Circle

Year of the Bombshell

12 Year of the Bombshell This year I decided to be a bombshell. I played bottle-cap table hockey with strangers and trained my brain to say yes to martinis carried by men with small biographies. I didn’t even mind men who smoothed my many selves into a handkerchief. I suddenly believed in Chinese astrology— the restaurant placemat sort. This year I even called the man in the white truck and he actually came over. My nervousness led me to spit out Socrates and feed on his beating skin. Suddenly I thought there was only one Lord of man, keeper of the persimmon’s cartilage, despite his split ends and small forehead. And I waited every day for his calls, when he complained about his girlfriend from the neck down and up. How did I go from “Gertrude” to bombshell back to Gertrude again, waiting and wanting—my mind gone nova into a white hospital coat. Maybe bombshells also mind being 13 tossed aside like clocks? I’ll never know what makes us seem so different. I only dreamt of his long brown back, small gasp, grasp of his shirt, each memory, a knife’s edge skidding my stomach, just barely cutting. ...