Thin Pipes

 Love slithered across the newly uncarpeted floor that night and met me in my empty room. "Will you find the empty clam shells here too?" it asked. "You're disgusting," I sneered and felt that I was doing what I only did when I fell asleep angry. Love slithered into my new closet and choked itself around the bar that would soon hang all of my dresses. "Stop." Love released its grip and dropped to the floor in a way that only something with no arms or legs could. I nailed the closet shut and moved out before I could move in.

            You smell like sleep and tears.

 The deeply Catholic Wolfgang Amadeus pried and prodded and I wept and could feel the source of warmth weeping too. He asked if I wanted clams for breakfast. We had clams for breakfast. When I tasted the bread it was bitter. When I tasted the clams they were bitter. When I tasted my tears I thought they might taste sweet like lemonade. They too were bitter.

Damn it Ann, don't look at me that way! You don't want my help? Just do what you're supposed to do.

Josephine, patroness of roses, convinced me that unpeeling oranges shouldn't make me feel dusted, convinced me that walking in lots shouldn't soak me in tar. I followed her and Green like the wind and grabbed their hooks so that I would not have to bother walking. My time with Josephine was always marred by the nights when I would fall asleep beneath the porch, I was a cat then, and she would find me and whisper to me: "Mon amour, je t'arrache. Je t'arrache," and I would whisper back "Tear at me so that I spill beads from my lobes. Tear at me so that I drop any plates I am holding." In the morning we dressed in damp silence.

I would always wake up in tar.

One evening at dinner you fell asleep with your face in your food. I ripped a petal from the centerpiece and tiptoed out of the house through the kitchen. You never saw me again. I moved into the apartment across the street and watched you eat dinner alone. I cried. I cried. I cried. I closed the curtains. I stopped crying. I opened the curtains. I carved wax tulips in your eyes and found out you weren't lonely, you were just old which is still lonely but not in a way I could understand. I looked at your face and felt comforted by it. I felt cradled by the space above your lip and beneath your nose. I imagined myself sliding back and forth in it like I were in a rowboat and waves were lapping at the side of it, licking it with its receding peaks.

The river is flowing, flowing and growing. The river is flowing, down to the sea. River carry me, a child I will always be. River, carry me down to the sea.