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Elena Peabody

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Data

The man I’m in love with has given me a collection of poems he’s written. Only two people have seen them. They’re in a manila envelope on my kitchen table.  I crinkled and folded the paper parcel on the train ride home. They’re good. There are forty-nine poems. Twenty-nine are about women. Possible upwards of twenty-four women are noted in topics of screwing, or love and screwing, or love alone. Five names are given. There is only one unverifiable reference to me, obliquely made and also noting my failed career path.

“Let me help you edit it,” I offer. “You can’t edit yourself in,” he answers. 

Still, he wants my red pen notes, ordering, culling, and consideration. So I drink peppermint tea and hover just above the back of his head like an invisible professor, nodding and pondering as he lives waxed pussies, chewed fingernails, other people’s anuses, the gallows, the twins.  I calculate, consider, and carefully mark in the margins, “word choice,” “too many similes,” “brilliant,” and “so good, really.” 

There’s a vice around my chest and as the month ends and moves into the next I wonder about the cubic inches of air I have left, the coming new year, fresh starts and the shit I’ll endure getting there.

tags: Data
categories: Misc.
Tuesday 12.10.13
Posted by Elena Peabody
 

Misc.

She had read a book when she was young.  It might have been set in the west.  In the story was a horse that was not important.  The exhausted animal ran and jumped too lowly, and cut its stomach from rib-bottom to crotch.  Intestines rained from the gash; hooves hit the gore and it slid with grace.  Finally the horse and it's body splashed, sliding to a stop and eyes calming. 

Seated and looking down, she thought of this now.  The parts that should be inside and clean and pink and vibrated with faint pulse in the dust.  Beside her, her leak made mud.  Her mouth might have formed a smile.  What surprised her the most was the smell; she was an open sewer. Her eyes moved out to the brown horizon, found a dust devil, and lingered.

tags: Gutted
categories: Misc.
Monday 03.25.13
Posted by Elena Peabody
 

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