Currencies of Loyalty
I stretch fingers across dust-tangled stale room/mate wanting her/them the same way I do when I hurt for a cigarette — I’m not good to stay at home anymore. ever since those slabs of something durable. I ask my brother what he wants for the holidays, he says something durable, which is to say something that will last. so I think of that click/slam of a door that outweighs me tenfold, keeping me in/out of the/my bedroom. I’m not good to stay home alone with something durable in the house. instead I want to fall asleep in her room, the fire alarm disconnected, the locks broken, my microplastic
ten-cent grinder forever lost
in the fast-food wrappers and ash of her dining room table
everyone’s shit
drudging through the leaking pipes of the ten-square-inch bathroom more smoothly than some old/slut/me would slip home on some cold November morning and sure, I’ll stay another round, weak-willed enough that it doesn’t take to/o much these days. I drink from her hand, I’ll get too high and lose myself in her city of torn upholstery, stolen furniture. I’ll get too close and suffocate on cat-induced dust and leftover Halloween vomit on the carpet. plea/se, if I start to feel anything again I’ll show myself out — slip like a slut on some November morning, walking home with the heavy conscience of something durable. the sharp nick of a door that does not really even need a lock. when I stay in one place too long my eyes become well/adjusted. pleas/e, when that goddamn durable door shuts I miss more than anything those mornings when I couldn’t see anything at all — no one, no bodies or tears, scars, blood left on my sheets or her inner thigh, the ear/rings too many girl/s have left in my bed by/for
“accident,” this purgatory of pretty and its varying currencies of loyalty. if only the door would close with slab click, cold and death sound/ing sweeter evermore. if only we all turn the lights off again we can go back to sleep the way that children do, & when
the lights are off, who doesn’t look for that sweet thing
for which we’re yearning, no, no, I can’t keep doing it. doors keep swinging closed. closed is an ending, ending is durable. I want thesweet thing for which we’re yearning like lollipop, found & hairy that dissolves in saliva or morning/rain water.
I want to devour it and fall asleep fat & dizzy in my bed. I reach for a cigarette when it looks fat & dizzy. behind this door my hair is dry. my skin is poisoned. I need to stop being touched, falling asleep in the beds of strangers that maybe someday I’ll love, take the lit end of that cigarette that we both want so much and put it through her/their face when I find it between my knees in the mo/urning.
Frances Sharples is an English literature major in their last year at Geneseo. Frances is the Editor-in-Chief of The Lamron and Iris Magazine. They write a lot and talk even more. They also read poems and listen to music and love all of their friends.