The City She Was

The City She Was

5 no business driving, then I’m alone under the single bulb of self-interrogation. This one makes me near-dead but still pretty. This one makes my friends hate me. This one makes my friends hating me a dull sting, calamine lotion for the brain. If I take this one, then I can bury the undead with a spoon. This one belongs in a hall of fame. The last one not really the last one, the one I want to relish, my first Casanova. 6 The Walk Like a wino I trolled the streets in search of an elixir for my melancholy. A Virgo with gold teeth lured me into his lap and sang songs about the fraudulent landscape. The purple sky is invented for you. The purple sky is not among us. When his hand traveled south, I blushed. I left when tomorrow made sense. That’s the way a walk renews— she makes her way through the imperfect city and discovers how the world is people with hand puppets. People who shiver metal sheets for thunder, and then she squints her eyes to fuzz it more, to prettify. 7 The ladies at the laundromat called me La Chula for my role on the show Trainwreck. I had birds in my hair and my porcelain feet chipped when walking. An earthquake and, an omen, the Emmy for Best Hooker with a Heart of Gold Ingénue fell on me as I slept. Later I sold chocolate smuggled in from Morocco, but it was so boring I faked my own death.Muffling my voice with a hanky,I called in as weeping mother. For days, I cried thinking about the things I hadn’t gotten to do like jump from planes or have sex with British DJs. My lover said massage school. He said PhD. Then I built Taj Mahal replicas with dried pasta and sold them to Texas Junior Leaguers for thousands of dollars. I was moody and dark and skinny and Modern Painters did a feature on me.I posed on the roof of my building with a mannequin. I poured hot water on one of my works, and the photographer and I ate it. After this, I professionally wrestled men and my ring name was Kristeva the Krusher because I was brutal and post-feminist. The league paid me in Macy’s gift cards, so I could buy lacy garments and complicate the paradigm. Without training, you won’t go places, my lover said.Without an education you’ll work where they can’t remember your name, he said. It’s not you. It’s the edifice and me, our default. We’re keeping you out on purpose because we only really like you in bits. That year, I learned Pet through the mail from Sally Struthers who also spoke King Cobra, and I counseled cats although I was allergic. The cats argued that their reputation for indifference left them love-starved, but I talked over them because this was true for me, too. Vita • • • • • • • ...