Who you are, what made me assent—all I know’s I was hopeful and bored
reposing in the Delta Sky Club, luggage bulging with late Christmas presents, and you
waterboarded a catatonic fly with your gin-and-tonic straw, before sauntering over
in a dark suit with the inherited, stilted anguish of a winner. Now we’re mid-air
somewhere, Johnny Doe and the covert transexual—pre-murder, maybe, pre-everything—
you beseeching your sky sluts for chicken piccata, cheap earbuds, Red Hots, love
and sex and power. And us, voyaging to a medtech conference, an ayahuasca orgy,
an offshore funds transfer, a will reading, and me—idly wondering what sort of girl
wants love so badly she’d follow anyone to nowhere. Do you like baritone soubrettes?
Do they have transphobic violence in Mykonos? When you figure me out,
will I slide like some toppled nationalist statue off your gated esplanade to perish
duct-taped in the orange ravine, rotted habitat for lobsters, ribs a cage match
for betta fish? Or am I invulnerable, the fetish porn you wolfed down with roommates,
hands bobbing in college-furnished sheets like web-tangled birds, at the phallic
female dream? What will our mothers say, and at whose funeral? Because loneliness
makes a former boy a fool. Because I’d let myself be caressed by Lucifer if airborne.
Small concessions of the heart—smiles from apple-faced babies in polyester slings,
the gate-woman’s hand on mine collecting a ticket—amounting to sufficient,
life-altering love. You miss fucking your wife below a transparent staircase, or grasping
her thigh instinctually below a minor holiday incident, blue fireworks premature
against a blue sky. Take me where nauseous saints scrub emeralds by the sea,
where archeologists brush astral dust off primeval clay apostrophes: bring me
forty sheaves of wheat, lay me by our daughter’s river grave. Ferry me anywhere
you’re unlikely to kill a woman who’d die to be one. Beams of alabaster sunlight
irradiate a turned-off iPhone miles above the snow. Napping malefactor,
footer of the missing bill, I sneak a glance at your passport, scrawl your hilarious name
in lipliner on a cocktail napkin. O first-class dick, blank profile, rising action—
the aircraft rattles, and I think the firmament’s rejecting me, and I don’t blame it.
