(My fingers won’t stop growing like shells! My fingers won’t stop growing,
but without water, just with food!)*
As I stand in this bathroom stall in this congested church I can’t stop thinking about how much I hate my fingers, about how much larger they suddenly seem. This stall is stained in blood and ***** and graffiti that reads, “girls day 11/13/14.” Nothing seems so sad and so dry as this stall does.
I think of you sitting in the pew with your hand on the thigh of the girl whose hair is sheared short as though it were Judgment Day and she were an apple tree, its branches cut into small, fragile pieces.
On Judgment Day my grandfather died and everybody in my family and everybody in my town went to the funeral
except for me
who cried and cried and cried
and I’m still crying
for the way his skin used to fold over like a moon violent in its softness:
1. he’s a dead man with a body like a fish who has just ripped off its scales.
2. he’s a dead man who before he died liked to stand on top of the one cliff that looks out onto town and yell, “I will not spill my guts!” But he died anyway.
Would I be lying if I said I loved my grandfather? Would I be lying if I told you who I loved?
Here: I will tell you who I love, for a dare (triple doggy dare style) Here: this is an experiment Here: on Judgment Day (on the day my grandfather died) we’re all experiments; we’re all experimenting with those we love in terms of the way we kiss them:
we go into the woods just to touch each other’s chests.
We lie on tops of rocks and I kiss you as though I still need more fat on my huge body.