Forty-one of Fifty

My friend discarded her blouse and gave up to the summer night
contractually, like sleeping with a stranger. "Even the bra's
too much," she said, but left it hooked and superfluous,
a spare skin over small breasts. She was
all nipple and no milk,

had eyes like swamp gas, and carved her initials with her tongue
into everything she loved. "Not as good as me,"
drizzling charm through an omelet of speech, "none
of you up there rich and sweaty like me. I'll buy that chariot
of daytime and even Apollo won't tell me
to take my hand-off-his-ass-he's-driving."
She scalloped her arms around the breeze
and unsheathing her smile tapped my knee with her knuckles.
"Tell me who'll you be when I'm turned to stars."
She tasted like orange peel. Her mouth was wet paper.

"I'll still be the girl who kissed you," I said.
Her eyes shimmering and bruised in night's humid glass cage
aimed back to the sky. "You think I won't know more than that," she said.

"You'll go. I'll be gone."

She was buttoning her shirt. In the quiet, I laughed for the first time
that week and unhooked her annoyance. It hung undone, our friendship
free and exposed. "Do you always bite when you kiss," I asked.
"The biting and kissing are separate," she said.

She unbuttoned again, dropped the blouse on the porch. "Let's go for a walk.
To the store. I'm thirsty," and ran her thumb under her strap.
She was for one moment forfeited and mourned, an object of mine—
statuette, ghost story, saint, or cartoon—then I stood, we walked,
and the future erased itself toward us.


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