I kissed someone's wife today.
It felt better than I wanted it to.

In my tiny bedroom,
the walls looked more beige than usual.
Martha laid beside me -- her idea.

Frames.
I didn't have frames on a couple posters.
Martha rested her head on my shoulder -- her idea.

Instead of putting up my clean laundry,
an **** of boxers, button-downs, and jeans took place on the floor.
Martha told me she liked her hair played with -- I didn't ask.

I left my cigarettes in plain sight
on top of a face down picture frame.
She slid my arm under her neck -- I couldn't be rude.

While she spoke of her husband watching cartoons,
I noticed **** (used during last week's *** with an ex) lying behind a couple beer bottles.
I put my right leg between her legs -- I can't help it if I'm a curious man.

When Martha pulled the blanket over our heads,
I hoped she couldn't smell my ex's perfume.
She let me run my fingers along her waistline -- she didn't tell me to stop until the fourth kiss.

Tributaries of mascara ran down her face.
Rivers of regret rushed out of her mouth.
I played out what would have happened -- had I not grabbed her, pressed my lips harder on the fourth.

"I'm not this kind of girl."
I told her things would be better with her husband.
Handing her a clean rag off the floor, she said -- "My life wasn't supposed to turn out this way."

I broke up the **** of clothes, grabbed an armful; made a beeline for the closet.
With a beautiful sound, a beer bottle broke as I passed by.
Martha's teary eyes saw the **** -- "What the hell were you planning to do?"

She slammed the door.
One of my unframed posters peeled itself off the wall and feathered to the ground.
Most of me felt cloudy, but I knew one thing -- she's got a good 50 years of marriage to go to spite me.

The ******* took the beauty, and it wasn't
because he's handsomer, wealthier, or more caffeinated--
as you supposed, Christopher.

It was timing.

She was lonely.
He was there.

Chris, you were typing an email.

To a cat in a cul-de-sac,
she's a stone rose,
malaise with no remorse and a penchant for suicidal grammar.

Backsassing and backroom massaging
her way from Tanner, Illinois to Irving, Texas --
her interstate veins and her data plan brain
catered to the orifices of the weary,
and soothed the spidertongued and sleepy.
In the last postcard, she signed Evangeline,
the number of name changes: 23
in the Sunflower State alone.

A dive bar in Ulysses, Kansas
beamed as a brilliant model of
"Starved wives and stray dogs," Evangeline explained.
"I found the dark side of beet farmers
and the redemption in callused hands."

A letter came from Pryor, Oklahoma:

"Recognize the perfume?"

The only line.
Printer paper close, inhale --
my mind drifts to my former
high cheekbone'd bride, Skye.
Evangeline bedded her spindly body.
Spite, spite, spite.

Confused, I answered her call on the
first morning of December.
Tent living with a retired acrobat on
the growing shoreline of Lake Texoma,
she downed a mixed bag of his sleeping meds,
and sleeping by his side, she fantasized about me.

"I think you drank too much in my dreams.
I woke up dissatisfied."

Once she arrived in Irving, I mailed her
my edit of her suicide note.
A call to say it looked good,
and she'd let me know if she ever had
to use it.

I never heard from her again.

I put two handles of whiskey on the counter,
and the cashier asked if I was having a party.
I told her I was preparing for a weekend by myself.
She didn't know what to say.
I told her life should mean more than this, paid and walked away.

Abigail slides the glass door shut.
As beads of water percolate off her body
and land on the faux stone tile,
the smell of chlorine from her swim
and the smell of coffee from my brewing *** blend.
My uncle, Abigail's father, and my mother
are seated at the sticky, spilt soda kitchen table beside me.
"Go get ready for dinner," my mother's brother says, sending
Abigail's bikini'd frame through doorway and around the bend.
The brew idles, and I'm all porcelain and sugar substitute for a moment,
then back by my uncle and mother.

"Abigail has gotten so thin," my mother says.

"Is she eating?" my mother asks.

"I know it's tough for girls her age. When they're looking to marry," my mother says.
I want to bash the smoking cup into her face.

My uncle says she's been training for a marathon.
My neurons get tidy and taper off.
So, it's out of the kitchen and into an empty living room
to park my *** on an empty piano bench.
I set the coffee on top, and press eight of my fingers down
on black keys.
I hear toes-to-heels, toes-to-heels.
I gaze over my shoulder.
Now, Abigail's in a black, black dress. Mid-thigh.
In her left hand,
red ****-me-shoes with a heel that could turn a curious man blind;
in her right hand,
black pantyhose and cherry lipgloss.
"You should have swam," Abigail delivers with hushed precision,
like she'd been reciting the line throughout the duration of her swim.

Abigail has long brunette hair,
and it's sticking to her neck.
Deep permanent dimples frame her lips.
She's a nurse in Waco.
Each time I see her, I think about
Bukowski's 103-pound "Texan".
It makes me rash, violent, a heady monstrosity,
and trembling sick.

"I forgot my trunks."

"That's no excuse."

I would respond, but she's sliding the hose up her leg.

In the living room.

While my uncle talks a second mortgage around the bend.

Her right leg crosses her left,
an overpass and an interstate.
My forehead overheats in a flash,
and I feel like she's staring back at me.
When my leering eyes shift from
her toes to her eyes, the pupils beckon:

"All roads lead to me."

Irreversible -- the decision --
yet there Harvey goes on halcyon stroll,
thinking there's a hue that's 1 part Anna's blue blood
and
1 part his simmering red that would be appeasing to
third-party perspective.

Their blood has mixed before;
instead of rich violet, the colors
oiled and watered -- staggered --
too proud to blend, and
yet there Harvey goes into the park,
listening to the children laugh
and he thinks how a violet child
would suit him and Anna well.

Worse -- the hope -- than any wear
either person has suffered,
hope has a funny way of keeping
one suspended in the air,
and a funnier way of
chaining two together that hope
in the same vain.

Does it look like I'm having fun?
Far from shore in midst of bottom shelf ocean,
Holding me by my edges, afraid I'm about to go off.

"Papa, you're a gun," you rattle off for your friends to hear,
"I feel so reckless with you by my side."

Clasping my edges tighter,
I dream of backfiring into a passing thought--
I dream of backfiring into good times--
lift up and into your purse I go,
with a zip the party softens to a buzz,
with a zip I cozy up to velvet darkness.

I gleam in the fluorescent light of a bathroom
and when you wrap your lips around my barrel,
it's you I want to blow off.
I look away when you find my trigger--
I look away, and pretend another's doing the pulling--
"Papa, you're a gun," you whisper especially for me,
"I feel invincible with you by my side."

You won't when you realize the chamber has gone empty.