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Romantic Love
Delayed Reactions
After the hammer slams down on your thumb / or the hurtful word penetrates, / a stunned moment follows.
October 2009Confessions From A Conversion Van
The owner of the sports bar knows I sleep in the parking lot on weeknights. He doesn’t seem to mind. I’m a curiosity — the homeless professor. He thinks I must be one of a kind, but I’m not so sure. Anyway, I’m not even a professor. More like an adjunct instructor. I’d move closer to work, but I could never afford to live in Martinsburg now that it’s becoming a D.C. bedroom community.
October 2009
Manifesto
In April I believe only in lilac, dogwood, and wisteria — such suddenness and color, indecency and mess, / always opening and opening, and fading, and falling away.
August 2009Suburban Bitch Cruise
Virginia and I were in an English-literature class together during my senior year at the State University of New York at Albany. She wore black-rimmed “cafe girl” glasses and had one of those bright, pale faces that slips back and forth from plain to attractive. Altogether her style was a mixture of grunge and hippie, and I found Virginia sexy as hell. During the week that we covered James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, she and I united against the close-minded faction in class who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, comprehend how one man could love another. We chastised them on breaks and shouted them down during discussions. At the end of class one evening, Virginia discovered that I, too, liked getting high, and she smiled — her face alive with mischief — and counted off three words on her fingers: Suburban. Bitch. Cruise.
July 2009
Brightest Corners
My sponsor told me this would happen. “Temptation comes from the brightest corners and at the most unexpected times,” he said. I washed my hands and face in cold water and flushed the toilet to make it appear like a genuine bathroom visit. I walked out of the bathroom, said I had to go. She scrambled her sorrys and for the first time in my life I meant it when I said, “It’s not you, it’s me.”
June 2009A New Painting Of Marianne
I wasn’t my idea to call Marianne. I hadn’t talked to her since she’d shown up drunk on our porch one summer night and tried to kiss me in front of my wife. That was four years earlier, just before Jenny and I had moved from Phoenix to Tucson. Now we were back in Phoenix and looking to buy a house.
May 2009
This Late Hour
She stopped taking the medicines when it had become clear they were no longer of any use. They had crowded her dreams with demons and angels from some nocturnal Disneyland. Now that she was done with them, her dreams were her own.
April 2009
Sunbeams
January 2009Love is when a girl puts on perfume and a boy puts on shaving cologne and they go out and smell each other.
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