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Edited on Thu Aug-16-07 02:50 PM by BlueIris
"Healing"
The girl I love still sleeps with her mother who is huge, bulky as a bear. It is a small house in Guthrie without a doorknob or a father. He is silent on a hill. They forget to leave flowers on Memorial Day.
We stay up late, kissing in the car, windows open to the cricket buzz. Inside, her mother barely sleeps. Food goes bad in the fridge. The worthless brother, guitar plugged to the wall, wails.
The boom's gone bust. Every other house is empty in this neighborhood, a democracy of failure. Armadillos rustle in the brush. We watch as neighbors tune their truck, the breasts of a woman they saw in a bar last night troubling the pure mechanics of their talk.
All day the brother sleeps in his leaking waterbed. The father, a stern man in uniform, watches me from the bookshelf.
Her hair is perfectly black and smalls faintly of her permanent. I walk to the drugstore with her to buy artificial nails. They leave red highways down my spine. In the sink her dishes grow green. The back yard rises in a weedy funk, foaming over bones of old cars. The dog drowns in ticks.
An aunt comes by, ashen-faced. This is a laying-on of hands. Her tumor's growing like a great idea, a central concept. Jesus, everyone says, their palms burning through to the core. Heal. A cousin wears Christ on a t-shirt: this blood's for you. Pepsi's in the fridge.
Soaps in the afternoon, couples humping through the broadcast day. In the glamour magazines scattered on the floor women tan and tone. They come hard with famous men. I suggest we go
for a doorknob at the hardware store. Vetoed. Too hot. A sister visits, baby sucking at her chest. She swears her milk will shoot across the room.
At dusk we drive to the Sonic, a neon bonfire near the base's barbed perimeter. B-52's tilt over with a black wake. Evil, she says, munching okra, her face so beautiful in the red fire of sunset my throat tightens, I could cry. A song comes over the radio, the very car shimmers, the bulbs of the drive-in blooming red and blue, deepening in the failing light and she moves into my arms, smelling of soap and french fries. All around us men and women, boys and girls are tuned to the same frequency, moving together under the tinted glass, beneath the whirlwind of moths in the hot air, the Sonic throbbing with light and love, the life I left to come here forgotten and the sun sliding down a dome of gold. She laughs. Mosquitoes rise in the rural haze. Her tongue is in my ear.
—George Bilgere
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