Wild Strawberries

She stained his hair
with passion's pulp,
as he teased her knees
with nerves of grass

And like a record
sweetened by its needle,
contact spun them
a crackling song

Berry juice squeezed
from electric thighs,
tiny seeds like gold dust
flecking red tongues

Postcard

Mara,

I love you.

All this way, the shit I’ve seen, and that’s all I got. I love you.

I thought escape, escape! But distance just makes the heart sing louder. Until it’s a god-damn carousel in my ears, spinning me to sleep at night. I...love...you...

I want to touch you, consume you, make your body bend to mine. These roads are so weary, Mara.

I belong to you (I love you).

That’s all I am.

So please, baby. Please.

Sing me home.

Well there was a time when you let me know
What's really going on below
But now you never show that to me, do you?
But remember when I moved in you
And the holy dove was moving too
And every breath we drew was Hallelujah

--Jeff Buckley, performing Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah

[Photos of Ohio's Smallest Church, near Belpre]

Brigadoon

Her feet hung over the blanket’s edge. The grass tickled her ankles.

“Are these clouds even real?” she said.

He claimed her waist with his hand.

“For as long as we’re looking at them,” he said.

“What happens when we’re not?”

“So long, clouds.”

She laced her leg between his thighs, pooling their sweat. Their heat.

“Our clouds,” she said, filling her nose with the sharpness of his skin. Sunspots flared across her vision. Toes cramped, digging into the damp earth.

“We should build a summer home up there.”

“Mm.”

“Call it Brigadoon.”

Her chin rubbed his shoulder, while her hand slipped below his waist. Searching. Coaxing.

Needing.

“Will we have to wait a hundred years between our summer days?” she asked.

“What?”

“Brigadoon . . .”

“Sorry. I’m a little distracted. Again.”

She smiled. “I love it when you can’t think.”

"I know."

Sliding on top of him, she pressed his arms into the ground. Fingernails dividing the taut tendons, muscles. He could slip away, flip her over. But he didn’t.

Yet.

So she moved faster. Loving those hunter’s eyes. Matching their reach. The sun pounded her back. So bright, so bright. She ached to melt. Center out.

“That cow over there. Is watching,” he said.

“Quit pretending. You care.”

“I think he’s—Jesus—judging me.”

“Shut. Up.”

“Our cloud. Would be. Softer.”

“But I like. Hard.”

She placed a hand over his mouth, watching his eyes smear over. Showing him what soft was.

He seized her hips. Rolled her over.

Proving her deep.


The clouds blew by.

They didn't care.

Ferris Wheel

They circled through the smoldering afternoon. Her cheeks were flushed, but not from the sun.

“Keifer! When you gonna kiss her already?”

They looked, again, at his friends in the car behind.

“Idiots,” he mumbled, turning back around.

She answered the apology in his voice with a forgiving glance. But neither could hold the heat from the other’s eyes. Her stomach dropped as they crested the orbit’s peak.

She looked away.

“You want some?” he asked, offering her the cotton candy.

Her tongue had somehow jammed. She nodded and ripped off a pink handful. The spun sugar tasted like one of those clouds, sweetened by summer's gold.

Dissolving, dissolving . . .

She liked the large, capable hand resting on his thigh. She wondered how it might sit upon her shoulder. Tucking her chin aside, she licked her sticky fingers.

The wheel slowed, and stopped. Ready to unload.

She covered her mouth, swallowing a small cry. All that distance covered, and they hadn’t really gotten anywhere. Their bodies still belonged to separate planets. Down there, in the harsh glare of his friends' spotlight, contact would be impossible. And yet the hands of this ferris clock spun faster than time.

Their car eased into the top spot, and rocked them like two babes in the night. She caught her breath. The horizon opened up a safe harbor to anchor their gazes.

His knee slid over to find hers.

The long line beneath her eyes swam. She leaned into him.

Hoping, hoping, hoping to never again touch ground.

Gazebo

He couldn’t nap with her hands gone from his skin.

So he grabbed a replacement light bulb—a ladder, too—and followed the path to the gazebo. Past the shore of the lake, where a shameless bullfrog bleated for a mate, and beyond a troop of evergreens, limbs loose with amber light. Wheezing slightly, he stumbled into the bridal structure and planted the ladder’s legs onto the timbers of its floor. He sagged against the metal trunk for a moment, as his heart recollected its rhythm and age.

The crack of an overhead jet rattled the joists as he mounted the ladder's steps. The lamp moaned and swayed, while vibrations crunched the arthritis in his hips. An aftershock jounced him as the heavens ripped open, and, drunk in the knees, he seized the lamp’s chain with both hands. The need to pee was urgent upon him, while something darker licked at his loins. His intention scattered like feathers, even as he detached the bulb from its thread, and paused.

Spider webs whispered under the roar, while shadows stretched and swarmed.

He looked up. Into a splinter of light.


She came to him a little wild.

He was neither wise nor tender.

Their mouths and bodies laid open and panting, like the ruby throats of baby birds.


His hands reached out to touch her hair.

Falling backward, and then down, he glimpsed a face in the pointed gap between rafters and sky.

He smiled as the old bulb shattered like so many eggshells on the gazebo floor. His eyes closed while a man-made bird blazed past sight and sound.

Somewhere, above the clouds.

Pink Passions

When working in a nursing home, I cared for this old lady who was addicted to lipstick.

Her mind was all pockmarked—a soap opera hunk became her wayward son—and she smelled slightly of stale urine under the Jean Naté. But that lipstick was her I-am-still-here-goddammit stamp on a fading world. Whenever there was a gap in our conversation, or a commercial on TV, she’d pull out a tube of Pink Passions and just slather that nothing mouth like one of those freaky, televangelist wives. She must have went through a tube a day. Her niece found a place that sold them bulk, I think. Had to change her pillowcase constantly, but none of us had the heart to take that color away.

She still wanted to be beautiful. She still wanted to be kissed.

Down the hall from Miss Luttrell was Mr. Lyons, a real firecracker of a man who raged at the talk show guests on TV, and us nurses, for the dead wife who left him six months ago. When she was breathing, he'd had no use for her, but now that she had stopped, he sniffed the air like a bloodhound that’d lost its master. That’s usually the way it goes, far as I can tell. But he wore his anger like a cheap toupée that slipped over his eyes to hide the guilt and shame. Too easy to see that scrubbed baby scalp below. Anyway, we all liked him, in spite of his nasty. The wound was so raw, you know.

One day I caught him checking out my ass. I knew he must be doing something because he wasn’t yelling at me. Got me thinking, it did.

When it came time for Bingo in the rec room that week, I made sure to park Mr. Lyons’ wheelchair next to Miss Luttrell’s. They weren’t much in the way of players—he yapped too much and missed the calls, and she was distracted by the wind from the fan—but that wasn’t the point, after all.

I sat in the corner as that swivel fan swung our way. Miss Luttrell started to hunt in her pocket for something. Mr. Lyons finally shut his trap.

And I waited for my chips to fall.