Substitute for Love #2
She doesn’t say she will never love him as in hot sleepless nights by the old train tracks, or her dreaming of some bad boy, brooding, mumbling, cornering women with his sexy animal inarticulateness. With him, there will be no bruised skin over a deep wound. She likes the little man who butters his bread with his left hand, and smiles when she’s withholding an embarrassing answer. Why hurt anyone who gives gifts of saltwater taffy and tiny sculptures of Parisian dance hall girls? She imagines the real ones, limber and strong, not the fragile ceramic imitations, who might have carried Toulouse-Lautrec to his bed, when he was too drunk with love. Most of the little man's questions hint at depth, the ability to not breathe for long periods of time, the risk of losing things.
Sometimes on a sticky star-studded night, he looks up at the sky and remarks that we are surrounded by so much space. Yet what are we to do? When she finally breaks down and tells him about the man who cut her so deep that she bled from bed to bed, that some kinds of love, like his, are too precious, too fragile to be questioned, he tries to hold her and he is off balance. She steadies him. Her embrace is stronger, more encompassing. She listens to his faint heartbeat, feels his spongy bones. Whatever is left is her own space, an enormous room where she dances en pointe and keeps falling, keeps breaking that same tiny bone in her ankle.
Substitute for Love #4
He couldn't have the pale blue-eyed woman he read about all his life, lingering in twilight, the one who spun silky bobcats in the deepest con of the night. Supposedly. So he remodeled himself on his own lies, wore pants a size too small in the crotch, patted his face with liquid wrinkle remover. The next woman he dated was into expensive wines, traveling to The Motherland Calls in Volgograd, paying a therapist in whose presence she referred to herself as "a yellow island of one." Underneath all that make-up, she stated in a soft and flat tone, there was jaundice and waning sun. Feeling the drain of so many fragmented memories, of underground loves never completely silenced, the remodeled man asked her "How do you know if you're in love?" She said that sleeping without that person means finding splinters in your own bed. One night, he reached inside her. He found a hole that he mistook for an island. The next day at work, he kissed the cheek of a cleaning woman. He heard her son had drowned.
She doesn’t say she will never love him as in hot sleepless nights by the old train tracks, or her dreaming of some bad boy, brooding, mumbling, cornering women with his sexy animal inarticulateness. With him, there will be no bruised skin over a deep wound. She likes the little man who butters his bread with his left hand, and smiles when she’s withholding an embarrassing answer. Why hurt anyone who gives gifts of saltwater taffy and tiny sculptures of Parisian dance hall girls? She imagines the real ones, limber and strong, not the fragile ceramic imitations, who might have carried Toulouse-Lautrec to his bed, when he was too drunk with love. Most of the little man's questions hint at depth, the ability to not breathe for long periods of time, the risk of losing things.
Sometimes on a sticky star-studded night, he looks up at the sky and remarks that we are surrounded by so much space. Yet what are we to do? When she finally breaks down and tells him about the man who cut her so deep that she bled from bed to bed, that some kinds of love, like his, are too precious, too fragile to be questioned, he tries to hold her and he is off balance. She steadies him. Her embrace is stronger, more encompassing. She listens to his faint heartbeat, feels his spongy bones. Whatever is left is her own space, an enormous room where she dances en pointe and keeps falling, keeps breaking that same tiny bone in her ankle.
Substitute for Love #4
He couldn't have the pale blue-eyed woman he read about all his life, lingering in twilight, the one who spun silky bobcats in the deepest con of the night. Supposedly. So he remodeled himself on his own lies, wore pants a size too small in the crotch, patted his face with liquid wrinkle remover. The next woman he dated was into expensive wines, traveling to The Motherland Calls in Volgograd, paying a therapist in whose presence she referred to herself as "a yellow island of one." Underneath all that make-up, she stated in a soft and flat tone, there was jaundice and waning sun. Feeling the drain of so many fragmented memories, of underground loves never completely silenced, the remodeled man asked her "How do you know if you're in love?" She said that sleeping without that person means finding splinters in your own bed. One night, he reached inside her. He found a hole that he mistook for an island. The next day at work, he kissed the cheek of a cleaning woman. He heard her son had drowned.
