∧
font size
∨

One Poem  

Lauren Bender

*Home *Closet *Heart

* Nothing comes close to communicating with you.

* Though I might take a canvas and fling color across it as if I can arrive somewhere beautiful.

* Soft puppets on each hand, face each other, develop voices, then thoughts, also thoughts, then voices.

* In the car, I create little audio clips of all the sentences I want to scream at you.

* Though the words are strange, they are also, of course, sound.

* I’ll just try to worry through myself, through the night.

* See this mirror. See this hand. See this water. See my wet palm. See the slam slam slam.

* The running and streaking is nice. An imprint is nice. Almost like a relief. Like an almost.

* There is music, and music does not require composition.

* Hi, I’m La- my name is Lil, I’m an alcoholic.

* You have only to assign me a sponsor, and I will never again not need sponsoring.

* In bed with your considerate caution, disaster of an ex-husband, and phone tree.

* What if I say I do not want the goddamn fucking chip? No. To the car with that one.

* Where does one go in the middle of the night when one needs to go and has never gone?

* To sit at tables as if one has no bed, to fill blank notebooks with fake love letters.

* It has to be like this, because it is like this. Flashes and what the fucks.

* Build things! Assemble furniture! Hammer and frustrate and chuck and pound!

* I do, at times, lie on the floor like one who has no bed. I lie on the belt.

* Have been staring deep into the carpet since a child who didn’t know she was a child.

* I never asked her if my world could be small and I could be happy, both at once.

* I never asked a thing.

* One time I got so drunk I hated my comfortable house for years. Everyone in it.

* Everyone in it what? How does it go? I hate and I love? I am tortured?

* Thank you for diminishing me, for believing I can’t. I can’t. I can’t do this.

* Without selfies, would we ever clean the immediate area around the body?

* When I need you, it is never the right time for you to speak to me.

* I’m out of here.

* Surely at some point, I will grow out of the fucks needed for endless projects.

* I have not been able to figure out how my character can talk to the others.

* How the other characters can talk to each other.

* How talking works. How to make talking work. How is it supposed to work. What now.

* Go and go until I hit a Taco Bell, until I hit a highway south.

* Until the snow is gone.

* Far enough but where...?

* This time I’m going to assign joy to a month of the year. Be a numbers and games girl.

* What am I supposed to say when I call? That I want to drink?

* That I want to do something bad?

* Everyone knows these things already.