Erin Belieu

When the man behind the counter said, “You pay by the orifice,” what could we do but purchase them all? Ah, Sandy, you were clearly the deluxe doll, modish and pert in your plastic nurse whites, official hostess to our halcyon days, where you bobbed in the doorway of our dishabille apartment, a block downwind from the stockyards. Holding court on the corroded balcony, K. and I passed hash brownies, collecting change for the building’s monthly pool to predict which balcony would fall off next. That’s when K. was fucking M. and M. was fucking J., and even B. and I threw down once on the glass-speckled lawn, adrift in the headlights of his El Camino. Those were immortal times, Sandy! Coke wasn’t addictive yet, condoms prevented herpes and men were only a form of practice for the Russian novel we foolishly hoped our lives would become. Now it’s a Friday night, sixteen years from there. Don’t the best characters know better than to live too long? My estranged husband house-sits for a spoiled cockatoo while saving to buy his own place. My lover’s gone back to his gin and the farm-team fiancée he keeps in New York. What else to do but read Frank O’Hara to my tired three-year-old? When I put him to bed, he mutters “more sorry” as he turns into sleep. Tonight, I find you in a box I once marked “The Past.” Well, therapy’s good for some things, Sandy, but who’d want to forgive a girl like that? Frank says Destroy yourself if you don’t know! Deflated, you’re simply the smile that surrounds a hole. I don’t know anything.

Some of us are chum. Some of us are the come-hither honeycomb gleamy in the middle of the trap’s busted smile. Though I let myself a little off this hook, petard by which I flail, and fancy myself more flattered — no ugly worm! Humor me as hapless nymph, straight outta Bullfinch, minding my own beeswax, gamboling, or picking flowers (say daffodils), doing that unspecified stuff nymphs do with their hours, until spied by a layabout youth, or rapey God who leaps unerring, staglike, quicker than smoke, to the wrong idea. Or maybe the right? For didn’t I supply the tippy box, too? Notch the stick on which to prop it? Didn’t I fumble the clove hitch for the rope? Leave the trip lying obvious in the tall, buggy grass? Ever it was. Duh. Be the mat, and the left foot finds you welcome. Though there’s always a subject, a him or herself. But to name it calls it down, like Betelgeuse, or the IRS. It must be swell to have both deed and the entitlement, for leaners who hold our lien, consumers who consume like red tide ripping through a coastal lake? Who find themselves so very well when gazing in that kiddie pool, or any skinny inch of water. That guy, remember? How tell this tale without him? A story so hoary, his name’s Pre-Greek. What brought Narcissus down? A spotty case of the disdains, I think, a one-man performance where the actor hates his audience.

at the altarpiece of Saint Teresa No need to be coy— you know what she’s doing And so did Bernini, when he found Teresa in the full-throttle of her divine vision, caught her at it, carving this surrender so fluidly you expect the impossible: for her tang to swell up, ripe as seafoam, from the gulf of her flushed and falling figure. Perhaps this is how God comes to us, or should come to us, all: the bluntly and beautifully corporeal at prayers in the Sunday school of pleasure. Why shouldn’t He come to us as He did to Teresa? A saint on her back— a girl tearing open the gift He gave her?

I’m watching football, which is odd as I hate football in a hyperbolic and clinically revealing way, but I hate Bill Parcells more, because he is the illuminated manuscript of cruel, successful men, those with the slitty eyes of ancient reptiles, who wear their smugness like a tight white turtleneck, and revel in their lack of empathy for any living thing. So I’m watching football, staying up late to watch football, hoping to witness (as I think of it) The Humiliation of the Tuna (as he is called), which is rightly Parcells’s first time back in the Meadowlands since taking up with the Cowboys, who are, as we all know, thugs, even by the NFL’s standards. The reasons I hate football are clear and complicated and were born, as I was, in Nebraska, where football is to life what sleep deprivation is to Amnesty International, that is, the best researched and most effective method of breaking a soul. Yes, there’s the glorification of violence, the weird nexus knitting the homo, both phobic and erotic, but also, and worse, my parents in 1971, drunk as Australian parrots in a bottlebush, screeching WE’RE #1, WE’RE #1! when the Huskers finally clinched the Orange Bowl, the two of them bouncing up and down crazily on the couch, their index fingers jutting holes through the ubiquitous trail of smoke rings that was the weather in our house, until the whole deranged mess that was them, my parents, the couch, their lit cigarettes, flipped over backward onto my brother and me. My husband thinks that’s a funny story and, in an effort to be a “good sport,” I say I think it is, too. Which leads me to recall the three Chihuahuas who’ve spent the fullness of their agitated lives penned in the back of my neighbor’s yard. Today they barked continuously for 12 minutes (I timed it) as the UPS guy made his daily round. They bark so piercingly, they tremble with such exquisite outrage, that I’ve begun to root for them, though it’s fashionable to hate them and increasingly dark threats against their tiny persons move between the houses on our block. But isn’t that what’s wrong with this version of America: the jittering, small-skulled, inbred-by-no-choice- of-their-own are despised? And Bill Parcells— the truth is he’ll win this game. I know it and you know it and, sadly, did it ever seem there was another possible outcome? It’s a small deposit, but I’m putting my faith in reincarnation. I need to believe in the sweetness of one righteous image, in Bill Parcells trapped in the body of a teacup poodle, as any despised thing, forced to yap away his next life staked to a clothesline pole or doing hard time on a rich old matron’s lap, dyed lilac to match her outfit. I want to live there someday, across that street, and listen to him. Yap, yap, yap.