Elisa Gabbert holds degrees from Rice University and Emerson College . She currently lives in Boston and is an editor of Absent. Recent work can be found in Pleiades, Meridian, Cannibal, and LIT. Her chapbook, Thanks for Sending the Engine, is available from Kitchen Press. That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness , a book of poems written with Kathleen Rooney, is forthcoming from Otoliths Books.Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press and the author of Reading With Oprah: the Book Club That Changed America (University of Arkansas Press, 2005) and Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object (Arkansas Press, 2009). Recent essays and poems can be found in Gettysburg Review, Another Chicago Magazine, and Quarterly West.
Their collaborative chapbook Something Really Wonderful was published by dancing girl press in 2007.
II.
She kept a chamois-soft list of Things That Set My Heart Aflutter
& she sent it in a letter, the envelope encrusted with ruby glitter.
The fire-engine sound. The baby-sitter. Her trusty mechanical pencil
w/ the .5 mm lead scraped the rough paper: Rainwater in the gutter.
A post-script warning: I've seen a side of you I plan to exploit from now on.
I want to be fearless. The sky above my hammock snows glitter.
The night we met she said I don't believe in making plans. Her pristine hands
hovered like lovely hovercraft & made my scented candles gutter.
The night I went mad, she said, That's none of your beeswax.
But it is, it is. When she was mad her awful violet eyes would glitter.
I want to make my own list. I wish I'd never ever kissed
her. Wish I'd missed. Like in bowling. Straight into the gutter.
XIV.
Nothing happens nowhere. You have to set a setting.
Unless you want nothing to happen. That means no sex—
no sex in a bed, no sex in a car, on the floor, on top
of the washer or even the dryer. No sex at all. Not even text-
book sex of the boringest kind: no Tab A & no Slot B.
I'll call you a liar if you say you don't think about sex
all day. Everybody thinks about sex all day, I know
that's a fact. I have textual evidence. I saw it in a text
on Textual Healing. I picked it up at the Bookplex
& while I was at it I picked up the clerk. We had sex
beneath the "Summer Must-Reads" table. It was hot—
a conquest with no subtext, even taken out of context.
w/ the .5 mm lead scraped the rough paper: Rainwater in the gutter.
A post-script warning: I've seen a side of you I plan to exploit from now on.
I want to be fearless. The sky above my hammock snows glitter.
The night we met she said I don't believe in making plans. Her pristine hands
hovered like lovely hovercraft & made my scented candles gutter.
The night I went mad, she said, That's none of your beeswax.
But it is, it is. When she was mad her awful violet eyes would glitter.
I want to make my own list. I wish I'd never ever kissed
her. Wish I'd missed. Like in bowling. Straight into the gutter.
XIV.
Nothing happens nowhere. You have to set a setting.
Unless you want nothing to happen. That means no sex—
no sex in a bed, no sex in a car, on the floor, on top
of the washer or even the dryer. No sex at all. Not even text-
book sex of the boringest kind: no Tab A & no Slot B.
I'll call you a liar if you say you don't think about sex
all day. Everybody thinks about sex all day, I know
that's a fact. I have textual evidence. I saw it in a text
on Textual Healing. I picked it up at the Bookplex
& while I was at it I picked up the clerk. We had sex
beneath the "Summer Must-Reads" table. It was hot—
a conquest with no subtext, even taken out of context.
Leave a comment