Research: Journals
The Journal
Past Issues
25.1
Sarah Messer
With This Change to Indoor Lighting,with this new Zoloft prescription, your eyes have become pools
of oil in the back field a century before kitchen appliances
were invented, before the sky seeped turquoise like something
withdrawn, before spy satellites stapled down the horizon.
Now the air smells like steak, after-shave and gasoline,
like my father’s slow slide into adultery, a faucet dripping
in the back of my mind. The man selling coffee at the campus
kiosk is a secret outlaw. He cuts himself for decoration—
thousands of tiny mayflies at his wrists.
Unmoved by the trend of punk teenagers and their designer dogs,
he percolates the end of the century in a spoon.
He is a pie without filling, a photograph of a whipped
man, an empty sandwich. His wounds are healing
into marks of brown crayon, into curling iron burns.
In this light my skin is the color of corsets, jars of old bust
cream.
When I was sixteen, my father built a disco in the basement
with speakers that flashed lights the color of grenadine, maraschino
cherries, while in my mother’s kitchen, a bowl of oranges
covered itself with a green shawl. It isn’t so difficult
to understand
why women over the centuries mixed their own medicine.
Why not kiss me for real, as if for the first time?
Why not write me an opera? I’m sick of your guitar strings
and that tattoo of Lacan under your arm. Let’s make
ourselves famous or else get drunk. If you want, you can find me
sitting on the frozen fountain in my 19th-century clothes,
with my Judy Jetson hair, with my scarification vendor,
and my Rottweiler waiting as dutiful as pot roast, his head in my lap.
