Pym funny, asking if Pym was ok. Pym softly shrugged and slumped a little lower. They blushed at the incision these uncanny pauses made into their social fabric. Their words became noise, the wahwah of adults in Charlie Brown. Pym stopped showing up for work. Stopped going out. Lay in bed on oxycodone until forty pills went by. Lay on clouds like marshmallows in the microwave, erupting, consuming Pym in the warm sticky whiteness. Woke up in a bed with steel bars along its sides. “Hello Sondra,” came the silky voice of professional care, “I’m Nurse Barse.” Ceiling panels as worlds unto themselves, freckles become stars against a dirty cream sky, rusty water stains became galaxies. Live there. Short stay. Back on the street, no way Pym’s going to hang with that old crowd again, another bus.

City of Lakes. This was just last March. Trudged a few blocks through the spring snow from the Greyhound station and stumbled into the library of a community college, spent the night in the stacks where the next morning e.h., on a rare academic excursion for a course on queer theory, found Pym huddled beneath a carrel’s desk and asked if she could help. Pym looked up with saucers for eyes, is how e.h. likes to tell the story.

Dawn and its faint birdsongs have by now come and gone.

Life has commenced in all its bustle outside on the street amid the meaty summer heat of morning that gradually penetrates Pym’s window.

Light cuts a slanted, crisscross matrix over their prone bodies. Palm sweat sutures their hands.

“I’m scared to go out,” says Pym. “I’m tired.”

“I know you are,” says e.h., rolling supine, taking Pym’s head to e.h.’s very own soft, flat chest: “I do know.”

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_13/Sheffield.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″]

Second thing she does is slide into heels so high she doesn’t have to stand on tiptoe for shit.

Third thing the bitch does is throw every appliance into a snow bank. They’ll still be good in the spring.

Unsure what makes her stupid? Take this five question quiz to determine if you yourself are also a stupid bitch. Alas, if you are, there’s no way any of these words strung together in the manner I’ve strung and tuned them will resolve themselves into meaning. Dude. I mean, there’s just no way. I’m not a magician.

Test to Determine Stupid Bitch Status:

Please answer the below multiple choice and short answer questions as fully and as well as you are fucking able.

1)      In the morning, the first thing I want to do is: a) gather my skin around me like a cloak, b) ride off into the motherfucking sunrise, c) brush my teeth, d) put on sensible shoes, e) all of the above except for b

2)      Please describe yourself using five nouns beginning with the same letter: _____________________________________________________

3)      I think antiperspirant is for: a) bitches, b) bros, c) all the shining animals, d) your mother, e) I hate tests

4)      If a human being tossed an object as high as possible into the air, how long would it take for you to go run and catch it, and if you caught it, how would catching it make you feel? Would this be one of the finest moments of your life, or would you feel let down, like “yeah, this is just another thing I can do well, along with all the other fucking things I can do well in my life.” If you caught the object and then jumped from a car to a train to a bus to a motorcycle to a helium balloon, what would you change your name to? Please use a complete sentence to respond: _____________________________________________________

5)      Surrounded by the thrummingness of life, I often find myself: a) amazed, b)amazed, c) amazed, d)amazed, e) amazed

Well. How did you do?

Sometimes there are answers that become questions and vice versa. The stupid bitch knows this in her expansive grandmother’s heart. Try taking Tylenol for that. It won’t jigger your body back into anything resembling appropriate.

Appropriate forms for your body: an elephant, Eraserhead, an ermine, eggs, elastic. Antibodies.

Look, this isn’t going anywhere. I’m sorry. I apologize. There was this bitch? Who didn’t know, actually, and in fact, just how stupid she was? And she, like, fell in love?

And she was you and you were here and I was you and you were me and we were her and we wore our best dress and we wore our sexiest underwear and we, anyway, regardless, fell and we fell and we twisted our ankles; failed the test; and we fell in love; and we left our babies home screaming with their nannies; we became the nannies for other orphaned children; we left the island; we left the country; we left our husbands; we left our daughters and our sons and our animals; we left our own heads buried deep in unmarked graves because, hey, it’s fucking Saturday night, right? And someone’s got to be up be up be up be up be up for it.

First, try to yield to it.  Give over as completely and effortlessly as water coming to a boil. Save your best underwear for dark and stormy nights so that when the car flips, you can say you’d already known. Check your reflection once in the morning, once in the afternoon, and once again before bed. Any more than this is vanity. Tonight, if you can stay awake to see it, thousands of meteors will fill the sky like flies on a corpse. Just say I love you I love you I love you I love you.