By Megan Archibeque

❤

monologue for the boy (2/22) 

it was one of those things you know? a rowboat finding land, been rowing my whole life looking for the meet-cute 90 minutes of always a good end in sight. 

my whole life had been a flash. i knew nothing of this world. 

but underneath those sheets with you i knew the universe. 

i knew what it was like to be among stars. 

i thought of no tomorrow i’d not already dreamed of, you were all- this was all i’d wanted. what small dreams they were. 

i will tell the world i believe in love at first sight because of you, 

because of how much i felt for you in one fleeting moment bleeding into the millions. bullshit but it’s true. 

i’d bought weed for us, from a boy, from some party, i might have kissed him, you might have known. we got high. i still daisy-fresh to the smell, the idea of it, all i could think about was i am high i am high i am in the bed of the boy who i love love love and it’s messy, as 18 is, as close corridors and key parties. 

i’d leaned my head on your shoulder the very first night. it scared me to touch people. but i am always leaning my head on the shoulders of those i love and i said to my mother over rainy day bagels i think i am horribly in love. 

she believed me and began to worry. 

i’d stood in your doorway and must have said my name, felt my feet sink into the floor, my heart squishing up my throat to fall in your lap like a prophecy. 

whatever ending i imagined it was not the deep headache we’d become. 

i thought you were spider-man! 

when i said i love you that first time it was devastation; 

a scream to stop please stop you’re scaring me. i’d wanted to say it for so long since the first moment i swear it’s true i wanted to hand you the whole unknown world, you couldn’t even look at me. 

….

Salty 2 (intro) 

Today the house is an art museum 

and I am memory collecting 

the slugs the boys the insects 

tracing my armor-dressed fingers 

along every ornate frame, 

misunderstood sculpture, 

it is my museum after all

my collection 

I will touch these things as I please. 

If I like I’ll reach inside the idyll of 

a pond done in oil and rip out fistfuls 

of lily pads, chew them up, and spit 

them out onto my clean white walls 

green walls 

done in spit 

by my gnawed at self-esteem 

and lack of care or want for 

these dramatics alack alack alack 

your paintings your rooms your locked 

doors have not been on the display stand 

in years 

No one is coming to see you anymore 

barely even the curator dusting frames 

licking wounds half-healed by time 

half-healed by girl wonder 

when I try and picture you in my mind 

it’s canal water 

salt and slugs 

torn-up knees “rub some dirt in it” 

no sea green eyes made all the more 

lovely by my poet’s mind. 

….

House Call 

I cannot get my fingernails clean. 

It’s been days of picking, washing. 

They are stained red. Collecting dirt. 

If I bring them to my ears I can almost hear that local band with that asshole lead singer screaming. But they will not get clean. 

And the voice lately, has chosen cleanliness as her daytime topic. 

She tells me 

I am peasant 

I am dust. 

I am scratching on yellowed wallpaper walls and making cages out of bird bones.

A haunted house with no front doors to close. 

A collector of cut out paper dolls on thin printer paper. 

Thoughts thought and thought against, 

stuck in the web of sticky and cruel. 

Wrapped up in white. 

The gremlin laughing, 

I never finished that book on taming it, 

and mom bought me the sequel. 

Disgrace, disappointment, fold yourself up and let me flick you to the wind.

What’s going on in that head? 

Rats. fire. pot. Have you heard of that? I saw it on TV once and it stuck. I could feel it in my chest. I look for rats there often. Between my breasts there is a rat and they are scared and gnawing and soon they will make a Thanksgiving dinner out of my insides and it will be ssssssilent. 

But first it will be terribly loud. 

I will drown out all she sings, I will make my own ocean. I will crash waves against her and she will be 

Pulp. Static. Peasant. Dust. 

The idea of her will become an open mouth on the deepest of my ocean floor. A nowhere place. Vanquished. Banished. Forgotten. 

I want to write her sometimes into stories as monsters of many riddles, labyrinths, standing on high-up places and looking down down down. 

Check your hair. Check your hair. Check your hair. Check the back of your neck and the backs of your thighs. Check your ribs. Check your arms. Check the-have you thought that thought today? Let’s do that now and now and now thank you. And go on thinking it. Let it tear apart all you think you are and make from those paper scraps a raging ghost from the cobwebs drenched in molasses. watch her undress herself in front of you, a mummy spinning on a music box. 

Oh the music box! 

Let me show you what you are. 

I am. 

No. 

I’m not. 

Gremlin. Gremlin. 

Chew chew chew 

Rat 

Never goes. 

I don’t do enough.

I clear the cobwebs with a toothpick. 

I scratch misery from my fingernails. 

….

Vomit 

Hermia rips the still-beating heart from Helena’s chest. 

YOU BITCH. 

I am having a hard time today with the cleaning up and the smashing into boxes. Like a toddler I try a thousand times to fit my square into the triangle. Bone-tired. Unhurried.Terrified. Tomorrow will end and that is all there will be. 

Suzy from work tells me of her chocolate milk diet. I smile and nod as she zooms in on a photo of me from last halloween. I was a fairy. 

What a loser, what an absolute nobody you are, let’s do some yoga. 

Dont be a doormat. You’ve been a doormat all your life. Walked over by every single unworthy pair of shoes that comes to the door. Don’t you see how embarrassing that is? 

My sister and I fought ourselves into the closet to read soup labels the other day. 

Split pea Minestrone Tomato 

Clam Chowder was absent. Eliza hit me when I mentioned this. We were not hunting for CHOWDER. I threw a cup at her yesterday. 

I screamed at her over breakfast for dinner. 

Garbage brain. Old habits on a dumpster fire. Finding fingers inching toward a stovetop. Everything is a xylophone we laughed in a coffee shop, swapping bits of who we’ve become since the second grade. 

I should have known when you put those Godzillas away. 

When a toothbrush was ready for me. 

A shelf cleared off and crystals on display. So sweet I felt sick. Get your fish kisses away from me. My stomach becomes a snake when I think of you. Thinking itself into pretzel knots. Salt. Oh you, boy. Will you put me on stage again? 

I spoke to the universe as the stars fell that night. I wished I was alone. 

My left hand is turning grey again. Finally, And I feel seventeen writing runaways into doomed car-accident endings like was learned. Poor girl never makes it to the grass that’s always greener. You look very like a fairytale. 

I am amazed and know not what to say. 

This summer was a thrift store. 

This summer was a jet-stream. 

Tear yourself to pieces Little Miss Sunshine. 

….

Spill 

oceans and mountains away 

half a day ahead i say hello 

to the sun just after she’s said goodbye to it 

i love it here 

i love her 

it is not misery it is a wine glass

not half-full not half-empty 

raindrops counting down days 

until potato growing again 

her arms 

can i give as much love as i once thought 

on bathroom floors 

walking tightropes above kitchen knives 

and bitter yelling 

i do not beg for her love 

i don’t think i have to 

if i asked i think she’d – she is so far away – take me there wherever love is 

the great voyage! the epic! 

bring me to the lake baby let me seek out the sword 

i will carve legends for you 

lets pass paper notes between us 

stretch our arms to the sky – the attic 

ceiling of a small room in the windy city 

i do not want to blow away to new names anymore 

not yet 

snowglobe the six weeks that found everything 

shove my love in a bottle of prosecco 

the pulp of fresh orange juice as 

snow in what must be before-spring 

this cannot be winter anymore 

….

The Deep End 

I was a deep end girl now 

If my feet could not touch the bottom you would never know I kept my head above the water like a sailboat 

Took the twisting blue slide of lakeview water park 

Like a shot a heartbeat thundering a performance to 

Come up from the 5 feet of eye-sting and keep the 

Water in my nose to myself 

I was a liar in my faded tie-dye tankini 

Not the calm cool and collected 11 year old i pretended to Be a woman hope the boys believe that I’ve kissed before Hope the boys don’t look at me at all 

The girl who was still just a girl but older than me 

Strutted into the deep end like the embarrassment of holding her nose Was not something she’d ever thought of 

I stared at her like she was what women were; i was something other envious of the way her body fit in her red cherry bikini Stomach down on the swingset of the shitty playground on the other Side of the chain link fence, my summer juliet

She, a stranger so seen in but one moment or two Faded into another childrens watercolor memory Remembered clearer than my 15th birthday party She was just so pretty

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