Tattooed
Tainted
Tattooed
Dispossessed
Bruised
Polaroids
The Hunted
Combat and boots
I stand
in the water and the steam
and wash my skin.
You tainted me
with your colors.
Colors
sink deep.
No phone number
etched onto my skin
with a pen,
washed away,
then forgotten.
No ink stamp
from an amusement park
that will fade
like a sunburn.
Tattoos
bright
as Spanky’s Pool
and pin-ball machines,
strong smells
of beer and smoke,
faint smells
of blue chalk
and promises of sex.
Colors
muted
like the Scrap Bar heard
through an open window,
a room lit with candles
and cigarettes,
smelling faintly
of incense
and promises kept.
Tattoos
so deep
they sink to my bones.
If you cut me,
I would bleed green
and blue.
My blood poisoned with memories
skin scarred with people
and places
I do not recognize
alone.
The water and the steam
burn my skin
I scrub and scrub
but your colors
have tattooed me.
The air hangs heavy
with lusty smells
of beer and cigarettes.
I lean my head
against his bed
and drag his smell
into my lungs,
into my blood.
I hear him move
and hum a tuneless song
over the splash
of the shower.
His clothes lie on the floor
and mock me,
they possess more of him
than I ever will.
All I am allowed
to take with me
are the smells
of beer and cigarettes
and the copper taste
of bitter regret.
The Bride wore indiscretion as a
bruise,
on which she placed the frozen dimes
and sent the man who wasn’t the
groom to the drugstore
for the E.P.T. test. She stood inscrutable
as the machine of marriage thundered
to life
by the irascible priest and the
two hundred hungry eyes
that devoured her like Chicken Cordon
Bleu.
She smiled as the eyes threw rice
and counted on the food being poisoned,
razing the fuel behind the machine.
Boxes fill with newly amputated memories.
A gray NYU Sweatshirt with red wine
stains from Puglia’s Fine Italian
Cuisine
on Spring Street will be his. The
smooth green
and red stones plucked from the
beach
of Whidbey Island are mine. Smiling
photos
filled with me in white chiffon
and tulle,
he in black cotton and satin,
a Felliniesque farce for a photographer’s
camera
belong to the garbage.
"Will you change your last name?"
He shoots across our bed strewn
with corpselike wedding photos.
"I don’t know,
yet." I shrug away from the ricochet
of the question.
He gets the hunter green leather
sofa
he never liked. I get the TV
I never watched. And the garbage
gets the checks,
embossed with "A," showing both
our names, ripped
in half. We take things we don’t
want
ammunition for another assault.
I stumble
over a potentially lethal mine.
"Do you want these?" I ask,
holding eleven year old prom pictures.
"Yes,
don’t you?" I shake my head. We
don’t fight
over anything, we can’t. Nothing
is mine, nothing
is his. Everything we have is ours.
"You can have these." He throws
wire cutters
at me. I accept them with rolled
eyes.
After twelve years there is something
he still doesn’t understand:
there isn’t barbed wire around my
heart,
I am bulletproof.
He moves slowly across the crowded
room,
his fingers work out knots in his
long hair.
A wedding band repels light.
Another gold band shackles my finger.
He sits across from me,
his presence rests heavy on my shoulders.
He places papers on the table,
legal size and wrapped in blue,
the slowly dying carcass of a marriage.
Paragraphs will carve the corpse
into manageable portions.
I light a cigarette, work knots
out of my long hair,
accept the weapon he offers me.
I kill the victim with an ease that
surprises.
He moves slowly back across the
room.
I stand to leave, take off my ring,
drop it into a garbage can.
She walks with a gait peculiar to
combat boots,
a toes-straight-ahead march
following the lines of the sidewalk
with unshakable integrity,
these lines invite purpose,
unlike her habitual duck-footed
waddle,
denying the aimlessness
of toes pointed left and right.
On the corner below Bleecker and
MacDougal,
she cups her chin in her right hand,
fingers curled around a cigarette,
she pulls slowly at the acrid smoke,
her heart clenches, a fist
raised in protest, her left hand
clutches
a plain brown paper bag, she sucks
the straw
and winces at the bitter sting of
carbonation.
Her hands fret, slide through her
hair
dark and straight as a summer rain,
fingers wrapped in silver rings
jam into
and yank themselves out of pockets
frayed by years of this,
fingers provoke a narrow sound
from the cracked harmony bell
hanging around her neck.
Her dark eyes capture mine
where I watch her from Le Figaro.
She quietly puts out her hand, asks
for spare change, I turn away and
catch
my reflection. NYU sweatshirt,
Levi shorts, Weejuns. I close my
eyes
only to see a black leather jacket,
Doc Martens,
black lipstick on the end of a cigarette.
I hand her a ten dollar bill.
