The Girl With the Dresden Blue Eyes
Your girlfriend with the Dresden blue eyes
with the sleek belly &
gorgeous scars from ripping off Avenue A
dealers has you on a leash of short-term
amnesia. You can't recall the last time you
got off from being trigger-happy inside her
& you formed a post-Expressionist impression,
of two barbed souls.
You could go crazy counting
the nights that slip into a winter numbness:
a reindeer dying in a child's eyes, a hit & run
on 7th ave. South. When she calls you don't say
what the fuck, where you've been? Instead,
something inside you trembles like a victim,
and you ask where & when.
You curse the rain.
At the university cafe,
she shows you a new dragon
tattoo from the place on St. Mark's
open until 1 a.m. She then hits you up for some paper
tongue because there's a new drug rumored to cure
the virus called living by numbers. It's fatal
but so is being born, she says with a smile
that tangles up your peek-a-boo soul & leaves
you misty-eyed for your father's polyester suits
before he came down with a rare strand of
sleeping standing UP.
Tonight, after a frenzy
of unsafe sex, in a hotel owned by an ex-captain
of steely visions, your girlfriend with the Dresden
blue eyes sings you an old lullaby
the very one her grandmother once sang to her
when her eyes were too baby doll big
for this world. And the two of you collapse
into each other's jack box, the night taking
no prisoners, only the half-shadows by the
fireplace, only the soft flickering
against the walls.
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Author's Note
(A slightly different version was published by Scars Publications in 2010
in a chapbook titled "Avenue C")
Also, read at one of Su Polo's readings in Manhattan in the summer of 2013.
Other stories by Kyle Hemmings
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Strong. [*]
What Mark said.*
Thank you, Marc and Amanda!
*.
really good.
You might want to cut the "take no prisoners" line.
don't need it.
Thank you, Jerry. Appreciate the comments.
Great title too. is that from a painting, like one of the Dutch Masters maybe?
I laughed too hard at: "It's fatal but so is being born, she says with a smile that tangles up your peek-a-boo soul & leaves
you misty-eyed for your father's polyester suits before he came down with a rare strand of sleeping standing UP." Brilliant. *****
Thanks, Mathew. it's funny cause I got that same reaction to that line when I read it at Su's.
"When she calls you don't say
what the fuck, where you've been? Instead,
something inside you trembles like a victim,
and you ask where & when.
You curse the rain."
this is perfect writing!
A sad lovely tumble of words.
Thanks, Gary. Sad, indeed.
girls like this can kill you.*
Oh I would love to hear this one read, Kyle. Like Gary H. I feel this is a "sad lovely tumble of words" and it's also layered. There's another dimension here, too. Some bitterness and resignation, the "two barbed souls" and about the father who came down with a rare case of "sleeping standing UP" ...great work, Kyle.
*, Kyle. There's music in this verse. Four sentences, four periods, four verses. Terrific.
Thank you, everyone!