He Found This Scrawled in an uncharacteristically legible hand on the back of a Department of Corrections Release Authorization Form for one Madison, John near the bottom of a smushed shoebox crammed with expired apartment leases, receipts for major purchases made over the years and warrantees for gadgets outmoded long before they met Give it up over in now no patricians three the table laid low bulls in the olive grove lowing their bangled wives senseless on rugs harmonizing cows in graceless eros nibbling figs and pecorino oh where is that Ptolemy verb that permits its user to take as if eating without swallows? No I haven’t, not a bite all day dated around the time she tried to buy the farm, a story he had coaxed from every angle, for he considered himself a patient man who liked his drama deadly but done. Setting the shoebox down he walked stiffly, a sudden tower to shadow her with his conclusion. You never told me about a guy named John Madison. Annoyed and blank was the face that yanked the slip of paper from his hand till coyness witnessed maybe once, no twice and generosity made apples fall from her cheeks, and he hated her whore mouth as it aged into a shameless smirk. This is the prick who gave me smack and told me it was blow. I was too numb to be sure the next day but I figured he raped me. All I had to go on was a bacterial infection. Thank you for digging this up. She handled the evidence tenderly like it was one of the crumbling lithographs of dead relatives in plantation prosperity in red velvet framed on her vanity and cooed when she saw the words on its back. I wonder if I wrote this during or after. She studied the document with moonlit eyes in the June afternoon then folded it neatly and tucked it like a pokerfaced madam into the worn copy of Slaughterhouse Five she’d been poteetweeting over like it was a hymnal before he’d interrupted, and with that classic book and the awful document establishing a memory in it, the box she’d been filling filled to geometric perfection and was crisscrossed sharply with mover’s tape. She stood hands on hips admiring her labor. How sickened he was she hadn’t broken down over something she didn’t remember. How hard to swallow he couldn’t protect who she had been. Stop staring like a fool and start loading these books, she snapped. The China’s already in the truck. You wanna finish before midnight? I was thinking Thai?
Dinner in the Eye The gulf is to the south. Sunset brings more light. It’s not day that approaches green sick gold. The lights go out but twilight doesn’t. The gulf is in the sky. Switching direction suddenly clouds pour from the north, breaking our clock. The gulf is leaking through worn window panes. Trash cans slip and winds slice lawns. Lucinda gets her scissors out and slashes paper into bored strips. We wait. It’s coming closer. We watch the sky for signs having lost our weatherman. We make calculations. At some point there are no more pauses. We figure we’re finally against the wall. There are no more pauses. Trees seize limbs flailing buzzards circle a tin roof section threatens cats hide under the house. What is a buzzard that it can hunt in this? The gulf is in the house the shed roof peels into the sky snip snip snippets of corrugated metals crash down the block someone backs away we’re too close the tape rewinds there’s a hypnotic hiss at high pitch in slow motion then it’s still and darker and now it looks as if we’ve arrived at the beginning. The gulf is all around except here. The eye is directly overhead. Lucinda puts her scissors away. We forget the washcloths in the walls. Tony takes a lighter to the gas. The candles and the leftover Swedish meatballs heat up in a blink. Inside the lids it’s so steady we can boil pasta and flesh out a meal. I set the table with silver and cloth napkins and snatch rosé from the cool box warming and we get drunk and full and run around in the yard slightly green sick gold near midnight. Tonight there is no real dark. What is light that lingers with dark? More gulf on the way.
Malpractice Spacetime ripped like old lace again last night. No exotic trigger, just another desk slave day in tights branded into my waistline. Evening is a nude battle with pet weapons, things like public radio, which is of course not at all for the public, and coconut water, which is for washing down muscle relaxers. A pet is a wild thing in prison. Run a tub. The faucet is steaming punk and loose Art Deco. Chiptips of my blue toenails crack the glassy surface. Ten thousand strangers fracture where my reflection was. I cannot convince myself the forever earsplit trill skipping scrubbed porcelain is not death by tuning fork. Declassified secrets sweat down tiles and evaporate undecoded into grout. I can’t make it all out in the eternity allotted. Why do they put chlorine in the water? Something takes shape on the toilet. It hikes its crinoline above its three knees and dangles ripped stockings over the rim which threatens to swallow. Slightly female now and elvin, she looks around my bathroom ashing and says I am the Little Green Amnion Queen and I noticed a crooked vacant sign in your alley that was never there before. I see your pool is closed for repairs but we need a room for the revolution. She motions towards the alley. Stardust vagrants begin filing in checking in to my flophouse body and affix my marionette limbs to strings. Somewhere in Prague a cuckoo clock strikes. Bypassing the ear they whisper into my thoughts--how weak the strings vibrate on this teeming water balloon! This place is a dump. If Wall Street knew what a backwater Earth is on intergalactic markets, your life might be easier, honey. And I wonder, could there be more to this than depersonalization episode not otherwise specified? More than derealization or jamais vu or whatever you’re calling it now? Could there be something neighborly instructing me to tourniquet my panicked mind so we can work out together how we got saddled with 900 Newtons tethered to this ignorant cesspool and how far downgalaxy revolves a more progressive system where travelers might pass without delay or hindrance? A place where the mind can wander? Thinking abstract in concrete like this stops it cold. There’s no thread stitch or machine hum or zipper pop, but there’s a Brandenburg on the radio now. I hear it. I know the lace has been mended. I’m no longer privy. I’m just alone clutching new foal legs in icewater chanting a name until it’s mine and I can see no reason not to reach for a towel and catch the end of Jeopardy with takeout on the sofa. I’m adding possible complex partial seizures to your bipolar for now, and I’m starting you on an antipsychotic immediately. No more buying drugs on the Internet, young lady, or I can’t see you anymore. Why can’t I keep them? I ask the good doctor as he types. This only happens when I’m safe in the tub or staring into a mirror or old photo. Confronting the illusion of self is healthy. What are you writing? Patient claims to enjoy episodes? You know, sometimes I draw baths I don’t intend to take just to smell hot chlorine and drag manicure scissors across my wrists to trace the strings put on my arms that keep me awake with their cosmic vibrating, but I know that won’t do anything but leave a pathetic mark. I’m no cutter. I’m a fake. I don’t need to see you. Sometimes I scrounge leftover speed you gave me when you thought I had ADHD out of linen closet baskets and try to scurry so high I might blunder into the breast pocket of that sport coat in the sky. You know, with your mouth open like that I can see every one of your fillings. Mercury is elemental. Who knows what enemy signals you could attract with that metalmouth. Don’t pretend to be shocked. It’s so easy for a pretty girl like me to smile and get what she wants. A doctor really should be more careful.
Sligo ‘99 He led a life so entropic I mistook it for a custom headfuck. I mean he was charming. In those days in that place, love was underwritten with 20s hurled like spit wads at the stage. I didn’t have to be there like the other girls. I had a master’s degree. I had options. And oversized appetites. Sligo would shout up to me on my pedestal, “Put your dress back on. Christ, you should be in a boardroom not a bordello,” and I in my stilettos would walk up to the footlights and show him how to be naked. He would cover his eyes when he shoved 100s in my garter and I would bend down. His bear paws polio slow would close around my throat. Our foreheads magnetized. The crowd roared. “Tell that crazy Mick to move--I can’t see her tits.” “And those are great tits.” “He can barely stand up. Why don’t they kick his ass out?” “He’s some famous bureaucrat in here every night droppin’ thousands. They’ll never kick him out.” “DC sucks.” I would sway in his hands as he said things like, “I snapped his neck, you know. I saw through the Thorazine his eyes begging me to do it. Don’t look at me with those eyes, woman. I gave up mercy killings when you were in diapers. But still they won’t let Mad Mick leave,” and I would piece love together out of delirium. I have always had a taste for enigmatic conversation. “However far you run,” he would say, “however famous you become, you’re a target if they know I fancy you. It’s like a microchip. But cheer up, darling, they put yours between your thighs. Now give us a kiss,” and the whoresale spun in the centrifuge of our courtship. What could I do but part my painted lips? I wasn’t in it for pillow lessons on the Digital Divide and the World Bank’s plan to bridge it by 2010. I didn’t reject offers from dot.com billionaires because I had morals. I operated on instinct. And we all knew when last call was. So, for a season, Sligo and I puked in the gutters of Washington, that squat city made for April and October, reaping a love sown in different decades on different shores until he got shot buying coke on credit. I wouldn’t say that was a turning point—more an enhancement or change of venue. He said to me in the hospital bed, he said, “You know it was MI6” as I patted Betadyne on the .22 hole in his head. DC let Sligo off easy with a bullet to the brain. He was back up climbing a New York ladder in ‘00. It took years for the rats in the strip club to join the race but by 2004 I too was racking up bylines and residence visas, in-patient stays and stock options. So where’s the power? That go-go played itself out forever. I’d have told him to take his diseases elsewhere but the train station is murder. DC finally let me off in 2008 with aggravated rape. I fled to fruit-bearing climes. I’ve always been too country for the northeast. I have a child now and a husband growing in the tropics, and they’re angels, but they don’t erase the 13 years true as tautology my nail beds were crammed with soil and moonlight. All the perfectly sturdy seedlings I clawed out in the midnight making of vacancy to clear a fallow tract for Sligo have now rotted to rich compost heaped on my family. Some crops require vast acreage.
The Kingest Bean For Lucinda I love red beans and rice with sausage not too spicy so, so much. On Monday eve, countertop, I helped Mama stir the pot till they were so creamy you wouldn't believe. This is what bein’ a big girl is, I thought, stirrin’, washin’, cleanin’ beans off kids’ sleeves. Mama pours tall wine when it's time to dine, La Croix for me and Daddy in between. I isolate one bean and say how fine this bean is so big it's the Kingest Bean. I puncture its perfection with my tine. So plump so juicy so like seventeen. Someday I will marry the Kingest Bean... wash his dishes, become bitter and mean.
Carrie Crockett is currently an English and Journalism teacher in New Orleans. Before that, she was a writer/editor for a decade in Washington, DC, New York, and Dubai.
