Bender

I don't know if spring is traditionally the time for bittersweet breakups and sudden and ill advised hookups, but this one has been for me. Celibacy, take me and do with me what you will.

My lungs hurt from smoking to keep my hands busy and my mouth shut. I have bills. Lots of bills. Bills that I can't pay. I've been looking for an office job for 3 months with no luck, and now I have to take a food/beverage job just to make my payments. I already have a job and an internship, and I've already done the three job thing. It makes me miserable. It make me want to crawl into a hole and forget that I ever loved anyone. I'm totally disinterested in reliving that type of life. After 6 years of school and $100,000 dollars, I can't find gainful employment. It is not for want of trying. I know that no one is going to pay me for my stories. They're not polished enough. I'm just asking to teach kids how to write poems or to copyedit dry business texts. Jeeez.

I've been drinking (which may be becoming synonymous with thinking) a lot lately about the early twenties (I've been thinking about the mid twenties, really. I am in my mid twenties. I am an actual adult with opinions and a home, but no sustainable job. No retirement fund. No property.). So, world of youth and older, I pose this question to you: what do I do? Write. Yes. I am doing that right now. No, Marshall. Write a book. Take all six of those stories and revise them. Then write six more. Right. This is what I say to myself before during and after the drinking. Well, where can I hide it? Cyberspace works. Now, instead of writing a story, here I am journaling about alcohol and jobs and debt and credit and a girl with nice tortoise shell looking glasses and long hair who wants to share intimate secrets may or may not be deep/ profound. But this is how I see that working out: poorly.

Culling

This poem is two years old.

Removed

A woman friend of mine
is sleeping in Boston
dreaming of how to remove
me from her.
She's reworking her concept;
Her tattoo
stretches from her
right shoulder to her
left breast,
covers formerly blank
skin with
tiny branches, shaded bark,
a trunk identical
to the one
supporting the full form
of my tattoo.
Stripped winter bare,
tendril branches
crawl up from
my right breast,
grip
my shoulder.
I scratch,
feel her tissue
raised thin puckered
colored in.

Progress

I wrote some stories. Months ago. A year ago. Years ago. I'm going to put them here. I'm going to revise them here. Probably.

Calvin

Maggie makes mittens. They’re good for extra cash if she can find buyers, and this week, no takers. Maggie’s footsteps mixed with the sound of bicycle tires masticating pavement. She stepped into an alcove in front of the Harold Washington library. Fifteen foot archways in dark shadow for the night. She stopped to light a cigarette. It was six o’clock. She had an hour before her boyfriend would meet her there. In the breath before lighting her cigarette she smelled toothpaste on her cuff and exhaust as a bus heaved itself from its stop. She released a breath looked up at the passers by. Young black women laughing and singing out. Teenaged boys with corn rows. An old Asian man in nurse shoes. Just to her right stood a wide sturdy black man wearing black construction pants. He had bruises on his hands.

Maggie looked from Calvin’s brown worn callused face still soft toward the windows of the monolithic building in front of her. It reminded her of a Magritte painting—gargoyles and moon reflected in the windows across the street. The street lights bronzing the already yellowing leaves in front of her. She knotted yarn with a crochet hook and Calvin looked down at her. He held and unlit cigarette. Maggie held up her lighter and lit it for him. The man said thank you and turned to face the street.

“Hey Captain,” he said to a little white man in a sailor cap.

Eight or nine homeless men with bags of personal affects and runny noses and tattered gloves made their way to the entrance of the library. Maggie assumed that they were there to get out of the cold. She assumed Calvin was one of them. He looked back toward her and said, “What’s your name?” “Maggie.” “How old you is? Look like you just a baby.” She answered. “Girl, I can’t understand what you saying. You talk so fast. You ain’t from here, huh? Where you from?” “Texas. I’m a mumbler.” “Yeah, you is.” “Are you from Chicago?” “Nope. I’m from the south.” “Well, how did you end up here?” She was really asking, ‘how did you end up homeless,’ but he looked at her with the almost lucid eyes of a sick man. “What you making there? “Mittens.” “Those for your man?”

Maggie bit the smile on her lips. “Tell him, he better treat you right. Ought to treat you like a queen. Some of these mens—“ “Yes, he treats me well.” “You married?” Maggie was surprised at the question, but didn’t let on. It seemed strange to her that someone in her early twenties could be married. “I was married for a long time.” he said, pushing down on his stomach like it hurt him. “You can make skull caps? You’ll make one for me? It is ‘bout to get cold out here.”

Maggie looked at the yarn in her hands. White isn’t a very good color for gloves, she thought. “Yes, I’ll make you a hat, right now.” “How much you want for that. I’ll give you a little bit for your trouble.” “I just want to know how you ended up here. What are you doing in Chicago?” “You sure you don’t want nothing for it? I can give you a little bit of money.” “I believe you could, but I don’t need it.” “Of course you believe me, I ain’t given you no reason not to.”

On the State street, Maggie heard more arthritic busses, car doors closing, high heels splashing water. She could hear the slow procession of trains, the redline grumbling to the ground beneath her, the brown line, snaking round and clacking above her. And she looped a tie of yarn around her hook.

“I got a job here. I’m from Georgia. Grew up on a lot of land. Wasn’t always out here tryin’ to run from the cold. Now, I ain’t given you no reason not to believe me. So you work on that skull-cap for me, and I’ll answer your question.

“I moved up to Chicago in ’79. Yeah, you lookin’ at me like I’m old, baby girl. Hehehe. You musta been born ‘bout then, but I already had me two children and a woman. Well, she got sick, and they got grown, and I moved up here.

My wife. We wasn’t never really married but we lived like it. She got sick. Started complaining of the flu. Kept touching her side and her middle in her sleep. I got worried, but she didn’t want anything to do with a doctor. Well then I got it, the same symptoms. I went to the doctor. Man said, “these days, there’s all kind of viruses spreading.” He asked me if I’m gay, say there this HIV going around. I said, no, I don’t fuck no mens. He asked me if I partied---oooh, we used to get down. Yeah. We used to go to the disco. Place called Braille—that’s what the call the writing for blind folks. Makes sense. It was so dark in there you had to walk around by feel. That is where I met my Martha.

Calvin smiled and wiped his lips with the hand that held his cigarette. That place was big as a skating rink, warm with bodies bouncing round to James Brown and the Commodores. All kinda treats. Well, Martha, my pretty dark-skinned girl with flashing white teeth and her big proud nappy hair spread in a dome round her head. Look like she’d get lost in a shadow somebody didn’t grab her.

Well that doctor man asked me if my wife or I had ever had other “partners.” I said, hell nah, I hadn’t. And no, my Martha wouldn’t. We’d been together then for, oh, I don’t know. Maybe about five years, and I couldn’t imagine she mess around on me. The doctor went on ahead and tested my blood, said I had some virus. Not that gay man virus, Hepatitis C. You mix blood to get that. I was sitting there on that table, mad with rage. My heart broke right there on that table. Couldn’t believe she’d bring that mess home to me—to my bed. Well, I sat right there and remembered when I met her.

Maggie pulled a length of yarn from her back pack and looked up at Calvin. He’d stopped talking for a long pause. She put the hook and yarn in the space between her bag and her hip, and pulled a cigarette out of her pocket. The evening had grown a little closer to night. The blue of the sky deepened, and the early evening crowds had thinned. Now college students ruled the sidewalk. All of the homeless fellows tucked warmly away in the stacks of the library. Just she and Calvin stood in the alcove. They stood shielded from the wind. She lit the cigarette, put her lighter away, and pulled out her phone to look at the clock. Six thirty. Another train crawled by. “Hey,” Maggie said. “Are you okay?” She worried now that she’d dredged up something too painful for him. He blinked hard hiding the blue rings around his brown eyes. “Yeah, boy I remember the night I met her.

“I watched my friend Athena walking fast to the bar behind Martha’s booth. All I could see was that yellow scarf that Athena always had on. She always had it on top of her head---her hair wrapped up like a baby is swaddled. Athena bent to pick something up from in front of the bar, and then I saw some little young buck make eyes at my Martha. Course at the time, I didn’t know here name. I was whiskey warm, you know, and all the lights in the place were purple, slow and crystal clear. I felt like my eyes were looking down on the crowd, while my body waded through what felt like lukewarm ocean water. I toked with my boys before I walked into the club, and I was high as the moon. Then I heard a little screech. Must have been a crunch just before that, cause I could see Martha holding her hand, looking like some little bird was dying in it. And that no good next to her was justa smilin’ and rolling his eyes back in his head, like he was ready to cum. He must been on something good, but I never did find out what it was. I walked over to them, and took her little hand in mine. Wasn’t a bad cut. She had a trickles of blood all over her palm, moving in tiny rivulets down the brown of her palm lines. I asked her to come with me. She put her pocket book under her arm and stood up from the booth. We left that buck laughing. I crimped my nose up at him, and slid my hand around her waist as I led; she wore an orange and green skin-tight cocktail dress. We walked under the exit sign, and had to dance slowly, through the crowd. I remember Otis Redding was playing, and her hips were pressed against mine, and I held her hand up above our heads til we made it to the exit.

That’s what I was remembering when that doctor told me what she’d done. He said it took six months for the symptoms to show. She’d been sick for two, so I knew she’d been cheating on me. Well, I went home, and there she was lying on my bed. I took to the dressers. We had two big chests of drawers, one on each side of the room. It was the middle of the after noon, and the sun was shining through the slats of the blinds on our windows. She looked just as regal as a lioness, but she was filthy, and I had to go. I stood and watched her sleeping. I picked up some red nail polish she kept on her dresser, and I poured it all over her hands. It seeped into our blanket, but I didn’t care. I just packed my bags and left her there. I got on a train that evening. To this day I don’t now how she is. I’m sure she know why I left, but I didn’t tell here where I went. I didn’t know where I was gonna go.

Maggie lifted her face to Calvin’s, then looked back down at her hands. She slipped the cloth from the hook, and said, “Here, try this on.” The gritty soft fabric felt electric on his chapped fingers, but he slid the cap on over his woolen hair. He smiled, and said, “I bet I look sharp.” Maggie, smiled and said, “Yeah you do.” She looked at her phone again. Five to seven. “Well, it was nice to talk to you. Thank you for sharing with me. Stay warm.” “Thank you, little sister. You take care.” Maggie turned south to search for that broad butterscotch face with the full smile she’d been looking forward to seeing all day, and there he was walking toward her, rolled cigarette in hand.