Arsenic Lobster poetry journal |
Issue Thirty-one Spring 2013 |
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Garbage Night Liz Martin Maybe I want the car to crash, because I’ve been dying in New Jersey, Bloomfield: my spaghetti squash never blooms, my tomatoes get a slick, sick green film that the beetles won’t eat soil can’t function in the Garden State. Never thought I’d be homesick for rusty cars, factories and drug stores, where people don’t say, “Would you like low-sodium, baked sweet potato fries with that? Or beanballs, kale salad, or a groovy green smoothie with spirulina?” Where mothers ask to be moved when you and your friends sit down near them in the Friendly’s. God I can’t wait to escape Connecticut because in T-town I’m the only one that noticed how she shook her head, told her daughter to eat her sundae quicker. Always a compromise again, and again, and again, like “La Vie Boheme” that skips permanently on my I-Pod, fiddling with my windshield wipers wishing I was driving up 23 to see mountains cresting up over the hill when you get to Cairo. To close my eyes and go back to a fleeting four-year home not mine to keep, not to crappy Connecticut where now I sometimes still wish I was but wishing I hadn’t fallen in love so young with a man so ready for it all to start “now” when I should still be living at that cabin on Pine Lake indulging in the kisses of a boy-drunken moment under a pavilion still running through my mind like water through our burbling turtle tank filter. I wish I wanted this life more and I wish I didn’t wish so much or want, but could learn to be content with the now and then I wish I wasn’t so old in this second floor apartment where squirrels used to wake me up running in the walls until we chopped the branches off our neighbor’s tree, so now it’s just the pigeons that won’t go away because the crazy bird lady next door can’t stop feeding them whole loaves of bread. She thinks they’ll die without her. Couldn’t someone have just sat me down, drawn my knees close to theirs, taken the time with small words to say: “You’ll have to work for a living someday.” Did I really have to major in theatre? “Would you like fries with that?” The salty kind with extra grease like that guy I dumped in high school pushed managing McDonald’s. We’d sit there in those shiny booths licking scalding hot apple pie filling off of our fingers. Is the world preordained, like the theoretical physicists say, and we have no choice, our molecules know where they’ll be so life really is set without your input, thank you very much. I have no choice, but to sit here in my old red chair wish my life hadn’t turned out quite this way. But lying in my bed at night with a warm back pressed close to mine, Kevin holding my hand as we stroll down the boardwalk with too old women wearing too tight dresses, floppy breasts jiggling in attack position, laughing through forty minutes bumper to bumper traffic for my favorite hand-pressed tofu, I’d miss our British pasty shop, the way Skinny hugs me when we visit his 69 Bayard Restaurant in Chinatown, where every night is garbage night. Where one time the unforgiving contents spewed forth from inside the belly of the great steel beast all over an unsuspecting garbage man. |
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