Ankle deep in milk or something else spilling from my body. His breath ragged with tobacco, his
breath as a kind of prayer. It doesn’t matter that days from now I’ll pull the teeth from his mouth
and stack them in neat piles. I haven’t washed our sheets in quite some time and hidden beneath a
fold is a days worth of toothpaste. What is your stomach, he asks, if not a failure? I don’t answer
and why should I? Words are not grace only the dirt left in our mouths. I take rust with my cereal
and pine with my eggs. I take whiskey with my milk and something equally bitter with my toast.
A man bloated with beer tells me about his hips. He isn’t wearing socks and of course I’m
aroused. Think about it, he says, inside even the most charming person is a mess of shit and
blood and now you’re surrounded by water ugly as I am. I go home and a man wearing socks has
laid out a peanut butter sandwich with the crust cut off. He’s laid out himself and nothing else.
Legs spread, a pellet gun in the grip of a child. I put my hand on his cock and imagine my
fingers counting the days until they hang warm and yellow as wind chimes.
*The title of this poem is taken from the band Rosa.
David Greenspan lives and writes in south Florida. His work has recently appeared in places like Gigantic, Mid-American Review, and Painted Bride Quarterly. Find some, admittedly infrequent, thoughts at davidgreenspan.blogspot.com.