Two Shorts

by Theo Ellin Ballew

I swear on my grave and on my mother’s buck tooth, ever and ever, amen: thou shalt not waste away in paper towels like this, a present, ready for school. Thou shalt not mind your ways. Thou shalt mind these swears, these promises given, these airborne things plunked there like pillows.

I will tell the truth, the whole truth, nothing but, amen. Yes, amen God and pluck me up. Like a feather of a bird, all sounding its cluck and puffing up its chest in the wind. Ruffling up its chest its furry soft chest, like a hand, on its self, just caressing.

On the bench, here, I shall wait. I shall hold you in my lap my bird, my child, I shall hold you just like that. I shall watch your paper towels for leaks. Leaks all pixilated in their patterns, I’ve prepared my mind’s eye to see, little present, you ready, for such school?

With your life I shall attest, you bird, our goodness, with your life I shall attest our faith. With my fingers all clammy and swelled from salty food, I’ll spare your little sweet bones. I’ll spare your flesh, attached like skin and bones, like age, or elbows, sliding.

I’ll tell the truth with all of it stuffed in my mouth. I’ll tell the truth with your bones spurting out my mouth’s corners, with your skin, dripping down like drool. Thou shalt learn the depths that are mine. And in that infinite abyss thou shalt sprout in sin, a gun, set off just like that.

My sea is like a pussy it welcomes you warmly. It meows and opens its legs. It purrs like ripples like waves when it’s petted, down by a hand, it moves there so subtly like laughing.

When I am alone I think of palms pressing down onto my chest. Above my breasts. I imagine me crying into a lap like milk, and one seems to be opening her legs, I seem to be falling, one, seems to be swinging her hand from my shoulders down to my waist, up to my hips, back down et cetera I’m lapping, under it all, like milk again or like water.

My sea seeps out of my mouth sometimes like milk, and I am sorry. It says words like sad and it says words like sex, it says words like objects like pain. It laughs, very hard, at these and other words, and if they hadn’t hidden their faces then I would have seen those words happening or maybe only if I had looked.

O, I have wanted to be a ship. O, I have wanted to be the shore. I have wanted to be some words that are read, every single one. O, I have wished that words were like objects, O, yes, I have wanted to be objects, and O I have wanted to be yes just one. I have wanted, O, to feel my own bounds, I have wanted to knock them against tables against faces, I have wanted to be wanted for that very wanting, I have thought about clotheslines and all the water seeping out, I have pawed at the air in hopes of catching it I have done this by myself, in air that seems infinite, and if you were there if you were anyone you would have only been the ground.

Here is what I am always doing I am always trying to water things down or else I am always trying to dry things out, here is what I am doing I have never been sure. My bounds keep on being broken. My bounds keep on transforming like metaphor like simile like mixing like wrong, wrong, they’re wrong. My bounds keep on transforming like what. My bounds keep on transforming like welcoming like what they are spreading, open, in their desperation for definition as I am wrung, out, again and again, like clothes, again, or like water.