Falling in Love with Garamond

“I’ve changed my font time and time again. And now it’s Ariel.”    –Eileen Myles

You used to be newspaper. Linear and predictable. A few verb tense issues but barely any spelling errors.

When you were living near the mountains, you grew fond of a poet with windy hair and red, red lipstick. Her voice was smoky and intellectual. You started carrying around a dictionary to look up the words decorating her sentences. It’s like she spoke a different version of English, one with linen napkins and foie gras. You both shared a love for Bukowski and chai tea. She always had scrapes on her knees and her fingernails were chewed.

When you shared one of your poems with her, she said, “It’d be better in Garamond.”

When she left, you looked up this word because you’d never heard it before and you weren’t sure if it was a color or perhaps a type of sonnet.

Once, she let you kiss her because it was a Tuesday, or because it was raining and you let her use your umbrella or maybe because she like you. But probably because of the rain.

Her lips tasted of Henry Miller and peppermint.

You never told her that you started writing everything in Garamond, which you learned was not a color but a font. A shape of lines and curves. You never told her that you started to forget all about her red, red lips and instead, daydreamed about Garamond, named after a Frenchman. Spent your paychecks on ink for your printer to pronounce Garamond’s figure. You became monogamous with this font, unable to notice beauty outside of its letters and punctuation.

She started to notice. She started to notice that you stopped noticing her. She started to notice that your eyes no longer cared about the various shades of red bled into her lips and instead, just stared down. At your paper. And Garamond.

She had never been jealous of a font before; she wished she had never introduced you two.

You used to be newspaper. Black-and-white monotonous.

Now you are 16th century, Parisian engraved.

the bone structure of yesterday.

“you’ve got to burn
straight up and down
and then maybe sidewise
for a while
and have your guts
scrambled by a
bully
and the demonic
ladies,
you’ve got to run
along the edge of
madness
teetering,
you’ve got to starve
like a winter
alleycat,
you’ve go to live
with the imbecility
of at least a dozen
cities,
then maybe
maybe
maybe
you might know
where you are
for a tiny
blinking
moment.”

—–Charles Bukowski, from Bone Palace Ballet: new poems

Where you are may include obscurities but if the footnotes are still attached, one may find clarity in what is further explained.

Where you are may be damaged or sprained.

Where you are may require a chest x-ray or formal apology.

Where you are may include a defend of language and after all the booze has been broken into, you may mumble out: ‘you’d be surprised what stalks inside bodies’.

Where you are is a desert in the west of what is central. You thirst for articulate shoulder blades and coffee.

It was only yesterday, when you offered up your waist waste. It was intimate only because you read that poem but in all of your nude, you realized that line breaks and italics can be far more intimate than exposed bones. A spectator will call this a rough-up, when you finally come to terms with the discrepancies on your body and come out about what is no longer true about you. And it’s ok if you decide to forego political vocabulary and just call yourself human from now on. Where you are is forming. 

a tuesday haiku

Henry Chinaski
crush poems into beer cans
sip the sap of lust

Happy Birthday, Charles Bukowski.

Charles Bukowski sips wine like glass shard woman

That woman screams out her name from my mouth.

I do this sometimes.
I don’t watch videos or look at pictures to push out an orgasm.

I think of words.
Shaped as women.
Letters shaped as skin.

She pushes her lips together like they are too heavy for her face.
Her teeth are perfectly straight line-up of criminals waiting to bite me away.

Women, Charles.

I am trying to get away from them.

I left the country with passport and two backpacks and folded clothing and empty notebook and extra ink and I just needed to find my way out of these women.

Their smell.

The salt and vinegar. Smell of nail polish remover or mascara. Grease and leather.

You like the pretty ones. The ones with inches against their heels.

I like the girls who look like boys. The dirty ones.
The ones who confuse men like you or challenge men like you or put men like you out of commission.

Oh, women.

I think about the one who dipped me in the Pacific and covered me with shells and dried kelp.
Or the one who never owned a bed, preferred bathrooms and barrooms and dance floors and car parts like hood or roof and alleys and brick wall blankets. Those women.

Women with wrists tied up like elliptical gifts.

Hair, sometimes enough to pull on or that stubble that scrapes or what gets shaved away that slides beneath me.

I left so I could write, Charles, because their sex is too distracting.

You and I, we are supposed to be alone, with occasional bouts of bodies releasing us toward our next poem.

They think I am capable of love, Charles.
Can I send you on over?
Can you let them know how we are?

That woman kisses an erection onto me.

* * *

My nudity is alarming at times.

Bruises form and I forget to ask why.

I used to be hairless.
All those men and women like that, you know.
They hate the challenge of hair.

Don’t want your pubes in my teeth, she says.

My cunt hides now, which I like because sometimes I don’t want it there.
Sometimes I want a different shape or Latin classification.
Not a mammal but a reptile. Or amphibian maybe.

Those women popped your pimples with their manicured press-on nails, with their crooked, nicotine teeth. They never asked you to stop being ugly. And if they had, you would have just sent them to get more beer.

That woman blinks slowly enough to translate the wind pattern of clouds.
She moves over me like a wave of grunts.

I fake three orgasms in seven different languages.

I yearn to grow hairier, to challenge her digestive system.

I order up another round of poems, place them beneath my body and use the still-wet ink as lubricant.

When I look outside my window, Charles, I see only the tops of trees.
Everything is dark, yet the sky is plum.

Yours in whiskey and women,
Aimee.