Eleven Syllable Escape.

Passing you by – your feet sinking deep into downtown pavement, eyes fixed to shell toed shoes counting careful steps – I barely recognize you.

Thin hair drops in limp lines from scalp to shoulder, spreading greys steal strawberry shine from lengthy locks, locks which used to compete with the sun. Your mouth is exploited by sad lines, deep imprinted tears in sallow skin dyed the color of nicotine. Matte mouse eyes skitter about tired lids, the whites yellow, the yellow fissured with splinters of bloodshot stress.

You’ve widened since I saw you last, hips a spill of squishy surplus, button and jeans fighting to stay together.

Turning, wizened fingers wrapped in paper thin skin reaching for my shoulder, your mouth a cracked red raw O, you say: hullo, girl. How’s your pretty life?

A sideswept chasse and I miss your grip, my hesitant smile a defensive apology for your attempted touch.

Again, you say: how’s your pretty life?

I scrunch my eyes, look you over, try to find the you I knew way back when you used to smile and shine, your packaging still smooth and store-front sexy, your laugh like rushing water, gurgling, bubbling.

Good, happy: I say.

Fidgeting hands smooth a hand-knit tunic over threadbare jeans as you chuckle, the sound of desperation like wheezing sand paper. Yeah, you say. Me too.

You flick a fired butt, the ember grazing paper skin – a quick ignition close to setting you aflame, your widened rack a torch.

Awkward pause, a beat too long, and I think of all the things I’d like to say:

Remember when we sat up all night and laughed until the moonlight cracked to let the dawn in?

Remember sitting on the kitchen floor in the first apartment we shared, eating spaghetti off one green cracked plate, red sauce splashing linoleum only we were in charge of cleaning?

Remember the friends, the drinks, the parties, the fun, the fun, the fun – the fun that poured so easily out of you, the unstoppable, beautiful fun?

Standing, your shoulders a horse shoe slump, I cannot find the you I knew way back when; the hardened turtle shell is hiding the you who used to be and so I don’t say the things I’d like, but instead say:

Great. Okay, then. Was nice to see you. Take care!

Faux enthusiasm, an eleven syllable escape and you’re gone from my memory again.

xoxo

M.L. H’art

Dressed up in Awkward.

Held together by safety pins, I secure straps of an ill-fitting shirt to that ratty old bra I promised you I’d retire but kept because it goes so well under everything I own, regardless of the underwire protruding white satin, marking indents on soft tit flesh.

I fidget in a room full of strangers, tugging at fabric which doesn’t breathe in summer heat but instead traps sweat, pooling beads of insecurity at the small of back, bleeding through fabric shrink-wrapped to that unseemly swatch of small hairs collected at the nape of spine, a bunny tail.

Shoes, weather-worn faux-leather, stick to swollen pads trapped in pools of stench I’ll apologize to the cat for later when, at home and alone, I slip off the smell and wash toes outlined in sticky dark dirt under bathroom taps which drip-drap into the chipped porcelain sink I neglected to rinse the last time I perched on the edge of the bathroom counter, feet sunk deep.

Bumping the shoulders of these strangers, I order another drink and, with a mighty gulp, shush the rush running laps round my brain as I strategically balance the energy of a room off-kilter. I check my cell again and again and again to look real important, phone face casting eerie blue glow on heat-flushed cheeks, a trick of light making my face look less cordial, more gelid.

Like a lost puzzle piece, I can’t find a fit: shirt too sloppy, shoes too tight, gaze too long, laugh too loud.

Dressed up in awkward, I finger the hole in my back jeans pocket and pray it won’t rip wide to show the sheath of bubble gum pink panties, a little girl playing dress up in mom’s clothes, hiding the stuff of childhood under layers of makeup and lace.

We exchange pleasantries: the rehearsed social motions of hullos and well-thank-you’s and you-know-the-usual’s. You pretend you care because you caught my eye: an obligation to the too long stare when, after you looked away, you realized there was no one standing beside you to goad into conversation and so, without a runaway lane, you’re forced to suffer through the robotic dance: left hand motion hair swipe, right cheek lift half smile, gaze down 4, 3, 2, 1, and up, maintain eye contact, break left, side step right foot, indicate exit, half hug (right arm over left shoulder), two pat reassurance, turn, turn, turn and…cut.

I repeat this dance with 12 other partners – the motions more fluidal the darker it gets – when, after having shed the last of the reserve energy, I nod in your general direction, bid my leave and think what a relief it is to swallow the starry night on the long journey home and not ever have to tell you how discomfited it really was to see you that way.

xoxo

M.L. H’art

Blue.

Stall 54, a slight space with grey walls and a heavy door.

“Take off everything but your underpanties,” her voice thick with accent.

I let the word “underpanties” bounce around my brain as the big door falls closed.

In the too small cattle stall, I change out of street clothes and fumble a heavy blue gown over goosebumped skin. The lady, she yells: “stay there till I come get you, k?”

“Okay,” I whisper.

I can hear the shuffling of other women, pent up, pawing the ground.

52 recites a hymn, half word, half hum as she rips the gown Velcro apart over and over again, the crick of hooks and loops keeping beat to the performance staged by 47 and her small son as they sing Old MacDonald’s Farm, the child’s voice an e-i-e-i-o echo of farm animals speaking Portuguese. 55 mumbles to herself, drops her purse, classic girl spill, tampons and lipstick and pens with chewed lids scattering the floor: “motherfuckinshit,” she huffs.

The personality of these numbers a show of feet on display in the one foot window between the door and the floor; I stare at poignant pumps and fraying flip flops and smart sneakers; I paint pictures of these women in my mind: coiffed backcombed ‘do, peasant skirt, pleated pantsuit, desperate ladder climbing, school-test-frenzy, long road retirement.

“54? 54!” her gravelled voice worn with use, camouflaging a slight lisp: “follow me, please.”

Downtrodden patients awkwardly fidgeting matching blue gowns, embarrassed by the bare ass underneath, line the walls. No one makes eye contact.

In the room, I’m told to lay down, lay still, don’t breath, look left, now right.

On the screen, my insides in auric light: dancing violet, indigo, blue and green, a sway of yellow, orange, red; a rainbow reveal of creativity, awareness, intuition, health, love, wisdom, happiness, courage; my being in parts: the brain, the brow, the throat, the heart, the stomach, the ovaries, the adrenal glands.

Blue, so much blue.

“Stay here,” the door a whoosh-shick behind her.

Under low lights, I stare at the tiled roof wondering how the sallow stain managed its way, way up there, when the doctor walks in.

He pauses thoughtfully before the imaging screen and nods his head, pulls a clenched fist up under his chin, removes his glasses and slides his open-pore-pocked nose closer and closer until he says: “Hm, why yes. Right, I see.”

He walks back out. Whoosh-shick.

She looks at me and grins: “let’s do it again!” repeating the board game dice roll that didn’t get her to the desired square offering the jackpot win.

This time, black and white, a scroll of larynx and lymphnodes and esophagus. On the screen: white, white, grey, white and then black, black, black – a big black void. A hole.

“Aha.”

A blip-bloop press of sonar machine buttons.

“K, you go now. You’ll know results in five to seven business days,” she says ushering me back out into the herd.

xoxo

M. L. H’art

Ba-Thump.

Lying in the valley of this saggy old mattress, my ear stuck to smooth quilted slip cover, I hear your heart beat: a ba-thump rhythm rising up through coils and foam. Listening to your heart mark the two-four meter twitch of eyes desperate to close, I trip the waking wire of semi-conscience and drop somewhere between awake and asleep, somewhere between touching you and only remembering the way you feel.

Your prosodic night song makes me miss you most when the moon is cloud covered and I can’t sleep. There was a time when I could sleep beside you, when life was easy, when life was good. But the older I get, the harder it is to measure the weight of your heart against the feather Ma’at; the tools I use to dig the truth out of the gut of the late night grow dull and the dirt caked skin holding sinewy hands together begins to crack and bleed all over my bedclothes.

Morning comes faster and faster – a ultra-violet blur of tomorrow’s stolen from today – and though I try to keep time with your quickly fading pulse, the sunlight washes the sound away, syncopated counts an unraveling tempo turned off till it’s just me and the silence, sitting back to back, awkward and shy.

xoxo

M.L. H’art

Again.

I wake up in last night’s clothes, sticky with sleep, on the living room floor again; staring at the stained stucco roof of the old building where I’ve planted my urban life roots, I feel that familiar pang of regret start to turn my tummy, a tumble dry cycle of jumbled emotions slicked with the hangover grease of one glass too many.

The early morning sun streaks the tasks of another workaday week across the wall – an hour and I’m late again; a grumble escaping cracked lips, I drag my wrinkled jeans, my addict genes, down the hall to the bathroom stall and wash away last night, astringently cold water making make-up heavy eyes sting black tears.

Stepping out of last night’s tired clothes, I pull up today’s panties, pink with shame, but forget to change my socks again; a quick glance in the mirror and my habits are an obvious expression: red nose, bagged eyes, ruddy cheeks, creased forehead.

Checking my wallet waiting in line for a dose of wake-me-up, I count the cash left over and am thankful I didn’t spend it all again; fumbling with the creamer and the sugar and the headache, I nearly miss the bus and spill medium roast all over the hand I forgot to wash the bar stamp off of before leaving the house.

Licking ink and coffee off the backhanded skin that slapped me with the realization I’m too old for this shit, I plough into a blue shaded bus seat and catch the reflection of a little girl growing the worn lines of absent memory and feel that old familiar sting sneak up the length of my oesophagus again; bitter bile biting at my throat, I choke it back and close heavy eyes and silently count the stops until I arrive at work – just on time, but not all there.

The click-clack of a life wasted on an ergonomically adjustable keyboard sets the tempo of a day behind the desk again; the formulaic process divided into billable hours when, at the end of the day, I go home, hit the bottle back and start all over – again.

xoxo,

M.L. H’art

In Somnolent.

Holding sleep in the palm of my hand, I pull closed tired joints, each knuckle choking one more hour.

A hint of night light paints dancing wolves on white walls – the snarling silhouetted pack surging forward, pulling back: a sympatric shimmy, tree leaves making me believe I’m being hunted.

A sway in starlight and the man enters my room. He’s been here before, the stench of his dark trench coat a familiarly sticky scent of dank earth and rusted blood and dried skin.

The shadow bird perched on the closet door quavers: he has a knife, little girl. Be careful, little girl.

Heart knocking ribs, crouching under covers, arms clamped to wobbly knees, eyes pressed closed, sharp blows of breath heave heavy lungs – puffing away shadow puppets playing amygdala tricks.

A negotiation between conscience and imagination, the wolves retreat and the bird stops singing but the man, the man draws his blade. Refulgent metal catching moonlight, his silver sharp tongue licks slick shank.

On theatre walls of bedroom late, drips of backlit blood run a slippery wash over white paint, soak into threaded carpet, rise past dusted baseboards, spill over well-worn chair covers, splash into dresser drawers ajar, creep to the edge of the bed and, lapping at bare phobic toes curled, stain sheets, a blossoming claret bloom spreading over pillow shams, dying nightgown hem.

It’s been days since I last slept.

xoxo,

M.L. H’art

59.

Heaving coo, a woman moaning, stout body writhing – the sound, a disjointed image of sleep. Coming to, shading sun from crusted eyes, it is morning. The woman momentarily falls quiet and I am left looking round the room for evidence of her, her ghost gone.

The cracked window spilling fresh spring air is a speaker box clue: blaring her purr, distorting the ruffle of her clothing flapped loose.

Standing at the sill, I stare out onto the balcony but cannot find her in the filter of early morning light. A dream figment, faded.

About to turn from my windowed reflection, I see her scuttling, her fat body edging the old apartment brick.

Dressed in moulted blue-grey finery, her nose a cere of soft fleshy swelling, she collects the flimsy night sticks and dusty day old trash blown over the parking lot concrete. Holding them carefully in her mouth, she is greedy.

The descendent of the great figments of war and peace, she is not the product of her genes: she cannot race, she cannot carry; she is not a messenger nor a passenger; she won’t detect nor save.

Her great, great grandfather puffed up his chest, a cog integral to the machinery of the 72 lofts of the Battle of Marne; the grandfather before him, a peaceful conciliator delivering olive branch signals of landlocked safety following the flood.

A forgotten shame of her lineage, she floats from dumpster to dumpster, her next meal an a la carte menu of half-wrapped three-day stale burgers and rotting tin can residue pecked out of kitchen catchers. Her waste, the trace she leaves behind, has the acidic corrosiveness capable of eroding metal, eating stone. She is dirty, she is sad: she is the didus ineptus of downtown.

A superstitious lady, she makes the same rounds each day, bobbing her head up, down, up, down asking passersby to take pity, to throw her just a crumb, not realizing superstition is only the repetition of an action with no influence over desired outcome.

Pipio! I call over the balcony. Pausing, she looks up, cocks her head left, then right. On the breath of the wind, she escapes down the alleyway in flight to haunt another ornithophobic.

xoxo

M.L. H’art

The Ninth Circle.

In the ninth Bolgia, sitting on a cold metal folding chair under the cast of one naked lamp, your cheeks poked full of dry rice, you wait.

Here’s a special place for you, the doctor says, affixing wires to fingertips, fingertips which dance atop a worn table, tapping the prevaricate rhythm of your vibrating nervous system.

Your thoughts, they walk wide circles. Around and around again, these thoughts come to pass the same decisions, the effects of which open in your imagination like a deeply infected wound: pussing, leaking. Back round the bend of the same circle, slowly the wound heals: inflaming, proliferating, remodelling, the tissue matures into a hard cast of time and skin, a reddened protective layer. Fingering the scab, you are relieved. But another pass around and its broken open again, fluid trickling from your ripped up flesh.

In your left hand, the doctor places an egg, its shell smooth and white. You cradle it in the lifeline folds of your palm, your fingers reaching up and around the oval, casting shadow over layers of membrane, the albumen, the vittellus, the truth of simple nourishment.

You start to speak, but dry kernels of rice spill out your open gap. The doctor motions one finger to lips: shh.

On the wall, a projection: your life in reverse. There you are: last week, last month, last year, last decade. A quick clip in time and you are six: the first time you discovered the salty addiction of scandal and schism.

The first time you got away with it.

Pressing stethoscope to bare chest, the doctor listens to your heart. Hiding scribbles on a concealed clipboard, the doctor’s head nods up and down, mouth pursed and concerned.

Here at the gateway to Cocytus, the doctor asks: do you believe in these things?

On the wall, a list: love, blood, honour, hospitality.

You nod, yes: your heart a simple beat, neither quickening nor slowing but instead reaffirming the delusive belief of a deficient conscience.

Here in the layer of the Malebranche, the doctor asks: do you respect these things?

Do you treasure love, blood, honour, hospitality?

Breaking beads just under the row of fine hairs laying flat against your forehead, you cannot focus.

Your hand, it shakes; the egg, it rocks.

Here is a special place for you indeed, the doctor says.

The egg, it falls; the shell, it smashes.

The doctor, he laughs.

xoxo
M. L. H’art

His Old Apartment.

In the back of the closet for 87 years, his life: layered between cling-wrapped bedsheets fresh from the cleaners ten years previous, four crisp, uncut sheets alternating green, black, green, black of Canadian mint one dollar bills; standing between big band pressed vinyl, a forty year yellowed history of National Geographic, heralding new age space age on spines uncracked, covers unbent; tucked behind stale liniments and powdered pill boxes with peeling labels, one pair women’s earrings – gold and emerald sparkling in dull light.

Photos, yellowed and peeling, tucked between unread book pages – scenery blurred by tour bus windows, landmarks and rayon-clad tourists crowding the lens, him riding a desert camel, a skinny sepia smile spread across youthful lips; a sock, tired and threaded, full and pushed to the back of the mahogany drawer, a numismatist’s dream of collected international currency: one coin for one memory; a single postage stamp floating on the shelf, glue dried and flaked, a memory of the shadowed sore spot lacerated on the postcard fallen to the floor, faded words: wish you were here, in cursive scroll.

The liquor cabinet, a passport: tequila, ouzo, sake, scotch. Etched shot glasses, engraved gold chalices, frosted martini glasses – dustbowl passages to old boys’ club deals, when handshakes and paper napkin signatures were the stuff of good business; bank notes and promissory titles on rice-thin paper, faded from forgetfulness.

A scratched mint tin with loose lid, inside the letters R.C.A.F. etched into the wings of lapel pins; a pendant, heavy with time, of a boy kneeling at an alter, the year 1938 inscribed; a locket, inside the photo of a man, young and tanned, smiling and sure.

A blue steel tool box housing crescent and socket and open end and monkey and pipe and torque and mole wrenches, original price tags affixed in place; unopened packages of screws, uncapped glue, unbroken seals on caulking tubes.

A fishing rod, a camping tent, a mosquito net, two kerosene lanterns – all forty years new, all unused.

The apartment: a front.

In the top drawer of the bureau, a stack of photos carefully tucked between the folds of a letter: the locket man in Palm Springs, in Greece, in Japan, in Hawaii, in England, in Vancouver, his beauty of youth a shifting timeline, young to old – the evidence of a true love kept in the back of the closet for a lifetime.

xoxo
M.L. H’art

The Jackhammer Waltz.

Machine gun rattle, the jackhammer bullies each one of my slippery dream thoughts hard into the spring-wet pavement. Sunlight vibrating the length of each rat-tat skips through the cloudy window. It is morning and I am red-wine dry. Smacking stained lips, the sheets shush and rustle as I turn over and over in the covers – a twisted game of hide and seek.

I share my first cup with the construction workers four stories down – leaning against the coerced chain link fence, it bowing under their weight, they raise their indestructible faux-titanium travel mugs their wives and girlfriends wiped out and refilled just that morning as a half hearted cheers when I step out onto the balcony.

“Morning boys,” I mutter, sticky morning breath swirling steam above the lip of my pink mug.

Skyscraper blue glass bounces stretched rainbows of Saturday sun across tired city streetways. A lineup trickles out the door of Money Mart, weekend tired warriors rubbing grubby mitts across crinkled foreheads, eyes squinting back early light, creased post-dated pay checks shoved into flannel shirt pockets.

Trundling traffic takes corners with less urgency. The lights shift slower. No one honks.

Like the sound of wind chimes tickling the backdoor of grandma’s house, the tink of green glass shimmies up the drainpipe. The calculated sorting of glass versus can has begun; the tchick-tchick of shopping cart wheels on winter-worn back alley pavement a race of rattled metal over uneven cracks.

Batonning the fan-belt crescendo screech, I conduct the moving echo of sirens cascading up and down, up and down. The concrete symphony swells and wanes on the dew-wet lips of wind, a compliment to the bellowing chorus of construction holler.

Keeping rhythm with the smacking steps of flip-flop clad feet, the song of spring has arrived downtown.

xoxo,

M.L. H’art