3:AM Magazine

By Corey Zeller.

9th Street: our bottles clatter together below the splayed, cut curves of the window-lit sidewalk, the lamplight’s incoherent gossip, sleepily over us like skin shaved from some perfect, ripened fruit. We could have been a picture from an old, hippy album in my uncle’s basement. On someone’s lawn, you sat on a wooden chair below a tree, putting a grapevine wreath around your neck, laughing.

Unchained, we passed through the wrought iron gate of an apartment complex so you could show me a statue of the Virgin Mary. I remembered my brother saying his Russian neighbor tried selling him a handless idol on Parade Street for five dollars. That painting, hanging in your living room, where your daughter clings to your gown, your head’s crowned with flowers. Didn’t you tell me the artist was quizzical, near agitation? Didn’t you tell me, posing maternally, you didn’t know what to do with your hands?

Walking, you are gilded, jubilant, but I am without the flirting, gleeful sleekness of similes. Your silence is not like the rude stumbles of wind through fields of lilac. You are quiet, but not like the lush, spiraling backbeat of a lover’s waltz, lovers who spin just to see who’ll let go first before the nightclub erupts into a gunfight. You’re the body which lays next to me, breathing. Sometimes, you smile and shyly turn away into your pillow.

If they ask, I’ll tell them you’re not like Juliet, Helen, or Cleopatra, even though I want to envelop every tree with your name like Orlando did for Rosalind. You’re the kind of girl who knows the initials of the top scorer on every pinball machine in Erie, PA. On your thirtieth birthday, you only wanted to play ski ball at the lakeside theme park, hand-in-hand, passing the brilliant bulbs of an ancient carousel.

You’re the kind of girl who has five hundred wind chimes shimmering, humming on your porch. The kind of girl who purposely passes billboards of the Dalai Lama on the freeway. Everyone you know has a Mercedes Benz that runs on ethanol. Below the moon, we’ve sat naked in your backyard, you, lounging on a deckchair like Goya’s La maja desnuda.

Kissing, you stopped in the street holding me that night, pointing toward a lightless window in a blue house. I lived there, you said, when I was pregnant with my daughter. After that, we made our way back between some shouting in the street, passing a worn couch outside the boarded windows of what was once a beauty salon. You’d stop sometimes to point out other 9th Street landmarks: an old boyfriend’s house, a cellist who offered you free lessons, the funeral home where they keep a mortician’s suit from the 1880’s enclosed in a glass case, marked by a small plaque. You told me an old friend who shared my name had his wake there.

That night, you took me into your apartment and into your bed. Like 9th Street, I tried deciphering your body so much like these houses peopled with music and voices I have never heard nor can I imagine them. In the corner of the room, a candle was burning against the red wall. If you were someone else, maybe Juliet, I may have worried that the wind would toss our light away. Instead, I held you near me.

I let the night still itself.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Corey Zeller has recently been published in The Kenyon Review Online, Gargoyle Magazine, Poetry East, The Literary Review, Double Room, Drunken Boat, and many others.

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Friday, October 9th, 2009.