Dulles airport in summer about 1998

I like garbage bags, a lot, the smell and the cool slick slicking unfolding, the roar and snap, but I can’t stand your plastic forks and your hair styles. Your television makes me want to gouge out my eyes with a dull shoe horn, so I think I’ll just wait over here.

So, for fuck’s sake, I’m sitting over in the corner on this cat-piss-stained corduroy ottoman, it was mostly tan, waiting for the eighth or the fifteenth or the thirty second coming of the coming of the coming of the spiraling toward some beginning, and I’m waiting for when it was ok to smoke again, cause I kind of liked it then, and the cat piss is smoking up all my dreams, but still I’m waiting, and I’m in love with the black vinyl and it’s Dulles all over again putting in a quarter to watch Bob Barker and buying Pep-o-mint Lifesavers and they really did save your life in those days, not like today, but it was okay there in the melting light with the terrazzo pressing against my hippocampus, it was ok in the thin vein of satiny steel, I liked that metal, that curving cement like the arching back of a horned-out lover, humid mid-Atlantic atlatting somewhere between solar plexus and spine—it’s pink ninnies on ice—but that was where I was waiting, in the moist “O” space between her tongue and her teeth, just behind the wall of silence draped between her lips. I always liked that shadowy space and it was not uncomfortable to sit on the black vinyl slowly drying despite myself.

"Thank god for air conditioning," was all she said, as she sat down beside me. The cotton pimples and the blue puckered remembrance of you. I liked the smell of her powder. Thank god for the powder. She never told me, but it was a yellow jar with a white lid.

"Dry your thighs or you’ll get the rice," is what it sounded like, when her wrinkles parted and the bristly short hairs which had become her lip issued that advice. I liked the pleats and the seer sucking better, so I focused on the wrinkled blue toes of her shoes instead. Not wanting to offend I tried not to breath and we waited, waited again.

But I did love that Dulles and if I ever see her again, what swell might I find to shine, that Dulles once in the sun dress in the weighted air in the heavy light, atomic parking spaces and just on the blinding side of thirty, the nipples and the weft.

Thank god the planes had to go or I’d be sitting there still, and maybe she too, dead and rotting inside her wrinkled blue shoes.

Careful what you quit, it might be the only thing holding you together.

Don’t quit her, whatever you do. She’s a tide pool, a cool and bright cauldron of gametes and shining wet skin. With the pain and the fury, but still with the fine hair in water and the black rock, don’t let her go. Hide hide, wait for the water to rise. Waiting while the goldfinches swim nervously by, gold gold, presto he exclaims, again and again for several days. Anxious black jewels with the darting and darting, watching for the death that never comes, until it does.
Here they are! The goldfinches, having found their feathers, and all the colors of summer. Having found the swing and the pendulous dips, the sizzle and the kiss.