Little conquest, a curious lap treat. A sweet dream I’d had. And how you wanted it, too.
Your little tooth in my mind.
Desire bent at the limbs. Only how it can happen when my mind has made a picture of you doing our secret will in an opera box, in the bookstore, perhaps in a dusty bungalow basement room where a passage can only be seen when the unmovable elevator shaft is hauled off after decades of sitting idle in disrepair
stalled with lightning
mildewing rows of spines of volumes of brick-like book nearly part of the dust and fully part of a message I share with myself in duplicitous ways like my bad art like my changing hair like the pointless images sitting in a cloud in my shit-particle covered phone where another who was not you but who had your hair sent me their cock sent me acknowledgment after I sent them
I had a dream I kicked you I had a dream I saw your other past lover I had
(and her a Mother now you lucky darling Sweetheart, you)
They with the hair like yours, accepting without fail my unending narrative of fantasies depicting them, of reading their poems, listening to their music, of romanticizing their cruelty
as long as I don’t talk about
drugs,
Sweetheart don’t
But you, you with the hair like them
Little tooth and all, curling chest hair like
I would never tell you how
we got bent up,
together in my mind
END
Kate Jayroe is a bookseller at Powell’s Books and serves on staff with Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Work by Kate appears in Vol. 1 Brooklyn, NANO Fiction, Juked, Hobart and elsewhere.
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