LETTERS FROM NOWHERE

I convinced a boy that I had a glass eye. We lay awake until daylight, drinking gin and listening to records in his bed. He tried to introduce me to opera. I found it innavigable but sweet. When he put his arms around me, I shrugged it off as inevitable. I purred under his weight, under his charm. And I said: You do not belong to me. Because I refused to kiss him, he asked only that I put my fingers in his hair. My resistance is without sternness. I understand the petty things that bodies demand. But I'm done with those curious exertions for the time being. Put it away, comrade. I don't know what kind of girl you think I am, but I appreciate tranquility.

I have been reading the Kolyma tales. Wondering at all those ghosts that the Siberian permafrost keeps. My love of history is turning me into a collector of macabre characters. Scurvied phantoms trekking in foot-rags across hills that shine blue like sugar. It occurred to me that one does not usually recount tales of deranged and emaciated political prisoners gorging themselves on puppy meat in polite conversation. However, this occurred to me only after I had already done so. History--there's no shortage of horror.

Lacking the discipline to write seriously, I have taken to taming my body. The only stain on my bedsheets is one of ink. Meanwhile every other nineteen-year-old goes gallivanting off to reconcile their mutable wants and wet mouths. Hankering, pang, throe. I sit in my room and try to write a boy worth undressing for. Sometimes I feel the need to close myself off for ever. Why not? Why not?

Because no words will come, I am building a new body for my poem. Separate from my own, which has been playing obdurate. So far this body is just a trunk, meanly formed from chickenwire. Ribs like dulcimers, shoulders like ships. I spent the afternoon bearing skin for the bookwork. Flour, water, newspaper flesh. When finished, the skin will glisten with decoupaged poetry. Rilke too. There's a vacancy in the chest, where the heart will go. An accordion book of red tissue paper. We'll see. Flirting with exorcism. We'll see.

I ran away to New Orleans for a weekend only to run into an ex-lover. Lover being a convenient term. He belonged to the school of impassable boys I would not undress for. He and I walked along the Mississippi River and it was oddly comfortable. I almost told him about the poem I wrote about him, but thought better of it. It took a year of not speaking (coupled with the astounding coincidence of having found each other in the Crescent City) for us to forgive each other for the discrepancy between nudity and nakedness.

I wish I had something to talk about besides bodies I couldn't love. But I don't.

I fear that my entire college education will be one of kissing the wrong people and writing poems about it.

Then there's the part where I greyhound bussed to Chicago and back. Crossing through the Midwest at sundown, I saw so many magenta haystacks it almost made me want to be a realist. Almost.

My hometown has been buried in pollen for the last two weeks. The streets are colored with absurd splashes of yellow. Everywhere I arrive, someone reaches up and brushes flowers from my hair.

I am an uncouth and unreliable narrator, spitting gin fictions.

Ten times, count 'em ten times, that boy asked about my glass eye.