maine st. notes

I am Pavlov’s dinner bell, in pieces on the linoleum.

you have lived in that crisp white lab coat for longer than I have

sneering at rows of canines with a clinical coldness.

I wonder why you harbor such contempt

for me, for them.

we’re doing what you want.

I’m smarter than this. I know that I am.

but even once the doors have been thrown from their hinges

the lab ransacked and the study condemned by the panelists–

I know I will be sucking back saliva through gritted teeth

fighting fruitlessly against a body with a preprogrammed agenda

the next time I hear a chime.

Geppetto, I am begging you: stick a spile through my sallow skin

drain the pondwater from my bloated body

scrape the lichen clinging to my ribs.

fill me up with what to say, what to want, how to love

impress upon me your worldly ideals and I will drink them in gratefully.

paint on doll eyes and an easy smile

coat my lips in a thick varnish

wrap my wrists in fishing line and pull me taut.

puppet me through my days as if I were a real girl

the sort with moral fiber and the desire to do

pilot my jerky limbs out of this rut until I can stand on my own. please.

maybe if I sit here for long enough

perfectly still, clicking through crossword clues and sale sections

the mold that has eaten through my cranial cavity will burst through my eardrums

and muffle the lecture that’s souring the air.

maybe if I’m lucky

it will germinate up through my windpipe

seal shut my trachea

smother me with a thick spongy pillow

vivify my chapped lips with a blue-hued bloom.

are scraping across desks, frantically

the afternoon is leaking through the classroom windows and pooling around tiny sneakers

a sea of hands jet into the air when the door clicks behind me.

historically, I am good with numbers and bad with kids

but they don’t much care. any break I can offer from the math monotony is a welcome one.

we sit on the floor basking in a crisp red picture book, her voice faltering at the longer words

practicing vowel sounds in unison until her timbre brightens, each sentence rounding itself off at the edges.

she puffs up when she reads the last few pages herself

and we waddle back to class sporting grins and matching penguin stickers.

somewhere, wedged between my back molar and the gumline, are the remaining scraps of you

leaching acrid memories into my mouth:

how readily I ate from your palm

how I sucked each unfurled finger clean of every meager crumb of intimacy.

working you free is a painstaking process of bloodied wire and sore tongue

of gagging over the sink while rotted leftovers taunt me from the basin

I will scrub you out.

Sunday’s molasses air swaddles my body in all the places it is aching

a sedentary suggestion soon to harden to a mold.

I have been thinking about getting up to get a glass of water for about a half-hour

for now I am drinking in a Marlboro-tinged pillowcase and trying to remember what wanting feels like.

any attempts to catalyze me are nauseatingly earnest

but a string of nights drenched in hedonism has left the in-between too stale to chew.