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EMMA COHEN

Big fat drops come out her goo-goo doll eyes

PHOTO BY BRAD GOLDING

I didn’t know if you got my —

so I’m sending you another.

You repeat that thing you heard:

Love is the message and the

message is nothing.

 

Lightning keeps hitting outside like long distance calls.

The ground a little bit burnt by it, keeps getting hit

by the current not knowing when it’ll come.

But it comes, then it stops. Who knows when it’ll be back.

Imagine lightning like liquid, drinkable.

Maybe if I could just drink it, it’d seal off my pores and

seal up my holes and

then I wouldn’t have to see or hear or consume or have anything

in me ever again.

 

I would rather be clever than cryptic. I keep choosing

cryptic, to be coded, and to seem like it means something more than it does

but it doesn’t.

I envy the way Justine moves through the world.

I admire her for the way she swivels her hips like they are

flat pressed wishbones, countertops, dominoes.

She wears camouflage cargo pants with her chunky curls on top of her head.

Justine cries at every party I’ve seen her at.

Big fat drops come out her goo-goo doll eyes

but the floor vibrates under her and the people part

like a current; she’s still the most powerful.

 

What I really want is I want them to see me and think wow,

I hardly recognize her. Like all my skin was melted off my face

and I’m new, a glaring white. New. New.

Don’t want them to recognize me, want them agape,

choking no words.

A lightning bolt fiend, a dancing shoe hoarder,

a record player cracker, a windowpane leaner.

Shrieking without moving, without opening my little red mouth.

 

First, take a telephone and call home. Hang up. Call again. Where are you even calling?

Then burn a candle and eat it with a spoon. The spoon should not be made of silver.

Take perfume and spray it in your eyeballs. Blink and blink and blink until you’re not blinking anymore, your eyes are just closed.

Get into a taxi. Ride in the backseat, face smushed to the window, for as long as it takes for you to fret over

that stupid thing you said. Get dropped off where you got in.

Then, just shut up.

 

There is no time for slinking down in the bathtub.

There is no time for glazed eyes on the TV.

There is no time for repetition.

There is no time for

This is no time for an empty mailbox.

 

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