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JJ Hutton Jun 2016
I find myself in a coverless Italian summer.
Grass browned. Skin freckled.
I find myself impatient,
no longer willing to entertain
the destinies of the salt and sea.
I edit video of you in a cobbled basement.
There's a knowing look that lasts four seconds.
I split it into six fragments and set it in reverse,
an unknowing, a deletion.
The crook of your neck
and shoulder blade. The red of your hair.
Some nights I hang from the rails. Five minutes.
Ten. And pull myself up.
Tented and mad by August,
stabbing ice with a little
black cocktail straw.
How can I change my
How can I love my
How can I erase my
body?
The rains wet me.
The wind wrings me.
This city we used to walk
under streetlights.
Now I bike through,
pedaling, furious and blind,
toward a place I don't know until
I arrive, and I kiss a young woman
who looks a lot like me. I ask her
to say my name over and over.
I want to fully occupy the moment,
the space, this time. Her lips
remain closed and her
hands linger on my shoulders
and no music plays and
there are voices, loud and
happy, speaking a language
that's completely new.
JJ Hutton May 2016
There was a time—and this wasn't all that long ago—where I wanted to be seen, loved, admonished. I wanted to be some novelist casanova, women, movie deals, et cetera. And one day it changed. I wish there was some monumental event tied to it, some clear catalyst, but to be honest this opposite idea, this idea of erasure, came to me in a supermarket. In the checkout line the cashier didn't greet me, didn't ask the usual did-you-find-everything type questions. The transaction was wholly procedural, nothing human to it. The total showed up on a screen. I swiped a card.

And it reminded me of that part in DeLillo's—I know, it's always DeLillo—in his book Zero K where he talks about the origin of "alone," and what the word really connotes. The word is a rather simple portmanteau of the Middle English phrase "all one." And when you think of the word like this, all one, it gives you a different idea. It does for me anyway. All one suggests freedom from any tie or association. It's who you are minus geography, minus desire, minus friends, minus family, minus lovers. Many people would say there is no self if you were to eliminate essentially the entire context of your life, but I disagree.

I say all of this to say, I'm hitting the red button. I'm eliminating all my friendships to regain a semblance of an inner life. I think they've become responsible for a projected version of myself, an expected version rife with inconsistencies that I wish to no longer adhere to. I know what you're thinking. I'm going to be some half-assed buddhist of the plains, but this small world I've played a small part in shaping has become suffocating, and the only way for me to exist in this space is as a vapor.
JJ Hutton May 2016
It was strange and didn't register as a serious request. She wanted to take care of me. Nothing ******. Just a meal here and there, maybe a little tidying up of the house.

She wanted me to talk. And that part, the talking, always felt transactional, a repayment of her cleaning and cooking. She didn't ask questions. Just nudged me on with emphatic nods in the living room, sitting six feet away from me in a stray office chair. She listened as if I were recounting a past life of her own.

I told her once I loved her little feet, especially in those heels. The next week she wore sneakers. She was older but not old, fifty or so. Two children a few years younger than myself.

She made a point of not staying past ten or drinking more than a single glass of wine.

I was always a little embarrassed by the state of the house. The ***** clothes strewn across the room indistinguishable from the clean. Earmarked novels, long novels, the kind you could bludgeon a person to death with, gathered dust on the coffee table, the desk, the kitchen counter. She touched them, fascinated by what secrets or sage advice might lay within, but she never read a page.

One night I realized I'd never said her name out loud. And she said, "That's impossible. Of course you have." But neither of us could think of a particular moment. And just when I was about to, she said, "Why break the streak?"

We grew more comfortable with one another. She wore less makeup and let her age show. She'd show up in sweatpants. Some nights we'd order Chinese and play that familiar game where every fortune is punctuated with "in bed." A stranger will change your life forever tomorrow in bed. Lies lead to great calamities in bed. So on.

We called them dates, our lunches in the break room, taken each day around 2 p.m. She would bring me leftovers from the night before, always making a point of saying something like, "My husband just couldn't finish it."

She brought baked ziti on a Wednesday last March. I told her it was the best I'd ever eaten as I forked it out of the tupperware container, the edges still hot from the microwave. She said she hadn't been intimate in two years.

"Is that possible?"

"It is."

*** didn't transpire immediately. We worked up to it.

I liked the way she directed me. I'd never experienced anything quite like it. She'd tell me to touch myself while she held me in her arms, she'd snag a handful of my hair, she'd dig her nails into my thigh, but her words were always beautiful, whispered, tender, spoken in the sacred and profane language of lovers.

I'd come and she'd make a comment about the quantity, comparing it to her husband's.

In the serene afterglow before we toweled ourselves off, I'd rest my head against her breast, and I'd say, "I could stay here forever."

"Every man I've ever slept with has said that."

"How many men have you slept with?"

"Has anyone ever liked the answer to that question?"

"I don't mind. We could compare data."

"Including you?"

"Including me."

"Two."

She crawled out of the bed and turned on some music, Neil Young, "A Man Needs a Maid."

"I always felt guilty for liking this song," I said.

"Me too," she said.

We drank coffee on the back porch before the sun came up. "There was a man," she said, "before I married. He was an artist, a painter. We were in college and I loved the deliberate way he spoke. He'd think, sometimes for a full minute, before he said anything. There was a softness in his voice that required you to pay closer attention to him. Your voice is not all that different."

The Department of Transportation began tearing down the houses in my neighborhood to make room for an additional two lanes of traffic. By October mine was the only house left on the block. The apocalypse in miniature. We'd drive by piles of brick and fencing and she'd begin to cry.

It was a particularly brutal winter, and she buried her car in mud and snow when she tried to back out of the yard on the day of her son's graduation. I offered to drive her.

"No, no, no no no."

We sat in the snow, our backs against her car. She leaned in and said, "Your cologne is new."

"Yes."

"You've cut your hair."

"Yes."

"Your shirt, it's actually ironed."

Silence for a beat.

"Who is she?"
JJ Hutton May 2016
Shake the demon lover
in the effulgent post-Chelyabinsk world,
where death breathes you back
into yourself and backwards you walk
through those coupled images, so posed,
charged with feigned desire,
the lighting just right,
the angle meticulous,
smushing foreheads with golden rings
on your fingers.
You had a dog.
You had a crockpot.
A kid was on the way.
Shake the demon lover,
rip yourself from her arts district loft,
where the music is in French and always beautiful,
glide down the rusted rails,
cruise past the headshops, the pawnshops,
say the word Tuesday and wonder if it means anything
other than the third day of the week.
You shared a bed.
You shared a bed.
You shared a bed.
Shake the demon lover
and her words track you,
her text reads,
"Come over, friend."
And she calls you friend,
she shouts you friend,
she pants you friend,
as you end the affair for
the sixth, seventh, eighth
time, one last couch
**** and never speak
to me again.
JJ Hutton Apr 2016
Have you been to the mountain?
No no no. But
I've been under the bridge, Mr. Jones.
I've washed my feet in Cottonwood Creek.
I've named the meadowlarks after ex-girlfriends.
Suzanne. Isis. Mel-oh-dee.
Some mornings I woke up in places I'd never
been and on those mornings,
oh I woulda killed for a pen.
The fog and the
steady gasp of diesels
surrounded me and sang sang sang.
Tall grass along the interstate
and god, he didn't talk to me,
but I pretended to be god and talked
to myself, saying This way. This way.
This way to the promised land.
On what I thought to be
the Fourth of July, mud dried
around my knees in the Quapaw,
and I stood up for four days straight before
the rains came.
And finally, in the golden dawn,
I arrived at my childhood home.
Ivy on the chimney. Rusted trike in the overgrown lawn.
My father sat in his chair. Static on the TV.
He said, "Haven't done yourself in yet?"
My mother, in cobwebs and rags said, "He's got
one classic in him, one heartbreaking work
of genius before he goes."
And I asked her for a title.
She only pointed.
I turned and that's when I saw her,
the Girl at the Gate.
JJ Hutton Mar 2016
A breakdown? I don't know if I'd call it that. Something about that word connotes immediacy, precision, a kind of instantaneous loss of your mental faculties. No. This has been slow. Like two, three years slow. I'd welcome a breakdown. A breakdown would give me the chance to start over, to mend, to be a better ******* human being. This degradation, and, I know, I'm being repetitive here, this degradation is so slow it's almost intangible. It's so slow there's ample room for denial. I need one swift, irrefutable act of self-destruction. Don't do that. That little gesture, that go-on-just-bottom-out hand flip. You're not listening. I don't have the energy for that. I'm not reckless. Wanting and being are, in this case, mutually exclusive. You know where I am? Let me illustrate it for you. I say I love you to empty rooms. I say sweetheart, sweetie, et cetera for no other reason than habit being so strong.  I'm not beat up about her leaving. It happens. Sometimes two people just don't work, you know? But maybe I'm beat up. I haven't slept in the bed. I sleep on the couch like she used to. I buy her favorite wine—which I don't particularly enjoy—but I drink it. I drink it, I think, just to watch the bottle go empty. I drink the wine and I sleep on the couch hoping it summons the breakdown, some ******* finality. That's true. I've been many different people, but I've been the same one for far too long.
JJ Hutton Mar 2016
I shed everything but
the pencil skirt and stockings.
I suffocate and sundry and
drift into my boy's case of
suede leather, where he
trusts me to miscalculate
his competence and its
Saturday, the morning,
and he says, I love you
in the morning, Sarah.
There's stroke and nip,
at every turn of the trail
an adoration for what
he calls my soul, and
he asks for the routine
obliteration. A violence
always whispered.
I'm velvet everything.
Velvet tongued.
Velvet *****'d.
Each portal and contour
a soft place for him to
land, to dispose of his
fear of death,
but what am I supposed to
do with it, the fear of death?
But this is my burden
with the light skipping
through the blinds. Simpler
times, there were, I think.
And a last name he means
to hang on me, always soon
and very soon. Dishes in the sink.
Eternal moonbeams and sun rays.
This is it, I'm afraid.
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