Inventory With Petrichor & Blackouti. freelancing I don't know what she wanted that summer we stitched our dresses into ourselves but I know I kept looping needles into my skin and smiling at a camera, sweating a little in the small of my back. Each stitch made me feel a little better, or so I told myself. Each made a tiny contusion in the sky; a hum in my backteeth. Each was a footstep, a new black spot on a lung. I know I got jacked three times and was only drunk one of them. I don't remember the faces of the women I slept with or the men who robbed me. I know each hour clicking over was a little needle of gin. Once I waved my hand through the air and combed the clouds straight as Venetian blinds just so the slats would fall splintered on her body as she posed for a selfie. Most days started with an idea, then continued with twisting it until it snapped in two. ii. last exit I want to know a girl well enough to know when she's drunk just by the look in her eyes. I'll bury my head in the sand of her graveyard at the edge of our village. What that girl leaves in her glass I'll suck of the rinds. I'll kiss someone else with her pith in my teeth. iii. girl working the bumper sticker booth in the Harris Teeter parking lot A whitegirl like a plane going down but still shining. Whiteboys who died curled inside yellow ribbons shellacked to the back of mama's sputtering Olds. Girls who fell over state lines and got up running. Girls pouring Domino sugar straight from packets to throats. Learning how fast ice melts against wrists or last drinks. Forgetting how quick hydrangeas & fruitflies bloom. The past just some seeds in her teeth. Dead cousins she sold to get out of work. Deadbolt stories spat out like come in her teeth. Forgetting the future like keys. Forgetting those months she let a man tie her up for money and another for free. The past just going to the matinee to find the parking lot dark after. Her skin just a ghost I've gotten so used to I'm not afraid anymore. Nina Puro's work is forthcoming or recently appeared in BETTER: Culture and Lit, H_ngm_n, Hobart, Indiana Review, Jellyfish, Prelude and other places. A chapbook, Two Truths & A Lie, will drop from dancing girl press in 2015. Nina lives in Brooklyn, works in publishing, and is bad at thinking of clever third-person quips to put in places like this. |