|
Aaron Pond
I Bathe between Lips and Linings
I hear hollering. My head angles up; a mosquito leaves my chin and before me, dresses are laid out like a body could fill them. I sit while burning skin in a tub. It's not finished until the reddened and raw skin begins to shiver and wrinkle. It finishes, and I begin to spin. I swatted at the mosquito and it flew away. My body is blubber, and each turn is a flop in a puddle. The bath wraps around me. The shower curtain is porcelain now. This is all now. There are the dresses and they are soaking. There are the dresses and they are mosquitos, sucking my blood. I swat as the gears move me. The light is warm, and it holds my curves neatly, before breaking. "It's fine china", I can hear it swatting me. I fly away. The dresses fly away. Each sequin is sewing, as I feared. The cement begins to turn the bath, rancid, sewing its own reality. The bathroom is a gamete, falling inside itself. It cannot stop. It's breathing.
This is all now and my lips are juicy, they're kissing the dresses and telling them what is compelling me. My arms are folded and I'm sitting on the carpet, telling the girl in the mirror, that there are girls and that they believe, I can fit in a dress. I pick up a dress and it's dark red. On anyone else it's a tube skirt. It can't go past my belly. I wrap the cotton around my arms. It's a sleeve for both of them. I look in the mirror and see the girl in the mirror become an octopus. I look down and see a bond between my arms, all of it candy.
Octopuses kill the clams that killed the goat that father bought for a land crab that crawled through my bathroom window and reached into my ear and took that space away. There is a hole where the crab reached in. It's not meant for output. I screamed through my earhole. I forgot I was free. I forgot. I forgot. I forgot to sing, when as when I'm curving sensually, my own body, wrapping the cement.
I get up, water clings to my hairy skin. Underneath is fat, is warm, regulating, comforting, squishy and slamming into the air brakes. I am an owl and I unravel and I look in the mirror and there is a boy throwing his hairy arms across his hairy chest. He kisses the mirror and I run into the door. I fall on my ass. I fall into the hole. My head never hits the ground.
The windows are screaming. They tell me how tree branches fight, they scratch, but they never mean it. It's a moonlight bouncing between dark greens and greys. There are palmetto bugs scurrying out of toilets, and I hear screaming between men, "help me", but they can't stop all the porcelain breaking. Their tile only dissolves and eats oranges beneath the earth, where all the water goes. Where all the water is, I'm fluid too. I'm in a hole and I'm digging down.
He reaches up to my chin and grabs it. We were going to try something new, and I flew and flew and flew. I distanced. I embraced with my arms, wrapping my mind around the blinds covering the room in shadow. I forgot I was here to be happy, and I forgot who he was. And I said yes. I was a boy then. And each dress felt like a trap.
Dark Cloud Get-Down
It poured and my clothes clung to my skin while I pantomimed grinding booties in swirls. I danced in the blight, nature with a for sale sign. There were no trees, but grass and puddles and the hum of power lines and the screaming of mosquitos, and my socks were soggy from the swamp water because there wasn't any room in the aquifers, air, or on my skin.
Pistons slammed. Necks are rubber trees bent by passing traffic cause I humped the wind with a groovy move back and slide. It was gaseous commotion, but all press is promotion. I had ascended to a lower plane.
Though, I lacked nipple clamps and a tye-dye tee, I was not weird, unpalatable though, a commodity for sure. Just another goonied-up teen, freed on trespassing by insanity: Delirium Induced Boogey Fever. That was "later" in the thoughts of shiny automobiles on decayed roads, slick with rain.
My face had developed a sheen by then. G-d's tears sweat, oil, and hair product warranted attention. Attention warrants judgment. A warrant was put out for my arrest. I sloshed and splashed in a field of unmet dreams. One day, a condo will be erected on the spot of my shenanigans. How dare I shimmee in entitled ecstasy. I am a delay.
My skin is red, in love with fat fabric (it's just water weight), but it's chaffing, too much too soon, but it cannot stop itself from holding what is closest to it.
It was sad when the 5'O came to rain on my parade. "Later", I would say at my trial that my words make no charade, that I flung my arms and stamped my feet cause I was told to, that I was sick. But they made me broken. Just parts of me. Though... I'm in parts, I'm broken.
Rubberized batons have give to them, one of them gave me a broken leg. I screamed, I kept dancing, this time like a beggar on the ground. More! More! And more batons blessed me with gifts and my skin turned to black and blue with appreciation. "Later", they asked questions.
"That's private property."
"You are dangerous."
"Your unpredictable behavior merited physical force and aggressive detention."
Questions like that. Very illuminating. I asked questions at myself while my face lay in the mud. "If a koa-la-la starts to paw at my Euca, do I slap that fucker down?" I never thought of answers, they were too tiring.
After "later", I learned a lesson.
Aaron Pond makes smashy noises in South Florida. He scares tourists and administrators. In the fall, he will be attending New College of Florida. His work is forthcoming in theNewerYork.
|