Kim Addonizio

I have been one acquainted with the spatula, the slotted, scuffed, Teflon-coated spatula that lifts a solitary hamburger from pan to plate, acquainted with the vibrator known as the Pocket Rocket and the dildo that goes by Tex, and I have gone out, a drunken bitch, in order to ruin what love I was given, and also I have measured out my life in little pills—Zoloft, Restoril, Celexa, Xanax. I have. For I am a poet. And it is my job, my duty to know wherein lies the beauty of this degraded body, or maybe it's the degradation in the beautiful body, the ugly me groping back to my desk to piss on perfection, to lay my kiss of mortal confusion upon the mouth of infinite wisdom. My kiss says razors and pain, my kiss says America is charged with the madness of God. Sundays, too, the soldiers get up early, and put on their fatigues in the blue- black day. Black milk. Black gold. Texas tea. Into the valley of Halliburton rides the infantry— Why does one month have to be the cruelest, can't they all be equally cruel? I have seen the best gamers of your generation, joysticking their M1 tanks through the sewage-filled streets. Whose world this is I think I know.

Afterwards you had that drunk, drugged look my daughter used to get, when she had let go of my nipple, her mouth gone slack and her eyes turned vague and filmy, as though behind them the milk was rising up to fill her whole head, that would loll on the small white stalk of her neck so I would have to hold her closer, amazed at the sheer power of satiety, which was nothing like the needing to be fed, the wild flailing and crying until she fastened herself to me and made the seal tight between us, and sucked, drawing the liquid down and out of my body; no,this was the crowning moment, this giving of herself, knowing she could show me how helpless she was—that’s what I saw, that night when you pulled your mouth from mine and leaned back against a chain-link fence, in front of a burned-out church: a man who was going to be that vulnerable, that easy and impossible to hurt.

I know my friend is going, though she still sits there across from me in the restaurant, and leans over the table to dip her bread in the oil on my plate; I know how thick her hair used to be, and what it takes for her to discard her man’s cap partway through our meal, to look straight at the young waiter and smile when he asks how we are liking it. She eats as though starving—chicken, dolmata, the buttery flakes of filo— and what’s killing her eats, too. I watch her lift a glistening black olive and peel the meat from the pit, watch her fine long fingers, and her face, puffy from medication. She lowers her eyes to the food, pretending not to know what I know. She’s going. And we go on eating.

The fish are drifting calmly in their tank between the green reeds, lit by a white glow that passes for the sun. Blindly, the blank glass that holds them in displays their slow progress from end to end, familiar rocks set into the gravel, murmuring rows of filters, a universe the flying fox and glass cats, Congo tetras, bristle-nose pleocostemus all take for granted. Yet the platys, gold and red, persist in leaping occasionally, as if they can't quite let alone a possibility—of wings, maybe, once they reach the air? They die on the rug. We find them there, eyes open in surprise.