Supernumerary.

We talk about pets and god and art and memory.

The philosophy comes easy and when he says to me, it’s like I’ve known you all along, I laugh but don’t talk. The words, they’re not tongue-tip close, and the giggle, it bounds up out of my throat before I can slap a hand over puckered mouth, lips quavering in a smile long ago forgotten on late nights alone when, through anomalistic months on repeat, from perigee to apogee and back again, the moon lit cracked floorboards of lonely bedroom late.

He says: you remind me of a song and make the morning better even without coffee and tomorrow we should do it all again because this is the way it’s supposed to feel and, ignoring internal somersaults shaking up breakfast, I say: please, yes, please, the words an awkward waver in a pitch of voice I’ve never heard tumble out of my own mouth, three syllables barely discernable, words stuck.

A slow fade into patterned bed sheet flowers where touch transcends talk, I am chameleon purple and blue and gold and gone so far. Behind inky night-cloak draping closed lids, dream and wake melt, puddling between bent limbs and rumpled sighs.

Puzzle perfect, loop to fit indent, a tessellated match made. The asperity of the past infinitely smoothes out in front of us, learned lessons of lost love shelved for another day, a rainy day.

The supernumerary of us exceeds expectation.

xoxo
M.L. H’art

Ten Years Late.

Ten years ago this month, your skin in ash-blue pucker, flattened veins surface-close, I cried on the shoulder of the all-star volleyball  jock who, if we were still in school, wouldn’t have held my hand and passed me a Kleenex when your mother, stone faced and sure, said you were happier now.

Lid wide open in a roomful of us just starting out, we saw the rope burn left behind when you swung from your parents’ open concept vaulted ceiling second floor railing banister.

It’s been so long since you and I drank a water bottle full of liquor we stole from the pick-locked cabinet in the camping trailer parked on the front drive, playing poker for shots, scrunching our face after each burning shit-mix swig.

It’s been so long since you called late at night, us both whispering in the dark into coil cord phones, for dating advice, telling me you were in love with my best friend, asking how to win her over even though it meant giving advice I’d wished you’d use to win me over.

It’s been so long since we camped in the woods with twelve of our friends and stayed up late under summer stars passing a bottle and a joint, talking about the way things would be when we got the fuck out of this shit-small town and really started living.

It’s been so long since you turned to me in biology class and mouthed that song, the one that went “la-de-la, this year will be better than the last…,” the corners of your lips upturned in smirk.

It’s been so long since you hurt yourself the first time; since you let the light fade to dark in your head; since you stopped calling; since you turned inward on yourself; since you got farther and farther away, the length of my arms no longer enough to connect me to you.

It’s been so long since I walked away from your shadow body, snot-wet tissues crumpled in shaking palms; since I got the fuck out of that shit-small town; since I starting making every year better than the last.

It’s been so long since I thought of you early in the morning; clouds ten years late heavy with the tears shed for a life gone too soon.

It’s been so long since I thought of you and said: it was selfish leaving us that way.

xoxo,

M.L. H’art

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

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

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

Bite my Thumb.

I toss the butt of my cigarette on the lawn of the Fort Knox Methodist Church and bite my thumb at God.

My mother – she did not raise me to be spiteful, but I am angry for no reason.

Frustrated at the sun shining in my eyes, I shuffle another smoke from my pack and fumble the lighter from my pocket as I cross an intersection without looking both ways, causing a white rusted work truck – gas cans and loose wrenches slamming to the front of the bed – to come to a quick stop.

I am immortal on days when the wind is just right and it’s not so cold and the perfect tune pumps through the cheap ear buds I bought on sale – the same ones that, if not sitting just-so, shock my ear drum with enough electricity to make me swear out loud on the street corner – the days when I understand, you and me, we’re not so different.

Of course, your past, it’s not quite the same storyline – yours is glossy pictures and sappy songs and saved birthday cards and glowing memories.

I am jealous – mine is cocaine hangovers and morning after bruises and tear-wet pillows and “I’m sorry” two minutes too late.

Your new girl, I bet she’s pretty – after school special pretty, all blond hair and cute giggle and pretend morals. I bet she’s popular – teen magazine popular, all Friday night parties and saved lunch room table and doting offers: “let me, babe.”

I bet she’s boring – wet cardboard boring, all uninterested in learning, experiencing, living, laughing. I bet she’s easy to please – bobble head nod: “oh yes, if you want to. Oh I don’t care, only if you do.”

The doormat I wipe my feet on.

**

Down on the platform waiting for the train, we are all performers.

I pop my coat collar and stand wide legged, straight backed and take inventory.

New shoes and old coat, he paces back and forth checking the time again and again – a big rush for the long wait when, at the end of the date, she’ll say: “let’s just be friends.”

Androgyny perched on the edge of the bench fights the urge to cross legs, ankles, fingers – stay cool.

Hardass twisting bent baseball cap left, right, 180, 360, he can’t remember which train’ll get him home.

Student, lonely nose shoved in book, salty fingers shovelling cheese chips between raw lips, nervous mouse eyes jumping back and forth and back again, she’s wondering if she’ll miss her favourite late night true crime drama.

The train blows in and we all scatter – our performance interrupted by life.

**

Shambling away from my stop, I walk head down against the wind. When I run into you I nearly knock you over, my shoulder a solid thump against your chest.

We head into the bar.

The awkward hello: a crisscross of words over the liquor lacquered table, the shine of our consonants bouncing off bar grubby pints. We are thirteen again – second guessing our intentions, wondering if he feels the same way she feels the same way I feel. I am inspired to walk right out the door and not look back because I don’t want to see your puppy dog eyes when I say the words: “it was just a phase.”

You and me, playing the game, we smile and pretend nice – we are sharing our bucket and shovel in the sand before lunch even though I want to push your face into the rotting shore seaweed and make you say “give.”

You hug me and you smile and you say: “I promise baby, we’ll always be friends,” smirking the same way you do when you tell your new girl behind closed doors I am the worst thing to happen to you since your wisdom teeth were pulled.

We order another round. I drink mine down fast, before you even sip the foam from the lip of your glass.

In the morning you’ll remember the fragments of my smell, the shine of my smile, the ratty shoes with the frayed laces I wore. You won’t remember my clever conversation, my witty comebacks, my biting, bitter laugh. You’ll remember the score and the fourth glass and the impossibility of us having such a good time.

I’ll only remember the awkwardness lurking dark and weird in the corner, the one I believe I created.

xoxo
M.L. H’art

Conversations with Dad (Canto II)

Choking its neck, his plump red-raw fingers – small flaps of torn skin pulled loose around the cuticles – curl tighter and tighter. He tilts the bottle to his lips, a light amber trickle dampening his beard. Swallowing loudly, a gush of afternoon-warm beer swills in his gullet; taking pause to catch his breath, he pushes wheezing stale air through the last of his teeth – only three calcium soldiers stand stained, nicotine and alcohol pocking their once strong enamel armour.

Wiping a paw across a wrinkled brow, his white widow-peaked hair revealing dark weather-leathered scalp, he averts eye contact. Lecturing the carpet as he speaks, his words fall into the snags of the flat orange-yellow flowers.

“I won’t be running for office any time soon,” his laughter deteriorating into a fit of phlegm-heavy coughs. “Do what you will,” a hand covering his mouth as he struggles to catch his breath, three sharp sucks of air kicking at his chest bone.

“I get to see what you’re going to do with this before you show anyone, right?” his hand waving away invisible flies when he says the word “this.”

“Like, editor’s rights before publishing? I should have some creative control over the way you paint my life. Then again, you don’t know the half of it. Not like you’ll share the worst of my story,” a wobbly chuckle, the sound of gravel squished under a worn-soft running shoe.

“Don’t matter much to me. I’ve done the worst I can with this life,” absently tapping a heavy gold ring against the lip of the table, his feet shuffle under the table as he readjusts his weight to fit a chair too small for his decades-widened girth. A hand patting his rotund tummy, he struggles as his lifts his weight. He adjusts the collar of his plaid driving jacket once steady on his feet.

“Nope, don’t matter much to me. Let’s go have a smoke.”

Outside, talking with a smoke in his hand, he is animated. He tells stories of a friend named Weasel who got them kicked out of the strip joint in Winnipeg the time Weasel tried to fall asleep in the girls’ pile of blankets set to the side of the stage. Or the time Weasel shoved a half empty beer bottle into the open fly of his pants and asked all them girls to take a taste. The stuff of urban legend.

Gasping the life out of the last flakes of nicotine caught between his finger and the filter, he tosses the butt to the ground, grinding it cold with the heel of his steel-toeds. Coughing again, the shudder shaking giant shoulders, his broad height becomes round and soft, old and worn. He throws open the door and yells on his way back to his seat: “Sweetheart, bring another round of beers, will ya?”

xoxo

M.L. H’art

Go.

I am a fish.

A great, big yellow pike. Eyeshine mirroring the glint of light falling in slow layers below the surface of ink dark water, I am gills and fins and olive gold scales.

I am slicked by a current carrying me along shallow shore lines, just out of reach of your lure. Unaware of my own cold heart, I am an ectothermic experiment in love and loss.

I am a fish.

A ripe pink salmon, dorsal fin flapping the wisdom of rivers and oceans, intuitively defying death by defying life: a refusal to spawn to die.

I am a last meal on the river Boyne, escaping punishment by frustratingly swimming upstream, but suffering the consequence of a tapered tail by the hand of Thor.

I am a fish.

One half a pair of shining gold fish, I lap the shores of happiness caught inside the reflection of a glass bowl, an endless cyclic swim taunting freedom just the other side.

I am a fish.

The intuitive minnow slipping in and out of your dream current.

I am a fish.

Ichthus. Matsya. Ea. Aphrodite escaping Typhon. The spawn of Mangala. Divine Mother granting you fertility. Fionn mac Cumhaill, giver of knowledge.

I am a fish.

xoxo
M.L. H’art

Gretel Says.

The receiver smashed into plastic cradle, a resounding silence filling the space inside my ear where your voice sat only a moment ago, I say: “Please don’t.”

Ringing with the echo of all the things I left behind when I asked you to leave such a long time ago, my ears begin to burn: a red hot awkwardness crawling in through the canal, kicking at the drum, slipping down the tube into my throat until my tongue smacks of your tinny aftertaste. Trying to defend myself to walls staring blankly at me, I say: “It was nothing. It meant nothing.”

Stomping my feet, I am surprised by the protein-crack of eggshells, the same ones I tiptoed over when you raised your voice too loud. To compensate for all the noise, I whisper: “Shh, you don’t understand.”

Between the accusation and the unforgiveness, you didn’t leave much time for me to tell you: “I can explain!” Between the distrust and suspect, you didn’t leave much time for me to say: “I came back because I thought I loved you.”

Staring straight ahead, pinpoint eyes glazed with the familiar slick of liberally slathered guilt, I am leading down the same path where I’ve already dropped a line of homeward bound crumbs. “It’s all so familiar,” I muse.

But the me I met when I left you, the me you decided wasn’t for you, she’s kicking at my gut, raising her voice, punching my throat – quick jabs bringing out indistinguishable sounds: a groan, a growl, a bark.

The me I met when I left you, she’s holding a road map. On the map, there’s a clearly defined line. The line? It’s leading me in the opposite direction of you.

The me I met, she says: “This isn’t about you.”

xoxo,
M.L. H’art