Rose FishmanYou think I find the fish a beauty. They reek
and still they swim like souls in heat. You think living alone would make me less ashamed. No. I lock the bathroom door, sit on the toilet with my legs crossed, hang a towel over the mirror and look away. I’ve powdered myself for 366 days and plucked out each bad hair, made my face grace emptiness like a doily. But I can see the germs quibbling along the sink, the heater’s demanding bang. As a girl, I stripped my clothes off in the car, pretending to be asleep. Praise was the hooked worm of a stranger. I’d climb to the window-seat, distend my eleven year old belly, distract a passerby from what was proper. That’s when I smelled it all at once, the clove of something dying in my armpits, the fate of all the mice you killed for me, their tails now wriggling out in silver hairs too fast to catch them with a tweezer. Nothing drowns out all the horror fluids that reside here, coming and going like tenants I have to grin for. Time is pungent the way I ripen. Only the mirror does not stink. You know, a widow’s just the wife of her reflection. I dreamt up the color of my cheeks so I could deepen the bowl behind them, fill it with the excrement of your affairs, out of breath excuses, your sweet nothings that aftershaved my ears. You got a kick from having sex with me whenever you came back. I didn’t mind—your disappearance let me dam myself in surpluses of logic. Now that you’re dead sometimes I imagine you getting eternal head from the brightest orange koi fish in Japan. The last praise I will receive will be the lack of flies adorning me. From your liquid world where you must be the gas that gags the eel and fills the ocean with purge fluid, rusted foam. You say there’s no such thing as boredom in a dream but I have sat in sleep a lifetime, my face copying itself a thousand times into fibrous slippery funguses. By day, they sprout from furniture. I dust them safely until soon when the light burns out of reach and nobody will change it. Cheers, my last supper as lady reason: I ate the cotton balls, I swear, drank the spirits of your old cologne, probed the mascara wand through my esophagus, beckoning the worm back to my lip.
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