I believed so
completely in words, their concision. He
liked to make out behind the garage where he worked.
Always in the dark, often in the snow.
Wedged in the passenger seat, the heat
spewed in a plume, like hell, like eternity. He started a
smile & assured me, “This is a straight date.” If I was straight I wouldn’t have
been there. I’d have married Erin O’Donnell. I’d still be in Tiffin. An
occasional snowflake collided with the windshield & perished silently in its
oily breath. How is it that anything even exists? “This is what straight guys
do on dates,” he repeated to remind us somehow that we were normal.
Later, I
listened to his heartbeat & thought how
fickle. How there was never a moment before his
body. How delicious his peculiar ribs, his tongue dislodged from his body. How
his heat diffused through his clothes, so that sometimes he only existed as so
much sticky flesh. How if I could I’d have crept inside his bones, near enough
to be his blood. I’d have delved so straight into his marrow he’d have needed
his teeth to scrape me out.
