Vulgar Remedies: Poems

Why Bioluminescent Shrimp Remind Me of Laura

1 Why Bioluminescent Shrimp Remind Me of Laura There are lights with a wayward sex appeal, a weirdness that is shrimp cocktail in my steel sink shot through with miracle. But that saturated, angelic skin turned out to be a pink bacterial slither, a sickness. There are girls who exist, like Laura and me, who’d glow— at fifteen—who’d go up in flames. We straddled that concrete median in the donut shop’s parking lot after school playing the cigarette game: a lit Camel dropped between our forearms, a parallel sting, that burn that made one of us jerk away first. Who can stand it the longest? Someone lost each time, although both of us still mirror the old brands—those flattened follicles where no hair grows, those nine white pox the size of dimes. That night, 2 as we twisted in her cotton sheets’ snakework, Laura said I didn’t know what to do with a woman’s body. We spooned on her childhood bed after I flinched from her kiss, turned my spine to her lips, my face to the postered wall she’d strung with dried roses the color of a dark breakfast tea—those rings left behind when the heat’s waned and the shapes settle into the dried and distant. Husked and half-healed. I’d trace those forms with a fingertip: the ovals of amber I slurred into the oak grain of her bedside table, the jade lip of her teacup from which I sipped, the row of scars on my arm I now lie about as chicken pox. Here, where I stand at the edge of my sink with a bowl of peeled shrimp, where I notice the sea life still glows after my lamp sizzles and snaps 3 the kitchen into blackness. As if a girl still crouches outside my window with her wire cutter and her lucky skull-lighter. As if I crack the glass an inch I could smell the smoke. ...