waking religion

[astrotourism]

It takes a lot of miles for me to get wasted again, starshattered and unspeakably tall. It takes hands that cut the string and hands to open my mouth. There’s nothing South of here that’ll make me move, nothing we’ll ever drive towards. We’re handing it all over to the Lord with the Alps slanted across the way back. Half a bottle of italian white to get me staring at peoples zygomatic bones, at silver necklaces and wideset eyes. It takes men, and it takes diphenhydramine. It takes light that stutters and groans.

[astrotourism]

Sometimes I feel like I know all of it already. The way your teeth become soft edged diamonds when the light hits them from the side. How you and I in the cab of your van always ends with you getting out to look at the moon. How I haven’t seen you drink in almost a year. I know it all already. I follow you into the night, one of the first of summer. Jeans and a t-shirt. The way the heat is like insect bites. Heat that flares and catches. Heat like slapped skin.

[astrotourism]

my brother is learning how to drive. he is drinking coke with ice from a ridged glass. he is drinking it for breakfast. some days deserve softer words. my favorite part of the dictionary is when N changes to O. my favorite part of tennis is when someone smashes their racquet on the crushed red shale. my brother’s ice blinks against the cut glass. he is learning how to take me places. his face is like an open tulip or a coin left in the snow.

[astrotourism]

you who are a white dove under hospital lights, a million rubber-gloved hands. creature-fuck, a packed bowl. there's so much i could do to you, so much you'd let me get away with. me who is a claw, who is a talon. me who is a thousand miles wide. none of us have ever survived anything.

[astrotourism]

the maid has ironed my funeral dress and hung it on my closet door. i look at its limp form, a small body stretched long and drooping in the corner of my room, its shape a sigh of relief after it spent three weeks crumpled where i peeled it off half asleep. look around you, lay on the horn. these are the people whose eulogies you read bent over the kitchen counter, these are the people you watch tv with. your back porch apostles, bathtub-drowned angels.

[astrotourism]

bloody mouthed with the engine idling in front of her town house, springsteen on the stereo telling me i better keep on driving. the breeze from the sound salts the windows and she tells me to leave my dirty boots by the door, drink the coffee while it’s hot. she laughs at the christians, licks her spoon in the doorway. candied altars and empty ashtrays, reality tv rectangles on the wall behind her bed. her shrill tastes and aches, soft-sallow bends i still look for in the aftermath.

[astrotourism]

High tide behind pond water eyes, wearing his wifebeater under the new blazer. Workman’s wages no more, he tells me. His card got declined buying Reds at the gas station, there’s no money to get married. Who are we when we’re not here? Without the black plastic gloves, when we’re not steering a beat up Ford down a service road in our nowhere county, my hand out the window to catch the leaves off dead trees? What’s left but to talk about how car wrecks must be a godly thing, how you gotta create your own way around the ape? Who are we when we’re not keeping the city folk fed?

[astrotourism]

with your face pressed up to the car window you look almost scary. white skin and flashlight eyes, little daggers for teeth, working up some kind of courage outside in the rain. three or four counties ago i lied to some lady in a wet gravel parking lot and it gave you a stomach ache all the way down the coast. here is the place where you can piss in the ditch, a place that is a hundred miles wide. here is the place that feels like being in love with someone dead, like chewing poison ivy.

[astrotourism]

i’ve left my stain on this island by way of lingering butane smell and a web of careless lies that only serves to get you into trouble. i grew up into fully realized shittiness while you were busy stretching all your bones up into angelhood. but you’ll have me three beers deep under a triangle sun and i’ll weather your neurotics and sunburns and the bluegrass songs stuck in your head.

[astrotourism]

in the steamed up belly of the faraday field i dream i help you move out of your haunted house and into a double wide off some highway in a county no one’s ever heard of. the swallows make shapes in the sky as we drive and i don’t kiss you, just your eyelids to wake you up. on the offramp you decide to let me meet your mother who looks exactly like you and i shake her hand, tell her my intentions and relax into husbandry.

[astrotourism]

i witness the seaside husbandry, performed flawlessly under an orange-peel dusk. side effects, as advertised, get me driving dizzy and half-drunk, it’s not rocket science to get double fined, to crash headlong into a work zone. the light house blinks out a father’s day ballad, calls home every husband strewn across the island.

[astrotourism]

The summer I went insane the weather would change every day and leave me with throbbing, tender goosebumps up my arms and thighs. Even in the midday heat I felt cold and flu-sore. My dreams became increasingly violent: throwing up embryonic strings of bile into a bone-white toilet bowl, ravaged by fever and locked in the apartment with a dead thing. 

I’d drag myself to class and bump into everything, bruising my shins and my forearms and not understanding a word. I grew short-sighted and dizzy, curling my body around the ball of hectic nitroglycerin energy in my gut. 

I wanted to break my face open on the foam-blue plastic tabletops, I wanted to horrify everyone. Instead, I bled pages upon pages of misery into my notebooks and into the bathroom sink. 

The first careful weeks of that summer I spent lonely and desperate and repulsed by everything I saw. I went into hunger strike even though my father, during that time, expressed his love via a steady stream of frozen meat and eggs that would pile and pile and pile in our little pink Barbie-fridge. 

Theo and I didn’t know what to do with ourselves: what to eat, when to sleep, what to watch on TV. I spent hours under the blazing sun, laying on the miserable concrete sliver that was our balcony, looking up at the blood in my eyelids. I developed a cancerous tan, scratched open rashes on my elbows and neck. 

For a while, I thought I had something wrong with my brain. More than the couple of wires I already knew to be crossed. Something purple and vile and eating. A fictional tumor. I wore sunglasses everywhere; I grieved my depth-perception. The dreams told me this, too. My sleeping self would beg Theo to gauge my eyes out with a plastic spoon or stick his fingers deep into my ears. They’d always come away covered in withering jet-black sludge and we would both weep. 

[astrotourism]

cold white contrail of a car crash, tailing the ambulance all the way from my street to yours. my writhing, oil-slick poetry stretches from the back porch to the driver’s seat to the church pews of my childhood. and you, across the indigo-deep divide, are still reaching fingers across though you have to bend them the wrong way at the knuckles now. you’re a wild woman standing windswept on a bridge and i’m a dirtbag runaway with ink slathered on my forearms. we were cooked up by mad scientists to keep meeting at the bottom of it all under a dead indigo sky, to keep crashing into each other and break all our bones.

[astrotourism]

i was walking here, right here, four years ago with a girl. we’d taken the wrong exit out of central station, too distracted talking about david bowie and patti smith and all her girlhood idols, and couldn’t find the way to the museum. she was smaller than me, which was rare, and we almost lost each other in the bustling weekend crowd. hooking my arm through hers felt drastic, like defying some ancient teaching, a rosebud rebellion. there, on the cracked pavement, i could be who i thought myself to be. the oncoming of a radical age.

[astrotourism]

somehow all the evils in the world have slid past this beach. you’re singing billy joel and i’m staring into the sun, imprinting it’s naked green shape into the back of my eyelids, to keep. the moon is a fingernail clipping flung low over the hills and somewhere beyond the shore a wildfire is blazing, but you’re building a tower of stones, to last. i want us to live in a world of wives’ tales and sailors’ tattoos. of iron and rust and peeled oranges, beer cut with lemonade. i’ll live at your feet, i’ll tail you wherever you want us to go. the kalahari desert, st. augustine, the grocery store. please, will you let me be your sister, please can we be younger still.

[astrotourism]

what i want is best consumed in moderation. the place i get my kicks is the warm hollow behind a cupped palm. if i don’t smoke i gotta gamble, i gotta put the pedal to the metal. when i close my eyes i see a thousand blazing suns and your eyes. chlorine blue, day-glo. everything about you is neon and i’m your truest disciple, kneeling at your halogen altar.

[astrotourism]

My father has lived a big life full of prophetic visions. Thirty years ago today, he whisked my mother oceans upon oceans away, showed her the way of the double barrel and cutting your jeans into shorts. The way of the poison jungle and holding your breath for three and a half minutes. He keeps it all in neatly bound albums now, locked in a suitcase in the basement. Every time he tells me a story he reveals another layer, another dead girl in someone’s arms.