After Whiskey & Waiting For Their Arms to Get Tired (Double Feature)

After Whiskey by Jennifer Battisti

After whiskey you tell me

you’d like to be a part of my body

and I wonder if my skin has been a hostel for you all this time.

That maybe you were an element worked out of me,

the sliver of graphite under the flesh of my thigh

after I stabbed myself with a number 2 pencil

in the third grade to stop the arithmetic of separateness.

Maybe I was injecting our future—pierced myself

with the blue-gray cold-shock meeting—analgesic for the hard stuff.

The small splatter of blood staining the plastic chair, so that

later your mouth could venom and surface my epidermis

to kiss all the wounds you’d already known. To soften

the sharpened world into shavings of spiraled aphrodisiac.

To love me minimally toxic, with the near-extinct intimacy

of cursive.

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Waiting For Their Arms to Get Tired by Jennifer Battisti

The taxi man looks at your tits

while you bend over the hustle of geometry: rolled bill,

square card, the pocket pouch meant for spare buttons.

This ritual of symmetry is your only loyalty.

Strutting the Blvd, you are a bottle of Goldschlager;

fermented flecks of sex float under the marquee.

When you slur your words, your mother calls in sick for you.

You are not a black sheep, you are a black hole.

Sometimes you’re the girl waiting outside an AutoZone.

Under the sign for antifreeze, you feel eternal.

While waiting for the dope man

your bowels twist like a rabid animal.

For a buck, you can confess your sins

to the bathroom attendant. She pities you in Spanish.

One time you were a girl lost in a strange city,

retracing your steps in a Red Bull can on-wheels.

All of the multitudes of you will sleep with each other’s

boyfriends because addiction is a whore in every dimension.

In the morning, power lines play double-dutch in the wind.

Your heart is an abandoned dance floor.

Twin scabs ripen each Achilles where the stiletto

loves the night like a tourniquet.

Your mouth is packed in ice like rotting meat.

When the asphalt burns your feet, you feel what you can’t

remember.

You are a pigeon outside the mini-mart. The man sells

you menthols, sucks his teeth, everyone is a prophet at 6 a.m.

A block from the local detox, there is

a bar named Just One More.

The intake doctor asks you what year it is.

You try to seduce him. You answer every question with your body.