Utopia.

Where I live
Seasons are experienced on the back porch.
Fifteen by thirty feet of Trex,
Upholstered seating, 
And Atlas 
Spinning his macrocosmic 
merry-go-round.

Summer in the suburbs,
A breathtaking 
Confinement.
Trading premature nostalgia
For a child’s sort of ignorance. 
A c’est la vie natural high
Of melted bomb pops down your arm
And sunbathing,
Absurdly inconspicuous,
As the light reflects off the two way mirrors. 
A season of 
Stars swathed in peach-colored light pollution, of
Wishing the pops and cracks of the house yawning
Were boys throwing pebbles,
Of wondering
If prowlers had leaned on this same railing
Here before me.
And not being hasty to prove my late night 
Paranoias
As weakness.

Verdant vitality
Wanes
Like a fairest sister’s early demise.
Inevitable
As it is with anything too brilliant for permanence. 
The mass extinction of October,
Basic clockwork,
Gorgeous cataclysms evident 
In the supernova of autumn foliage. 
Woolen academia
Forces away
Supper under sun umbrellas 
And leaves us 
Watching the canopies confetti
The lawnmower stripes
Measuring our backyards.

Post surrender,
Icy eaves
Frost our hibernaculums
Like wedding cakes.
Uniting us with that serious beauty: winter. 
Our observation decks are
Closed for the season.
In hot chocolate trances
We doubt the verity of such dangerous
Purity behind the Plexiglas;
Fingers curled around crate & barrel mugs. 
Fortunately, we have the 
Sudden influx of toy commercials 
As reassurance. 

It isn’t until April,
That docile, weeping thing,
Offers up several million prenatal heads
That we believe in regeneration again. 
The forts melt into dirty, iced rubble
And the quotidian menagerie 
Begins stirring once more.

The Girls.

My dad left me the girls when I was twelve. Marlo was my favorite, but I sortof liked Jackie too, when she wasn’t doing coke.

It should have tipped me off to something, anything, that I was smarter than all of them. I had kept books for my father since I was old enough to read and analyze. So when his life was threatened, he knew he could trust me to run the business better than anyone. Better than Kaybo, better than P. Dope, or even Wilson who was successfully running three of his own and knew every in and every out of turning profit.

I knew the girls wouldn’t cheat me. I was Wes Hilden’s daughter. Wes Hilden, who held an inexplicable power over them, even from the grave. They took clients, usually an average of three a night, dropped off their earnings to me and passed out. They were all highly trained and highly broken. This was my father’s legacy.

“So you need me to pick you up anything, Jenny?” asked Marlo, sifting through last weeks Cosmo. She was draped over the leather armchair, her legs freshly shaven and glowing in the soft lighting.

“No thanks,” I said, going over my calculations for the third time, my eyes hungry for any misplaced number.

Marlo sighed and ran a hand through her lovely, wavy hair.

“Well,” she started, sitting up, “Is it me or Polly who has runner duty tonight, I forget,” she bit her knuckle, smiling and chuckled like that was the most amusing thing she could have said.

“Polly. You can have the night off if you want it. I mean, you’d only be available for the late late shift right?” I asked, assessing her with my darkest, brown eyed glance before returning to my numbers.

“Right.”

I nodded and kept working, setting last night’s spreadsheet aside and reaching for a brand new one. My father had never looked like he’d poured over a thing in his life, as in a nose-to-the-grindstone, this-is-my-livelihood kind of way, but I was constantly busy. Maybe I attributed it to his built-up glory, he was Wes Hilden, he didn’t work he owned. And sometimes, he owned you.

She was watching me, Marlo. It was something she did all the time and it never ceased to make me uncomfortable. I always detected the faintest aftertaste of dominance. She was so much older, almost twice my age. I fought the thought that was clawing its way around the foggy recesses of my brain. I did know what I was doing here. I always knew what I was doing. This was my inheritance. I was in control.

“You know,” she says, when I haven’t glanced back at her for a full minute, “I don’t know if you know this or not, but some of the other pimps in the area are getting suspicious. Wondering who the great Hilden left his empire to.”

I stopped scrawling. “How do you know that?” I asked.

She shrugged haughtily, “I get around, Jenny.”

“How suspicious are they getting Marlo?” She wanted my attention, she had it. I needed to know if she was bluffing.

She recoiled slightly, flipped her hair, and addressed me once more. “Not very. But I wouldn’t get too comfortable.”

She stood, on her way out. Before she’d crossed the threshold, she turned back slightly. I was watching as she left.

“Now are you sure you don’t want me to pick you up anything, Jenny?”

I smiled a tiny, little smile. “Maybe a new package of printer paper.”

Mauve (4)

“He sounds like an ass,” says Levi, swishing the few, measly drops of alcohol we have left around the bottom of his flask.

            “He is.” I’m slurring, but only slightly. But I like it, it feels good to slur right now.

            “You know what I’d do if I saw him?” he asks.

            “What?”

            “I’d pop ‘im one. Right in the elbow.”

            “The elbow?”

            “’Cause folks say it’s the weakest part of your body… or is it the strongest?”

            He looks like he’s fallen into deep thought and I can’t help that I think it’s the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. I start laughing and soon I can’t stop the guffaws wracking my chest cavity.

            Levi doesn’t even ask, but starts laughing along with me.

            Disregarding all control of ourselves, we laugh, drunk as artists, on the steps of a funeral home.

            “Leah, what the hell?!” Bobbi’s voice behind me is a shrill jackhammer, only penetrating halfway into my soft drunkenness.

            I turn.

            “What are you doing?” she asks, her face contorting into that half-disgusted half-superior look I know she’s so fond of.

            I take a few seconds to collect myself after such an episode. Levi and I are still snickering when I wipe my eyes of the tears and face my oldest friend.

            “Sorry, Bob. I was just sitting here with my new friend. Levi, like the jeans,” I say.

            She obviously can tell I’m somewhat inebriated. She huffs and scurries forward to help me to my feet.

            As I steady myself in those stupid stiletto heels, she turns to Levi with her ‘don’t mess with me’ face.

            “You better not have tried anything, wise guy,” I hear her mutter.

            “Love, I don’t try at anything but jigsaw puzzles. Though I never have finished one of the damn things.”

            Bobbi leads me a couple steps away where I find Amanda and Tarah had been standing the entire time.

            “God, look at you,” Bobbi says, trying to pat down my hair, “We were just gearing up to go out for drinks, but it looks like you already beat us to it.”

            I tilt forward in my heels, feeling progressively more drunk by the second. Now that I think about it, Levi might have gone back inside to refill the flask, two, maybe three times.

            She sighs, “I’m taking you home,” she says, and loops an arm around my shoulders.

            “What about Lucky Sam’s, Bobbi?” asks Amanda.

            “Give me ten minutes,” Bobbi calls behind her as she leads me to the car.

            The slamming of the door is the last loud sound I remember hearing for hours.

            

Sailboats.

I’ve had the same painting of sailboats on my wall since before I can remember. I know the exact number of boats in that harbor: ten. And I know the exact number of the buildings towering behind them: fourteen and one eighth.

Probably a staple of nursery décor back in the nineties, this painting has been an indispensible part of my two-tone walls my entire life. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve counted the multicolored boats on that river and traced their sails up to where they prick windows above. It has an air of mystery about it, one I’ve only just begun to realize. I don’t know where it came from or how it ended up on my wall. I don’t know how my mother came to choose that particular painting out of all the other possibilities. I’ve only recently bothered to peer closely at the scrawled handwriting in the bottom right-hand corner to learn the title and artist’s name. The first time in seventeen years. 

Needing A Finally.

I’m sorry about my complete inadequacy when it comes to persistence. I’m working on it.

Have you ever put your head underwater and screamed?

I haven’t

But I would

If the sound didn’t carry in my bathroom.

Appearances are the suave pickpockets of the Western world.

I dine under their umbrella

Every night,

Fighting for the inhalation

Of something, anything nontoxic

As I pull the rubble closer around me

Like a blanket.

 Those hard-won miles to the hills

Sing siren songs

Of finally.

Ten

More

Months.