Bedfellows summer 2013 by bedfellows magazine

bedfellows summer 2013

bedfellows magazine

“The poet’s life is just so much crenellated waste, nights and

days whipping swiftly or laboriously past the cinematic window. We’re hunched and weaving over the keys of our green our grey or pink blue manual typewriter maybe a darker stone cold thoritative selectric with its orgasmic expectant hum and us popping pills and laughing over what you or I just wrote, wondering if that line means insult or sex. Or both. Usually both.” ― Eileen Myles, Inferno

CONTENTS

CONTRIBUTOR KEY | 42 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS | 43 EDITORS | 44

A NOTE FROM THE EDITORS The prolific use of social networking & our ever-present “smart” phones create the illusion of intimacy & closeness with others. We detail everything we eat, where we are, who we are with—but we don’t say much, if anything, about ourselves at our most exposed, least inhibited moments. The page should be a place where visceral personal experiences are shared with others, where intimacy is experienced without employing defenses. Sex is natural, vulnerability between people is natural, & poetry is natural to the poet—so why don’t we talk about what is inside of this vulnerability? For this first edition of bedfellows we allow the pieces to speak to each other in anonymity, with our contributors' names revealed at the end. Here, the work lives in a thin-walled apartment building, with the goings on of neighbors’ lives in the adjacent apartments suddenly clear & audible— all too familiar & still startling. We hope you enjoy listening in.

BOX | I in this dream my vagina's in a box. it's in a sea of boxed vaginas, tiny see-thru incubators full of newborn vaginas in water, i imagine tepid, coupled with that soft light & the people with their faces tapping the window at cute ones. i pick mine out in a corner & i think, ah fuck my vagina, & then i think ah fuck, what does it look like down there now, is it all scars & welted red, or is it more of a hole one might trip over walking & curse, or is it negative space & what does that feel like why don't i feel any different. earlier there was a girl in line for the bathroom with the same tattoo as me on her ankle. we held up our feet & went 'hollaaa,' halfhearted a shrug, & i remember hers looking more shiny & new, or concise like a sentence, & now i'm thinking back on the vagina box baby ward wondering if the tattoos were a metaphor 8

for vagina, & what's that say about lasting. the words we use to talk about ourselves, like quiet or nervous, or that vagina is a metaphor for claimed space, dislocated on display, with people cooing at it. or that sex is bereft, or it's intimacy that's depressing, in the sense of a swift sock to the stomach then left feeling airless & wilted. or that aloneness is a vice, is belligerent, is yelling at the bar when it's last call. or that nakedness as positive space is the opposite of a metaphor for life force meaning dispossessed the same throughout, not to mention stuck in this box soaking up all the water & light until it's too big, leaves home, finds a job, becomes a woman, settles down, whatever that means. tapping on that window thinking mine, & feeling different.

YOU SHOULD MESSAGE ME IF | II Everyone wants each other topless, or as close to it as possible. A world of whale sharks on two legs, sucking down debris. My true love only wants to go with me to the taqueria every night, where the world's love nestles inside a salty shell. I don't kiss just anyone; the mouth is an intimate place. It has seen so much comfort. Like me, you fear death and a mediocre lunch. You like to keep warm.

ON A TYPICAL FRIDAY NIGHT I AM | II Holding people hostage with my art. Waiting for the beer to end. Counting stray cats and all the ways they would kill us if given the chance. Weighing the pros and cons of keeping old panties with holes in the cotton. You can still wear them on the days you won't have sex. (Most days.) Considering all the dudes who will still fuck me even with holes in my underwear. (Most dudes.) Debating Nacho Cheese versus Cool Ranch with my educated friends. Fighting for our lives. Finishing the last of the cottage cheese. Thinking that what I hate most is when someone has talent and also really great hair.

THE FIRST TIME AFTER HE LEFT | III Was ridiculous. The old friend screwed up his eyes and heaved his flanks and I made noises that maybe were pleasure but maybe the ghosts of five dirty pigeons thrashing their way out through my throat. The first time after he left hurt, until it didn't, and my fingers found his back and my teeth his shoulders, was haunted, until it wasn't, and the pigeons flew out the open windows shedding grime and winter feathers, was ridiculous, until it wasn't, and my body shook and shook like a carpet beaten on the stoop and settled languid and clean back onto the floor.

POSTCARD TO O. | IV Amid spring's soft-edged days, the phantom limb tingle still finds crawlspaces to hide— a burst and bloom in the split-instant transition of traffic lights. I pinch the feeling mid-shudder, fumble for a pen, flip the Matisse print. Longing flutters into frame— Everywhere I travel without you is a layover. I'm fed up with his discordant touch, lovesick for our synchronicity. Consider how we rise at the same breath, spiting time-zones and months apart. How often we’re addressed as one, or the variant in which waitresses take us for sisters, left-handed and smiling the same from the shared side of a booth. Let's not call it theory— instead, evidence of intrinsic magnetism. Thoughts culled from the other’s tongue, every mirror and stall and mattress split. He'll be past tense when we next meet. Meantime, I remember Bolaño’s postcard to Lihn; doodled lips in the corner captioned un beso verde. Imagine lush puckers cropping up coast-to-coast across a flattened atlas, one for each mile between our mouths, each carrying the scent of sodden lawns or limes freshly sliced. I've lost sight of the sweet spot between patience and constant motion. Say you'll wait while I reconfigure? Beside me, he wipes slick fingers on a khaki leg, picks back up from a folded page. The bus lurches southward and I slide my hemline back to wholesome, half-dozing already in the back row’s dim. Your girl, always. Out past the highway, foggy water and railways stretch seemingly endless. Once every calendar, we circumvent horizon lines: pick coordinates and alight, only to scatter and find ourselves on the other side of spring. Waiting again, making do with other mouths.

WHAT’S LEFT | IV “ ...burn all the maps to your body. I'm not here of my own choosing.” ― Richard Brautigan Mattress sullied with ash-cherries, speckled blood A foyer floor, or: my scuffed knee’s origin story The leather loveseat from which you ordered simply, Strip Jangly subway cars where I sat shifting in brand-new lingerie palms pressed against my short trench to ward off voyeurs, slickness trickling further along my thighs at each stop Brick walls you pinned me against in full view of passersby, testing my pulse under streetlamp glare Taxi backseats where I slipped off underthings on command and balled them in a hand when I felt you waiting Stray earrings, obsolete lip shade once saved for when-and-only-when, nylons with a run snaked from cunt to calf

Ravenous notes dispatched from your bus trips, the filthy little films I made in response A morning like so many mornings when I rushed to dress and said One of these days I wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have an alarm to wake for or anyone waiting The static of your reply The vacated dreamscape of rapture not made to last Muscle memory's stubbornness, or: the places on my skin where raw-red trails still pulse the shape of your name

MARCH 16: LÀ CI DAREM LA MANO | V “Dash me in amorous wet, I can repay you” —Walt Whitman

we wake up make coffee shut off the Fault Machine remember ourselves differently assemble lost chronologies explain: we were doing this weird thing called sleep is why we couldn’t answer and given that we have a 100 % chance of dying anyway no matter what we put in our mouths we eat bacon, we eat eggs and avocado covered in sour cream and let the words cross watch them pile up between us on one side of a diner booth

after breakfast I call and tell them I’d rather not be oppressed today sorry and we put the phone away, we wander off somewhere where lost objects wash up like an antique opera Toulouse-Lautrec coffee cup and sequined sneakers a sky blue T-shirt leave laden with plastic bags and bland necessities the train the time labor and laundry lightened by a lovely equilibrium that slows our walking, we fall to talking of how “The Waste Land” negates the spring

I say Eliot was an idiot

for one thing everything attributed to April actually happens in March for another no month breeds lilacs lilacs breed themselves so the dead land wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be each flower convinced it can cause summer all by itself cause lilacs are that crazy I am wondering if you agree or not when I stop turn back and buy a popsicle cause youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve been waiting for one all winter flavor: strawberry and red as a crayon you torture me with it til I ask you to choose 18

to walk or be carried you decide to walk, you follow me I ask what time it is and you say, Plenty down my street then up my stairs and hours later you send a photograph of a flower that says you do agree, and we are each of us crazy as lilacs for one another, causing entire summers

TIPS FOR HER | VI Last April I fell in love and I’m still in love. Only, the focus of my love and affection has shifted several times and I don’t want to talk about any of it. No, I don’t want to talk about any of it. I don’t need to talk about any of it. If you really want to know, listen to the sound my keys make when they hit the kitchen table. Notice the way I curl my fingers around nickels and pennies when a cashier drops them into my palm. I smile easily now and take too many vitamins. My shorts are shorter and sometimes, when I’m tired, I believe that there are types of people and they do types of things and that those things are always typical and bad. Handsome single boys in their forties call tights “stockings,” and they like them. They like your hair when you blow-dry it. They ask you if you wore lacy underwear just for them, and they want you to say that you did. They like that you’re in your twenties and that you intermingle big words with curse words, and that your father lives on the west coast. They pay close attention when you talk about him. Boys your age cover your mouth when you moan and their roommates are home. Handsome single boys in their forties fuck you harder. Boys your age still eat pizza. They sit on the floor when there are no chairs. They dance with you because they know you like to dance. Boys in their forties do things for the greater good. Boys your age cut up the shoulder of the New Jersey turnpike to get to you on time. They watch the way water drips off of bikini bottoms and the edges of ass cheeks over your shoulder when you go to the lake. They get shithouse drunk and tell you they love you, and they don’t remember it the next morning, but it doesn’t mean that they were lying. They do love you when they’re drunk. Boys in their forties have dirty kitchens and pets they didn’t name and clean fingernails. They look you in the eye while breasts and butts float by behind your head at the beach, and you’re the one that will forget about things that happened the night before, and it will really be for the best. They will never tell you they love you, because they don’t.

Boys in their forties send filthy text messages with correctly placed semicolons. You can talk to them. Often they know you’re playing a game before you know you’re playing a game. Don’t let them win arguments at first, but let them win sometimes. Being defiled is overrated; you’ll find you don’t actually like having your hair pulled. They read new fiction and pick the best songs on the jukebox. The songs will stop you cold in the grocery store after they’re long gone. You’ll lean against the bagged cereal and sweat like you’ve smoked too many cigarettes, which you’ve been doing since they left. But boys in their forties have been hurt worse. You’ll know Her name. It will always be something menacing, like Alicia or Michelle, and in your mind she’ll have thick hair and a wry smile and wear beat up Danskos and think you’re a joke. Boys your age disappear. They understand technology and how to hide behind it, and they’re bad liars. Boys your age want to be good, but the world is just so pretty. Boys in their forties want to be good, but you talk too much. You want to be good, and sometimes you are good. Like your best. But then sometimes you look down at your own feet and you’re wearing beat up Danskos, and your name, as you say it to yourself in line at the supermarket, sounds cruel and foreign. And sometimes boys in their forties can’t handle vacation. And sometimes they disappear. And sometimes boys your age tell you they love you and they mean it and you shit all over them. They may use semicolons properly, but their parents might be alcoholics, so they’re great liars. Some nights, everyone in the city looks thirty. And you won’t be tired but they are tired, and you’ll both decide upon things without knowing them, and you’ll play cruel and elaborate mind games without even the hope of being defiled. At least boys your age believe in condoms. If they don’t really need the gold ones, you don’t have to tell them. Eat more pizza. You fucking love pizza.

THE TREE OF THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOOD AND BAD | VII The night I learned it's ok that it feels good to shoot a gun, your laugh was a half-snort. We drank something cloudy and coconut. At one point, you said, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Sometimes it's worth it to just buy another bed.â&#x20AC;? You kept your eyes so wide. We fought for every inch. I remember so little. Too little. That high-five we could barely create stung my palm. I wore that sting like a smell. That summer, outside of you felt like the vacuum of space. It made my clothes feel so heavy at work. "Must be the heat," when I told you this and you stuck out your tongue.

WHITMAN, RUSSIA, & YOU | VIII And so what I think everything is about bodies mingling, two playful waves overlapping Delaware River, we two how long we were fooled, to think we’d resist rushing inside each other, we watch Die Hard watch the cold war isn’t over after all of these domestic iron curtain conversations I have. Frank said he was always bursting forth away but I burst within want to, got to tell you the way you walk on nerves, sleep through the third alarm, hold a slice of pizza mirrors my late SEPTA bus ride palpitations, the typing cadence of the stenographer in the court room of my mind, I say “I have good word per minute” but the ruling is your presence more or less takes care of Purple Rain on repeat or a sense that time could be wasted inside of a Strongbow hard cider on top of your lap, I am cracker crumbs. You are not a morning person, so we sleep consider bagels reconsider bedroom departure and I replace my body in the vacant space you open and I seize onto, freckled arm, navy briefs say

“hello sailor,” I don’t need you to tie the knot to know I am at sea and I tread water, clear, naked window pillow talk, and for once your scent catches and it’s enough. The wave, the way you emerge from a kiss as if you’ve been drowning. Your next life sustaining breath will catch my scent. Forget the difference between.

CLOSER TO HOME | VIII someone almost caught my face contorted with the memory of you, on broad street line, southbound only to be snapped out of a crystal vision of your wandering index finger by a Philadelphian youth mockingly stating “he thought Maya Angelou was a financial analyst” and a sea of Phillies jerseys, hats, track jackets filed in like sardines, better than hide and go seek, I’d want you to hide with me in the cramped places, until we are caught and smashed against winter coats coming off to bare arms, further and then my face again textured like a scene where Katharine Hepburn gazes nakedly into Cary Grant’s eyes, it’s a Philadelphia Story with less bullshit finality and more gritty uncertain eventuality pushing, the woman sitting next to me leans in to see what I am writing and I just have recalled your mouth, then a clavicle, the stop before my stop I stand, gut punched, then a hip, broken breath waiting to emerge, soaked in the promise of nothing but the present, as what is to come is always then eyes, clouded, because all things considered the future is always uncertain, all I need is a brief patch of blue sky at the top of the subway stairs, then a foot closer to home.

A CELL | IX for BBC Bleached and starting to pass out, the women in my life hide for years. Objects can only last as new for moments. And then this thing grows and is eaten. The box is another way of detaining art. * How can I think of you as the one who got away when I was the one who left. When you came out back and asked me to admit it, I wouldn't admit it, and that's how you knew. A cell phone in the shower. Our wolf-like boredom gets the best of today.

DATA SOMEWHAT SKEWED | IX For every parked car a human. You can take a breath in the greenage that follows or sleep it off. Your only difference becomes parietal. * Esophageal sweat gets them hard. I'll wear costumes to understand how hair can change a person's point of view. You crawl through garbage breathing new forms of dust, exhaling old forms of cancerous tissues, licking salt from the floor. We're wrapped in cellophane and laying in the sun like used fish, trying to find a buyer, trying to lock ourselves in the basement of a former body. The data somewhat skewed: of cubicles and their covered walls and the quiet run and shoes noiseless in bathroom stalls. * How the idea of the character is more important than the character. How the doors are melted through. Temporally speaking, we are tomorrow. This total lack of insulation and the level of filth we can live with and how that level moves.

THANK YOU | X THANK YOU FRIEND THIS HAS GOT TO BE THE BEST PAINTING OF ME NAKED AND BELLY DOWN THAT I HAVE EVER SEEN IT'S GREAT MAYBE ONE OF THE BEST I KNOW JUST WHERE TO PUT IT ON MY WALL OF EROTICA AND I HOPE MY CHILDREN DON'T SEE IT AND I HOPE THEY DON'T SEE ME SITTING IN THE BED OF YOUR TRUCK SMOKING A CIGAR OUTSIDE OF THIS RED LOBSTER LOVINGLY DOUSED IN HAND SANITIZER TOTALLY FILLED UP ON BREAD CHEDDAR BISCUITS LIKE CRISPY BYGONES SO WE CAME OUTSIDE TO THE PARKING LOT BACK TO THE BED OF YOUR TRUCK AND NOW IT IS HERE THAT I WILL STAY AND I HOPE YOU TELL ME MORE ABOUT THAT TATTOO OF YOUR MOM I HOPE YOU TELL ME MORE ABOUT HOW TO DISAPPEAR

JONBENET RAMSEY | XI when i first saw her i knew she was like me except a saint, an intermediary. in the supermarket we stood face to face, black girl to sacred tabloid as the items rang like church bells. i wondered if god let her wear lipstick like that still. i would flip to the centerfold and search for details of sexual assault, thinking maybe if i were dead they'd love me all over the country too. but she had all the footage and frilly socks, ringlets. i had box braids, mosquito legs and a sun allergy. hot comb burns on the back of my neck and ears and i wanted every person to know that my hip bones were bruised and friction when i walked felt like hot asphalt like molten everything. i wanted barbara walters to interrogate my mother solemnly and zoom in on my dead face in the middle of our last family portrait. we were the same silent darkness staining our nuclear families. i wanted america to know and shake their heads at least. i searched for myself in the crime scene and in her genital injuries. i found my genital injuries in her genital injuries. i searched for my future in her genital injuries, for parallel realities there. i hoarded tabloids and lined my panty drawer with her patron smile and the floorplan of her home. layers of her where i needed her protection. i talked to her when i couldn’t fall asleep. there was a place where we met and compared notes on shadowy figures. we could both name our murderers but couldn’t see their faces. we blamed our potbellies and how we liked to rub lipstick into our cheeks and eyelids. we both pissed the bed and blotted it with old towels and disney comforters. we both hid our panties inside the toilet tank. i told her i wanted someone to murder me and she told me someone might. she said one day there’d be a road to heaven for girls like us, lined with paparazzi in silver robes, heralding our fallen hymens. i asked her if jesus knew where my rash came from because i didn’t. i’d already forgotten the most important parts of my own story. did jesus know what happened in our townhouse? was our home a crime scene? i wanted to know if jesus knew. 29

ROSETTA STONE | XII In the most unromantic city in the world I found you and your unsavory idea that we might be happy, be able to unlock the language beyond we should spend some time together. Trust each other with those new definitions clicking open upon waking or a cup of coffee, snap of the television or soles of feet slapping, those bulb-exploding realizations that end with Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m an incredible asshole and end with palm against palm and end with sharp snap of lock, door, jamb. In reaching endlessly for his hand, the reaching itself the conversation anyway. Humpback whales sing the same song, all of them, across the globe in the chill of the Arctic and while lazing through the Pacific for a year and suddenly change their tone, all of them at once. The first few hours of that new language filling the ocean with sonic waves that ricochet wildly, finally accidentally intersecting in such a way that is where have you been Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve missed you so much. Your dream mouth speaks about shoes and chicken and concrete and I pull you awake with thin, sweating hands, still wondering as you slide into waking into me if any one of these moments will be the one that breaks the code, in which we intersect at such an angle so we can stop talking in our sleep.

THE MOVES | XIII for Eileen Myles Dear Eileen after your reading I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t go to the bar. I got in a car with her we thought about it but instead parked in a dark icy lot on Washington Ave. between 22nd and 23rd to make out. I was wearing two layers of pants so was she so we couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t do it right instead I just pulled out my thing and whacked it for her right there on the street the lights off and the engine running. Two people walking by saw me doing it. But the city under snow gets muffled 31

cops were running red lights and this isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t my style Eileen I only like it sometimes. I read a poet and wish I had their life. I rolled my long underwear all the way down to the Afghani combat boots my father gave me after the war leaned the seat back imagined being a soldier having a woman wait for me at home bones crunched in my rubber soles. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m very traditional. But I think reading your poems makes me want to write about fake orgasms the kind I do in the dark 32

like sonnets turned on the 9th line itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s just a different kind of breathing everyone buys it they never knew boys would bother but believe me itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s true. Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s this basketball player he plays for the Denver Nuggets every time he dunks he yelps making all the other dunkers seem like fakers. And Tom Cruise which is where I learned my moves from. Tom Cruise is a faker. What I like about her is she got under the lie which is why I do it on the streets with her. Nothing can happen to your little 33

human self. You’re safe Ian. I’ll watch. I keep trying to yelp. We’re driving home now. I’m excited. I’m gonna write this poem. I got it all planned out. All the moves. I want to learn how to show someone that I love them next Eileen. I loved your cat poems. I want to get there too. Love. Cats. At the center of this weird earth.

I ONLY HAVE A SHORT TIME LEFT | XIV I only have a short time left to be in love with you. I know that now. Once, everything made me think of you— even the pattern where salt fell when I sprinkled it on meat. The other day I got in the shower and soaped up. I didn’t think of you. That night I squeezed your leg hard under the sheets just to hear you say “ow.” I put my cocktail ring on the other hand and squinted, pretending you had given it to me. I pulled your arm across my chest while you were snoring in the morning and made you hold on. I closed my eyes and hoped it would feel the right way. It felt sweaty. You left a pair of boxers on the floor and I picked them up and put them in with my own dirty clothes, and then I pulled them out again and lay back on my bed and put them over my face and breathed for a while. I scrunched them into a tight ball and held them in my fist later while I was watching TV in the dark, and honestly, I thought I might never see you again, and I flipped through a few channels. And I thought about touching myself. And didn’t. Nothing was really on.

[C] = SPEED OF LIGHT | XV The bedroom window was covered with outside & she with light blankets was light herself & so like dawn; both of their beauties were tactless: the outside reeked beauty & hers must have been real because when asked for the time I said “Sorry?” She said I have to leave promptly at “Sorry,” & never forgave.

HALLOWEEN PANTS | XVI I didn’t know what pants to wear for Halloween but it is nice to think of better pairs I could have picked while we take this ride through the suburbs, past the sign that says here begins the land of phantoms. It is nice to think about pants and regrets and other things I’d share with you to cultivate a healthy relationship, such as will my press-on claws be misconstrued though they look lovely against the automatic windows of your oversized car which you drive fast like Nosferatu driving his horses in strobe-lit silent film time but you are younger and come with hair on your head not your hands this thick October night when to be honest the air is too moist—it feels like biting into a chocolate with gelatinous insides that make candy-colored clowns of my teeth. Sometimes I don’t think you like me enough. I don’t think I’m your 37

sexual partner in the 8% of dreams where scientists say you have sexual relations with the one you really love, if anyone calls sexual relations what they have in their dreams. I should have worn tighter pants or an animal costume with a name like Busty Cat. Do you have an animal? I’d like to see your animal. I’m looking at you through colored contacts that make me resemble the vampires I’ve always loved but I’d rather have their immortality than their eyes, even though the beautiful vampire people call themselves monsters and complain how hard it is to live forever when they cry about their beautiful, seductive, immortal lives, but everyone knows it’s harder to be a less attractive monster who’s going to die and speaking of death I’ve got this cut on my arm and the bandage feels wet but I want you to touch it and check and not be repulsed unless you find some erotic charge in repulsion and then we’d be getting somewhere, like 38

have you ever been to candy heaven? I know a few things and I don’t think a woman wears the same perfume as her sister unless she wants trouble because even fake scents belong to particular people and you can’t take that away any more than you can take their way of seeing, like how I see bright dying leaves swirl under streetlights as if we’re all about to be sucked up by an expensive vacuum cleaner I’d like to ride through the air, calling myself the witch of suck if it just—if it weren’t for this bandage and the moistness and the street numbers that keep ticking up when you drive past my address and I know if you get to my sister’s street you’ve gone too far.

NOSTALGIA 1.0 | XVI Maybe itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s just a virus but I wish we could revert to our factory settings and make it feel like the first time. .

CONTRIBUTOR KEY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thankâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; Sean Ahern for giving us life on the internet. Michael Messina for generous financial aid. Lauren Faralli for an additional pair of editorial eyes. Liz Giacalone for providing us with art. And the Philadelphia Poetry Community, for giving us a home.

bedfellows

editors

Jaclyn Sadicario | Alina Pleskova