314 ½ East Ruby

This isn’t my place, having sex on red sheets, you hard on me, I flip like a pancake and you enter my vagina from the back–the way you know I like it.  It hurts so badly I cough and cry and whisper, It’s all good man.  Don’t worry about it.    

So you go out to smoke, then come back, and your hands smell like ash and cheap tobacco, and I lie in bed and watch you pee.  Posture firm, tight buttocks, both hands on your head.  I reach for the wall.  Flatten my palm against cold drywall; winter found its way in.  I crawl to the window to see the stars, the bold navy sky.  I see steam rise from a generator across the street.  Puffs of smoke powder the air and I remember the road through Helper, Utah and the factory in the valley.  You said it’s where they made clouds.  I wanted to stop and rent a trailer, drink a beer with a fat neighbor, plant daisies in the shade. 

Now you’re in the kitchen, drinking berry juice from the fridge, letting hot water drip so the pipes won’t freeze.  Negative seventeen outside and getting colder.  The streetlight on Ruby Avenue reflects off our icicles. 

You made an icicle sculpture.  You made it in the front yard.  I helped you snap them from people’s gutters at night when no one was looking.  I sat on your shoulders and you stood on bushes.  We carried them home in our arms.  Now they’re planted in bundles, a natural conglomeration of stained glass.  I sit on the front step in daylight and trace the colors of sunshine.  We call it art.  The hippy neighbor Daren fell over it, carrying a couch he found in our shed.  The couch is lavender, soiled and soft.  He’ll put it in the jammin’ room, the transcendental space of music and marijuana.  We’ll fix the sculpture. 

There’s art in our backyard too.  I can see the lump of its shadow in the snow—a frozen elk hide, green from the rot of warmer days.  We tried to make drums and you wanted a loincloth.  But our nails turned purple, wet and frosty in a ten-degree breeze, and the knives were dull.  When the smell of dying flesh attracts horse flies and disgusted humans, we’ll haul the hide to Crested Butte, three hundred miles from the San Juan mountains it once roamed.  For now we leave it to the foxes.  They lick it. 

Foxes licked Daren’s chickens too, then ate them.  He bought six so he could cook eggs for breakfast.  He shoved them in a doghouse-sized cage and took a trip to Las Vegas.  He left you in charge.  The first night, one chicken was pecked to death.  The second night, four were abducted, feathers and blood left as evidence.  On night three, one chicken waited to die.  You named him Jojo, after yourself.  He lost most of his feathers in the cage, in a panic.  He was missing in the morning.  You said he went to Mexico with your imaginary cat Schnarls.  We eat bagels for breakfast instead.

Another day we went tubing.  At the bottom of the hill–you on your tube, me on mine, talking–we saw a fox.  I whistled and you clicked your tongue.  It came sniffing, twelve inches away.  We held out hands and the people around us kept climbing the hill, sledding down, climbing, sledding–you fell in love.  I watched the small-boy fascination in your eyes.  I followed you; you followed the fox–down the hill, past Breckenridge apartments, into the pines.  He’s gone, I said.  And sadly you strolled home. 

We went fox hunting the next night.  Your idea.  It was negative twenty eight degrees.  Your beard was frosted and my eyelashes were heavy with ice.  We saw nothing but stars and hockey players.  No word really quiets that moment when one dream dies and you need alcohol–foxes to vodka. 

At our house in a yellow and pea-green kitchen, Nirvana blaring on the stereo, we danced and drank screwdrivers and you spun me fast, knocking me to the floor then grabbing my waist to toss me over your shoulder like a wet towel.  I giggled, but not too loosely because you had connected eyebrows and a long nose, nicotine teeth and thick hands, and I didn’t even know who you were in that fuzzy moment, your mind limp with too much drug—or if I was attracted. 

One time you passed out by the door, so when I came home from work, I had to squeeze past your body to act like I was alone:  moving on with my life, doing dishes, reading poems, calling Dad.  Another time you hopped on your skateboard, drunk, fell over our skis and hit the door with your cheek.  Then you stumbled to the bathroom while fiddling with your zipper, tumbled into the wall mirror, and cracked it into thirty separate pieces.  A mosaic.  Every morning I stare into a kaleidoscope and apply mascara.  

I’m here, still, lying by the window.  The heater kicks on, the fridge cools down, and water trickles from the faucet while you hum and move quick to the bed, sliding under the covers to hold my body against yours, my head on your chest of hair.  I close my eyes tight and sweep crumbs with my toes, feeling misplaced in these sheets beside you.  I move deeper into your chest and boys laugh in the night street.  It’s so cold I can see my breath and my mind is a constant ache of thought.  My natural place is my habitual place.  I have a habit of being Mormon, raised to covet temples, marriage vows, and the ‘missionary position’ during sex (side by side) only.  You’re my drinking boy, my wild-animal love affair, the tattooed atheist who slaps his knees fanatically during comedies and hugs all my friends with hellos and I’m so happy to see you’s. 

Now your snoring, exhaling sour breath on my cheeks, your leg intertwined with mine.  Now there’s a moon sliver in the sky.  Habit is the most painful way to live.  An apathetic existence.  One day you got so angry you slammed your headlamp on the ground and shattered the light bulb.  The fridge had died, our house was covered in ticks, and I had accidentally tossed your $300 mouth guard (to keep you from grinding your teeth) into the dumpster.  I laughed, enthralled by the emotion, the lines on your forehead, the energy of living:  pain, tears, giddiness, fear, beauty, lust. 

A car turns the corner, its lights flashing through the window, casting tree silhouettes on the wall.  I see your face, the shag of hair twisting around your ears.  I stay because it’s uncomfortable, Joe.  I never tell you this though. 

Then I fall asleep beneath stained blankets, in a shack tossed into an alley like a damp box.  The alley:  broken beer bottles, overturned recycling bins, bike tires, a pair of long johns in a tree, and a mailbox, 314 ½, red flag up for the utility bill.