“Do you know,” I say, “that this is your one-hundredth birthday?”

“My what?” Stella crows, her white eyebrows furrowed, the translucent blue-green-pearl colored skin of her forehead puckered into wrinkles.

“You’re one hundred today,” I friendly-shout.

“I can’t hear you,” Stella says, nose wrinkled, its drooping tip unhappy with me, “do you know, though,” her thin lips turn upward, lifting the white hairs on her upper lip, “it’s my birthday today.”

Love is

The anus of a Labrador

Blooming like a flower

And hissing out

The foul runoff,

Half-digested,

Of a mouth-sewer

Whose slobbery days

Are spent catching

Refuse, trash and dead things

Love is

The sandpapered pads

Of Labrador paws

Rasping a path up your sheets,

Billowing rank air

Into your face

To settle a Labrador body/septic tank

Onto your pillow

And you, pressing your head

Into the foul abdomen,

And muttering, “Good girl.”

it was a perfect clementine

tense beneath the teeth and then

a cool burst of bright, tart, sweet

a golden rivulet at the mouth corners

i handed you a wedge and said

“take this, eat,” for it was my body

and your beautiful teeth scraped its skin,

while I waited for them to bite.

i always finish perfect ones too fast

but you, a savorer, a savior, make them last

“Don’t be stupid,” Amber murmurs to me in the rasp-breathy voice she adopts around our high school’s gang of wannabe beatniks. Her short fingers, child’s fingers tipped in burgundy acrylic talons, are wrapped around the metal mouthpiece of a hookah, and her pale eyes glare at me beneath her false lashes and cateye. She is not bad, nor is she stupid; we drive around town at night in her 1995 Saab singing Disney songs and declaring ourselves stardust, sharing Big Gulps, makeupless and uninhibited. Her room is a disaster and she fails nearly every standardized test, but she knows a liar by the curve of their tongue against their teeth and that’s more than I can say of the brainless boneheads in most of my AP classes.

I take the hookah and suck in, just barely, careful not to breathe. It is flavored like blueberry, but I know it is tobacco, like I know facts about the solar system, history, Shakespeare. The beatniks debate poetry around us but do not want to hear from me, even though I know many, many facts about poetry. I know rhythms and meters; I charge classmates a dollar or two cookies to write them dirty sonnets in three minutes or less. But when I speak up in a beatnik poetry circle, refute their analogies, criticize their (male, male, male) beatnik gods, they shift in their seats. They cough. They think that I think they are stupid, which is True and Not True; Schrödinger's beatniks.

Hookah, I know, is cool, but it is stupid. Amber knows it is stupid, too, but in the lame way--the way underaged drinking is stupid, and skipping class is stupid, and falling in love with acne-ridden teenaged poets is stupid. She does them all once a week, a religious self-care self-harm routine, with abandon. She is Cool and I am Stupid. She is Stupid, but Smart. Much smarter than me.

“Your pal is a drag,” A beatnik whispers to Amber, his round glasses shining in the porch light, the hair above his upper lip blonde and patchy and embarrassing. ‘A drag’ he says, which is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard, but Amber laughs at him and rolls her eyes.

“I know,” she rasp-breathes, like Marilyn Monroe after eight packs of cigarettes. She’ll sound like that for real, eventually, from the hookah, from the cigarettes. She’ll get wrinkly and stained, like an old white t-shirt. I won’t get wrinkled or stained, but in the boring way--the way of a white button-up, the kind you rip off as soon as you get home, that sits in the hamper because it’s dry clean only, the kind that stares at you from the closet as you say, “God, I have nothing to wear.”

You eat blueberries on the strip of balcony they listed as a “terrace” and watch the cars pulse through the railings. Car--railing--car--railing. You are entranced by cars, but I worry that you think they are alive. You pet the bumper of each car affectionately when we move down neat parking lot rows. You tuck your plastic miniatures beneath blankets and murmur “shh, shh, shh” to them before bed. I worry that this means you are antisocial, or that he has broken your sense of reality, of affection, but the social workers tell me that I am ‘projecting’. This is the thing that mothers do when they are fearful of cars--of gravel beneath tires, the rhythmic and ponderous crunch before the door opens, and shuts, and the footsteps begin.

You get blueberries stuck in your tiny baby teeth; a swath of blue skin covers one and you are a pirate. I grin at your pirate tooth until it is a drug addict tooth, a rotting body tooth, and I duck behind you to slide my index finger into your mouth.

“I’m just getting it off,” I say, but you’re already crying. I lift you in my arms, and am amazed at your tiny hands clenched in my sweater, your chubby legs warm and strong against my waist, all instinct, like a clinging primate. I marvel at myself; the cause and the comfort. “You had blueberry stuck in your teeth,” I say into your hair and inhale, deep, the sour-sweet smell of your scalp. ‘They could lead me blindfolded down a line of kids and I could sniff your hair, and I would know it was you,’ my mother used to tell me, and it drives me to memorize you now.

I ask the social workers if you’ll remember him, how much, how long, and they say you won’t, not at all, but there’s always projection. I should be careful not to project. And when I ask them whether he’ll stay in, whether they’ll let him out, and when, the social workers smile with their big, big grown up teeth.

“It’s just blueberry skin,” I say, very softly, to your hair, but you hear a fire truck scream by and you use me as a fulcrum to crane your entire body toward the sound. Close, and close, and CLOSE and away, away, away it goes--shh, shh, shh. You love cars. I once watched the lights of a police car flicker red, and blue, and red, and blue and it made me think of you.

There is a period between Jon and Jon when the universe shudders a little and presses its weight into my spot on the rug in front of The Door. The Door is both Jon and Not Jon, a memory of his departure and a promise of his return, and between naps I stare at The Door in suspended expectation.

You likely know Jon as he is the most important human in the world. You can recognize him by the smell of burnt tires and the taste of salt behind his ears. Jon bursts into shouts when I lick the salt off, which I find exhilarating. Jon is, in his own words, a Good Boy. Jon eats popcorn and gives me every fourth piece. “One for me, one for me, one for me,” and one for ME. The popcorn tastes salty, like Jon.

There is a jangle of keys in the hallway, and I am awake. I am awake, and I am listening. The keys sometimes jangle past The Door and down the hallway, and on those occasions I sigh and go back to sleep. Right this moment I hear jangle stop in front of The Door and I am awake. I am awake and I rush to the door, where I smell burnt rubber and petroleum and salt.

“Hello, Jon, please hurry!” I shout through The Door, “I hope your ears are very salty today!” I shout, and the keys jangle, and The Door opens.

The body arrives at nine o’clock in the evening, and the neighbors do not seem to rustle their curtains. John Patrick Henry sighs, soft, above the music of cicadas and tires against warm, wet pavement.

“You need help getting it inside?” the delivery man asks, and John Patrick Henry looks at the delivery man and observes that his face is unnaturally impassive. He must know what is inside the box. He must know there is no it but a she, naked, flesh perhaps still jiggling from the motion of transport from truck to doorstep. John Patrick Henry swallows.

“No,” he says to the delivery man.

“Sign here,” the delivery man says, still impassive, and John Patrick Henry signs, signs away, signs Jonathan Patrick Henry, and the lines wobble from his shaking fingers. He leaves the pen on the clipboard to keep the delivery man from seeing him tremble.

“Goodnight,” John Patrick Henry says, and the delivery man looks at the long wooden slats of the delivery box, and looks at John, and seems for a moment to pause, as if to insist, as if to suggest she is too heavy for John to carry alone. Instead, the delivery man snorts and spits into the garden and strides back to his truck.

John Patrick Henry waits for the truck to rumble, for it to pull from the curb, before he drags the box in. His arms tremble now, and he casts quick glances to the brick houses around him, to their closed window shades. They do not shift, even when the wood scrapes against his front steps, and John’s eyes prick with tears at the scent of cedar soaring high, high above wet pavement.

He thought he would be calm, he did not want to scare her, but his right eye begins to twitch. His palms sweat and slip around the box; he moves to push instead of pull, closes the door behind himself and collapses on top of her wooden crate.

“I love you, I love you,” John Patrick Henry whispers between the slats. There is a crowbar on his dining room table, positioned there just for this purpose, but John Patrick Henry inhales deep. He pulls at the wooden slats with his bare hands and they slip but they loosen the nails, and the slats break in jagged pieces as he yanks at them. “I love you,” he says, as he pushes away wooden debris, and packing peanuts, and uncovers a pair of perfectly formed feet from beneath it all. The toenails are red and he strokes them with his shaking fingers.

John Patrick Henry breathes deep, and he rises to his feet. His knees creak, and he is embarrassed to be old in front of her, and so he is ginger in his movement toward the crowbar. He is ginger, too, as he lifts the crowbar from the table and returns to her. He presses it carefully against the slats by her head, levers it up, up against each one.

Like beams of light between window slats, her face shines. It beams up at him, still, through the splintered wood and packing peanuts. “I love you,” he says, and she does not flinch, or breathe, or speak. She lies wordless in her box, and the smell of silicon rises above the smell of cedar, and John Patrick Henry’s face grows warm and wet with tears.

I would rather be strung

from the ceiling

by the ankles

and gutted

like a fat hog,

ribcage split

and entrails spilled,

than let you reach your dirty fingers

into the tender place inside of me

that aches

and yearns

and bleeds

feeling

I managed to catch a promise on a humid summer day, and as I watched it squirm wetly in my hand I wondered what to do with it. I’d never caught a live one myself and I knew I wanted to keep it fresh, all iridescent and scaly in the shifting sunbeams of the afternoon.

I thought first to ask my father, but he couldn’t keep a promise to save his life. He left them all over, lining bar tops and car back seats all around town. My father handed me promises that were already in pieces, sad and lifeless, and I knew he wouldn’t be any help at all.

I thought to ask my Grandpop, who had always taken great care with his promises, but then I remembered Grandpop was a Twilight Wanderer now and he couldn’t tie his shoes or go on a toilet. I felt sorry for him, but I was scared of his far-off eyes and his spittle-lips, and I couldn’t ask him anyway because if he couldn’t remember how to go in a toilet he couldn’t remember how to keep a promise.

The only other person I could think of was Mrs. Williams, but she dangled promises above us like carrots, like we were all little rabbits in a cage. Now sit, she’d say, and we’d all sit and stare at the golden promise with our wide rabbit eyes, and then she would smile to herself and wobble her fat rear back to her desk and slide the promise in the drawer. Some other time, she’d say, I’ll just keep this promise right here, and you all just listen and some day I’ll give it to you.

So I stared at the promise I caught, at its slithering body and its golden sheen. I sniffed in big and unfurled my hand, and I crouched down to the creek, and I let it go into the water, because a promise was pretty but it was useless, and I didn’t know how I could ever keep one anyhow.  

Harry opens his sockets to the familiar darkness and, though his vocal cords are long gone, sighs out relief in the shrug of his bones. It is his once-a-year opportunity, his Halloween rendezvous, and he wills the soil above him to shift and part. He rearranges the grains of dirt methodically, leisurely, until he feels the final vibrations of them against the concrete of his coffin casing.

That is a harder task; he focuses very intently on the challenge, on lifting the slab from its well-intentioned placement above his coffin. Slowly, surely, he feels it rumble to one side, and he lifts the lid of his coffin to peek out.

It is dark, darker than it used to be; he sees only shadows and shapes now, limited by what psychic powers of perception he can muster. He wonders as he clambers from the hole if this is what babies see upon cracking their eyes open, if he has returned to some primordial sight he’d lost from years of assumed clarity. He wonders, too, why it gets darker each year. He tries not to wonder, with his right foot touching the grass, and then the other shortly after, whether there’ll be a year when he’ll go completely blind or, worse, won’t wake up.

No matter. He counts the graves as he passes them, unable to read the headstones; one, two, three, four and then a right. Two rows, and a left into the next, toward the shadow of the enormous oak he’d smoked cigarettes under as a teenager.

Over the hill, he knew, was (or once had been, he couldn’t perceive that far) the shell of Heinrich’s maraschino cherry factory. On humid summer nights one could smell the cloying scent of grenadine floating on the breeze. One could talk for hours there, suspended in time, feeling as if one’s endless musings floated in a cherry-scented haze around one’s head. He sits there now, careful of his fragile coccyx, and waits in the thin blur of moonlight. There is movement around him, a field of wakeful bodies counting their own rows, but he shuts his eyes against them. He saves his strength.

He still dreams, though, of the maraschino factory. He dreams of the tendrils of mentholated cigarette smoke, the smell of clean skin beneath it all; he tries to conjure the spirals of her hair beneath his fingers and reaches his metacarpals out as if in reaching he will be able to conjure them. Instead, he perceives the press of something hard against his fingertips and opens his sockets.

She is only a white shape, a marshmallow haze, but he would know that haze anywhere. She draws closer and descends to sit beside him beneath the tree, her finger bones lacing into his. He remembers the way her lips used to curl into a smirk in the last light of day, how he’d catch them with his own before the smile could slip away. He cannot kiss her now; he doesn’t think he’d want to.

He tries not to wonder, with her fingers clasped in his own, what it would have been like if he’d asked her. He wonders if they would have had children, would have spent their days bickering and sneaking furtive kisses in doorways and slipping each other a dollar for milk, please, if you could. He wonders if they would have been buried together, side by side, and would only have to part the dirt between them to reach out and touch for all the days of the year, for all the days until they stopped waking.

There were, though, complicating factors. He cannot recall what they were; the clarity, the open eyes, are long gone. Now, here, she is beside him, white and blurry and familiar in the darkness. But she’d smelled like clean skin, once. She’d had skin once.

He wonders what she’s wondering.