catastrophe

'I Will Take My Pants Off While You Videotape the Moon'
by Gregory Sherl

In some of the pictures you’re pretty sometimes. When your hair is a half moon I want to sleep in
your crippled heart, bend in my underwear while you take pictures of me smiling. Call me
disheveled skin. Call me your oldest bookshelf. Baby, you hold that gun like a crystal ball. Like
bug spray. Like make my day. Punk. I’m frightened by your desire to always be heavy. Still, I want
to take off all of my clothes and watch you take out the trash. I want to dirty talk your left elbow.

I want to understand your cough. Like: that makes sense, the way your tongue curls, the way your
cheeks make me want to eat coconuts. Tonight the air is thick like chalk dust. Tonight I am your
pajamas. We are on the couch, the couch is on the carpet, the carpet is below my mouth. You are
below my mouth, your knees only slightly above the carpet. Tonight this is enough, and tomorrow it
will be enough, too. Next week I will call you and you will think of my beige walls, my dry hands.
Tonight I will make sounds of the ocean so you can concentrate when you go down on me.

You are in a city that is not this city, but still, I want to scour the neighborhood picking up
your lost hairpins, smell last night in your hair. It’s a good thing, you never forgetting my
waist. Maybe I’m in love or maybe I’m not in love or maybe I’ve tasted love before and haven’t
brushed my teeth in a while, but you look so good in that dress I want to bake you a pie. In one
of these sentences I say something important. I was never good at math but I’m adding up the miles
to your hips. Come over, I want to sober up inside you.

This moment is the best moment: standing under a mistletoe in the middle of April. This is what
I’m going to do: touch your hips with my tongue, build you a nest out of pillowcases. If I still
know you in December I’ll decorate your neck like a wreath, hang mistletoes from your earlobes. I
spell hickey with a fuck. I want to rob every inch of last week, sell it back to God. I’ll tell Him you’re
the reason my medicine cabinet is full, but you’re also the reason I can sleep past noon. We’re even.