My Regina (I)

i.
Mornings are feral.
One sock half on, every hair growing in a different direction
I drag myself out of the den. You are up up up.
I’m making eggs and quinoa
and
do you want any?
and I tell her
baby
please
I don’t want no hippie food,
I just want rye toast, black coffee.
(then I cringe cause it sounds rough outside of my own head.
homegirl is just trying to make me eat breakfast
and don’t I have half a kind word for her this early?)
so I try to make you laugh
bring up about last night
when Jefferino told us rapid fire
that quinoa was only $1.50 a pound
recommended we make a big bowl every week
and that it was, in fact,
the mothergrain…yo.
you tell me
Hubert likes quinoa more than rice.
I grind the coffee.
Hubert also made a tattoo gun
out of a pencil sharpener
and got Rex to carve
“Welcome Theives”
in Russian
on his ass.


ii.
See I was at that party
and so was she.
We hadn’t met yet,
didn’t meet that night.
Separated by the oceanic divide
of Hubert’s new tattoo.
Our mutual fear of being presented
with the bloody horror
(the gun didn’t work so hot)
kept us on opposite sides of the house
and so we never met.


iii.
They look like curly little tails in the eggs,
and though they seem kind of cute.
I still just want rye toast, black coffee.


iv.
Stop pacing, and if you’re looking for the radio, it’s busted
The stove’s heat melts the patterns on the pane,
it refreezes into slashes across the glass.
how’d it…
oh it just fuzzed and popped and stopped.
A large piece of mirror stands in the corner
reflecting a sliver of the scene.
And I cannot remember
when the glass monster was transmuted
by lack of time or indecision
from art supply to home décor,
but I have nearly cut my foot open on it twice already.


v.
–I remember
how we did eventually meet.
All five of us were moving into the slanted house together.
You and I were the only ones who showed up early to sign the lease.
You opened the pickup door and the ice cracked like a pistol shot
get in, it’s freezing.


vi.
The radio’s bowels are all over the coffee table.
I am searching for a loose wire.
but I really am desperate to fix the thing.
After I drop you off at the hospital
I will be home, alone, before work,
feeling useless as all hell.
I’ll want the news
and the paper ain’t gonna sate me.
I want to lose myself in those disembodied voices,
let their words become my thoughts,
let the waves bounce through my brains.
My toast pops up, it’s burnt.


vii.
-I am too wide awake




Written in 2009, the first part of this seven part poem appeared in the magazine Beatniks and Cowboys in their Summer 2011 issue