Touch Me and Die
At the Pole
Tattoo
There Is Nothing Left to Find the Answer To
(for all the people who keep trying to touch me even the people who are attractive men that normally I would like to have some casual conversation with so I can pretend I’m still young to attract that kind of attention but yeah, even then)
Scene One
I was at a party once where some guy
was putting shit in girls’ drinks
I only found out about it because my roommate
got super fucked up after just one drink
and I had to take her back to our place
and I know it was the fucking guy who
kept asking us if he could help us
if he could give us a ride home
Scene Two
hello I know I let you come back to my apartment with me even after I made fun of you all night long because I needed a ride home but then I made you sleep on the couch and I locked the bedroom door and slept with my gun under my pillow because I didn’t know if you could figure out how to unlock the door I didn’t really think this part through
it was nice that you gave me a ride to work the next day and then went back and wrote your phone number on a piece of paper and slipped it under the door of my apartment after you dropped me off you know I’m never going to call you, right?
Scene Three
Okay, I’ve thought about this night for a long time
And I don’t know why I’m not dead now
And I don’t know how I made it out through the other side of
So many stupid nights
I don’t know how I lived long enough to write this part.
Scene Four
A priest walks into a bar.
A clown with an invisible dog walks into a bar.
A psychopath with an axe walks into a bar.
I stand outside the bar, a can of lighter fluid at my feet
here is your salvation. I can show you a way out
of the building without using a door CAN YOU SEE ME NOW?
are you listening?
Say something romantic or I will kill you.
I don’t even know the names of the gods to expect
when you die under the stars stretched out on the polar ice.
Perhaps there are legends about snow-haired deities on whalebone sleds
pulled through the sky by polar bears or wolves
or maybe no one has ever worshipped a god or a moon or a star out here.
Far beneath the ice, blue-blooded cephalopods undulate in the depths
ancient sharks scavenge in the blackest depths
perhaps in the places where the ice becomes water
are the remains of a people that knew which gods rule here
their cities abandoned and crumbled to dust.
He insists we stop in the tattoo parlor, he wants a tattoo.
There’s some flash of a cowgirl in the window that would be perfect,
right there on his arm, he could make it dance like a hula girl
but it would be a cowgirl.
I tell him cowgirls are stupid but he wants it anyway.
I wait in the chair by the door, try to ignore the buzzing in the other room
the smell of copper and rust in the air, the poor quality of the magazines in the lobby
I just wanted to go to the beach, I just wanted to get wasted out by the water
I didn’t come here to wait for him to get his crap tattoo.
He comes out earlier than I thought he would, because it’s just flash
it’s little more than a black outline of a girl
with red hair and a cowboy hat. Her eyes are super big
she has a nice smile.
It reminds me of the embroidered dishtowels my mom used to have
yellow ducks with blue bonnets and little aprons tied around their waists
babies bathing in stewpots underneath arching palm trees
kittens chasing balls of string.
There Is Nothing Left to Find the Answer To
I walk through the day broken, shattered, barely held together
in a sack of twitching skin. Everything unnerves me.
Everything is sharp and jagged and dangerous. I tiptoe everywhere.
The dog tries to make up for my lack of noise
by adding too much of her own, her nails click on the linoleum behind me
she follows me everywhere, as if she’s afraid I’ll disappear if she blinks.
I might.
They say women become invisible when they’re my age.
I wish for insubstantiality to go with the invisibility, if only.
But everything’s too hard and rigid and angry to just pass through.
I’m shouting at walls that won’t move or recognize me.
It’s too hard to wake up or get up or move
my limbs are filled with plaster and I’m too heavy to move
the dog whines at me from the doorway, it’s time for her walk
she lies her head down on the floor and waits for me to breathe.
Holly Day’s writing has recently appeared in Analog SF, Cardinal Sins, and New Plains Review, and her published books include Music Theory for Dummies and Music Composition for Dummies. She currently teaches classes at The Loft Literary Center in Minnesota, Hugo House in Washington, and The Muse Writers Center in Virginia.
