Melissa Stein

I want to write my lover a poem but a very bad one. It'll include a giant squid and some loose change and cuff links and two blue ferries chugging headfirst on the East River at twenty-six knots and only at the last minute averting disaster through quick thinking and sure reflexes. Also a bow and arrow and glossy red apple I perch in front of my heart. To be honest my lover doesn't really like poetry, which I guess is why I plan to write such a bad one, so he can feel right and strong and good in his beliefs. Tonight when I go see my lover he’ll hold me as I've never been held except by him and then I'll have to give him back. When you get new things you treat them like glass for a while and then get used to them and manhandle them like everything else. I don't want to give him back but partly it's not up to me and partly I don't want to be his old sofa. I want to radiate and gleam arrestingly until the certain, premature end. You can compose a whole life out of these rollercoasters. You can be everywhere and nowhere, over and over life slapping you in the face till you’re newly burnished flat-out gasping and awake.

It’s all the rage to sport waxed moustaches and cure your own sausages in some mildewy basement that formerly would have hosted convulsively awkward parties with spin the bottle and seven minutes in the dark and terrifying closet (aka heaven) but now boasts soppressata strung on repurposed vintage drying racks and fat clay pots of kombucha and curdling hops. Personally I've never recovered from the sex-shaped void left in those closets by all the groping that should have occurred to me but didn't: right under my nose kids my age were creeping into adulthood one clammy, trembling palm on one breast at a time. There was also the horror of not being chosen in gym. It is conceivable that learning intricately how to butcher an entire hog and render every morsel might give one a feeling of mastery one lacked in childhood. It is the greatest immaturity to believe suffering entitles you to something someone wiser and grayer than I once said. But in those basements and carpools and playgrounds as I assassinated one by one clandestinely my torturers abandoning their foul normal bodies to compost the astonishing tedium of the wending suburban lanes, I was transubstantiating to supernal fame and beauty and such eerie genius that entire books were written about my books. In fact it takes a long time to realize your suffering is of very little consequence to anyone but you. And by that time the future is already happening and you're pickling okra and starfruit and foraging for morels in urban forests and suspending artisan mozzarella in little wet nets and crafting small-batch, nitrite-free data and maybe even thinking about having children, which you swore in a million billion years you would never do.

What is so pure as grief? A wreck set sail just to be wrecked again. To lose what’s lost–it’s all born lost and we just fetch it for a little while, a dandelion span, a quarter-note. Each day an envelope gummed shut with honey and mud. Foolish to think you can build a house from suffering. Even the hinges will be bitter. There will be no books in that house, only transfusions. And all the lemon and cedar in the world won't rid the walls of that hospital smell.