Easy Pose

Tonight I’ll stand among other tourists in the mouthwash aisle and use my fingers

to read each bottle’s ingredients. It’s painful, this mediocrity, the darkest

of the greener labels, the orange bottle meant for those with dry mouths or

oral maladies. The aisle is familiar. They have one back at home and in the city,

where on a heavy night like this I picked the blue one, for those with unfortunate

breath, and benched my body, swapping swigs of wintermint

and Ketel One, attending to the glances of passersby, waiting for your 

“around six foot. wearing a red jacket” to ease beneath the storefronts

and theorize your mouth with a studied smile and veteran teeth. 

I’ll walk home as slow as language will let me, reorganize my vanity

or sit cross-legged and shut-eyed on the iced-oak of my floor. Open my window

and listen to the redolent small talk of younger neighbors, the buzz of the street lights

that palliate the staleness of this room, remember the snap, soft, of your unshaven chin

on my neck, the histamine reaction, averse to you and foreign fruits that I could buy if 

want would lift me from this urgent pen, where the floorboards pull and pinch 

the conclusions of my skin. I’ll write “my life will change” or “I wish

a truck would drive outside my house and honk its horn or lose its gas cap” just so,

at least, the wax and mucus can keep me in till morning. Just so,

at least, that months from now I’ll know I knew, that blood and hair fill gaps

in floors, that bodies pronounce each other, without intent or invitation.