Fiction 1.0
I'm calling this fiction, but I'd still like to say it's poefictiontry... anyway.
I've realized that throughout the writing process, I'll hold onto a few lines that I enjoy, or an image, or realization, whatever kernal that tends to holdfast within me, and then drop those kernals in whichever each piece of writing I'm working on to see how they fit. I wonder if anyone has been reading these strange blog posts... about writing--who has the time, really? I wonder if this has caught you off guard and if you're confused as to why the writing that you're reading doesn't really flow anymore with the ideas that were (not) floating around in your...could pick out the lines I've latched onto. It'sss pretty easy.
Anyway, this is my newest short fiction that works with a poem/two different narrative perspectives. That's all I'll say:
It Started With the Fucking
A grueling eight hours spent over dice and booze, they bend themselves around a table out in his workshop, spending their Friday evening into Saturday’s morning, playing Yatzee. They drip sweat, profane and saccharine, laced with a weeks worth of silence and pent up rage towards a failing marriage, but the need to Fuck, the need to release heavy on their shoulders.
Beginning with broken foreplay of tenuous laughter, they eagerly fill their mouths whole each time a drink is brought to their lips. They’ve shared the same bed for the past six years but their hands shake nervously, gripping dice in one, the table or their knee with the other. Their backs arc, stiffly erect in a sad, desperate position of pre-meditated sex, balancing the weighted rawness of shame at their hips.
Leaning in to mark the score, glances are cast and bypassed between bangs, a shirt collar, and skin. Lines that mark her cheek, quiver like an impatient little girl grown old. As she looks to the hair ruffled on his forearm, muscles in her chin pull with a smile that sits on the edge of a sneer. His gentle hand rocks back and forth from the bottom of his knee to the top, kneading patience under his palm. He knows this woman, but drinks until he no longer knows himself.
Sloshed, slurred and vacant, eyes pour deep into pools under each other’s lids. Sometimes they close and a condensed hatred sits salty upon her brow. Bringing his thumb to it, he touches her too soft and she laughs. He’s hurt, but so is she because he’ll never understand the swallowed avocado seed of her father’s abuse that sits inside of her belly. Retracting his hand, he doesn’t know that he’s responsible for holding everything, and nothing, but her laugh keeps his gaze lowered and he misses the command. Instead, he slumps his shoulders over, mopily, only to quickly readjust them, awkwardly shifting in his seat. His right shoulder stays crooked in a tentative confusion, unsure of what to do with his hands, his voice, his body. Extending a long finger, browned and curious, then covering her knee with his palm, he begins to delicately knead it.
Sighing, impatiently misunderstood, her hand falls from resting against her temple, slapping down on top of his hand. Keeping her eyes closed, her body tipsily sways while thinking that soon they will be fucking, and then he will fall asleep with her nipple in his mouth and this is his version of romance. Tentatively reaching his hands up to her lower back, he looks at her while she sways backwards, envisioning that soon she’ll be in bed moving similarly like this but towards orgasm and he’ll kiss her chest, then sleep against it.
The Fucking
It shouldn’t have happened.
no child should be shown the sounds of abandonment
how it drums the hollows of a cage
that is your very chest-
that when your heart beats fast ever
you are stolen to day-dreams
filled with malicious music of everything that pounded just so-
the doors closing
their boozed feet coming down the hall
in your bedroom to see if you’re sleeping--
too swallowed with obese need and emptiness
to see that you’re faking it--
the bed against the wall,
his scrotum against her ass, and her voice sounds
like the scary movies that you weren’t allowed to watch
then his voice,
harsh, heavy, horrible.
“Do you think she heard us?”
“Who cares.”
Who cares, he said
Those words bounded across the three foot wide hallway
between the two open doors
into the bedroom of his daughter
where they bounced off the walls and into her ears.
In that moment
she knew she wasn’t forgotten
but was forgotten enough
to have innocence stolen.
It shouldn’t have happened.
no six year old should wake up
to look at their naked body in the mirror and wonder
if it’s going to hurt- it sounded like it did.
no mirror should tell a child their body is for sex
and that sex is aggressive
but my god- it always was.
She looked down at her private parts and felt shame.
Someone should have swarmed in
wrapped her in blankets
wrapped her in their arms and held her
kissed her forehead and cheeks, made her warm tea while she dressed.
Someone should have told her
she was beautiful then
that if someone touches her any harder than soft
they shouldn’t touch her at all
that if their eyes are closed when they touch her, run.
Someone should have told her all of this
even if it didn’t happen.
but no one said anything.
no one said anything, ever.
So now she gets fucked up alone
wondering if she just loves differently
or if she’s unloveable
or if her love is love at all.
