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The Girl With the Dresden Blue Eyes


by Kyle Hemmings


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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