Treehouse

Yve Miller

The height of you across my bed, waiting when I come from the closet is brunette and it is unachievable by me. I see you and you are covered and always will be and I remember trying to kiss you on the mouth and I realized your wet terror wasn’t a system of checks. A lack of nod can allow all things to pass. This too. I am writing in complete sentences. I am lifting my face from the blue flames of the comforter and staring into your piano-bench eyes.

I am writing in complete sentences and I am eleven. Elisabeth is under the lilac sheets and we have a Kit Kat bar and her father is drunk and the shut door shudders with his vocal chords. Our fingers smell like chocolate and we lick and think about AOL and grass blades and the way our bikes talk trash and take us across town to the train-park where we make up games with our own rules like jumping from the swings and running to the blacktop fast means a Sprite from Morningside and later, when the floodlights clasp the dark cornfield in their shut notebooks, we can write rules with our fingers and check the wattage of beating flies in the sides of our necks against the glowstars on the ceiling.

I am writing in complete Elisabeth. Under the lilacs we have kits for dull hunger in our eyes. Keebler Elves and AOL and our bikes whinny outside on the groved driveway and we think of ways to sneak out. I am writing under rules. Our floodlights find towns inside our chests, miniature convenient stores full of racks of chips and razors. The cornfield swallows us shut, checks the wattage of our vocal chords against its expanse of covered ears. Our fathers are drunk down hallways and our fingers smell like us. We lick the night in shifts.

I am writing in complete shudders and I am nineteen. The cornfield strains for us and finds a silence in the bark of nameless hounds. The groved driveway is flat and restless; a woman at Morningside stares at the glazed black window, her self inside. Our fathers are drunk down hallways, our fingers smell like rules and towns, our chests are full of swallows, dull hunger in our lungs, Keebler Elves asleep in tins of homes with glowstars on ceilings, ours glowing over blank bedspreads, charged for the carpet.

I am writing in complete, I am open and twenty five and I am lifting my face from Elisabeth, I am staring at your rich stone eyes I am a cornfield and you are Audrey, you are Annabelle, you are Amy and Everett and Elvis and I am twelve, I am twenty, I am married and my fingers smell like my restless, flat grove driveway and I am charged, I am blank as bedspread waiting for the mating of two beating-fly hearts, two drunk fathers, two black-water canoes hung low in a shed where rules, like towns, dull in hunger and lost ceilings. Your floodlights blind my miniature glass of blank speech. I am the lilac sheets drenched by silver ringed hands, I am drunk Annabelle, I am a Mountain Dew glow. Our aisle rows through black water in canoes sharp as forceps. Our bodies countered by harvesting drunk fathers, their fingers smell and our Beemans cheeks swell like chests full of charged cards and blood-covered registers, shattered black glass windows full of budding-fly larvae like Skittles raining down, ears clutched in floodlights Arielle, Aurelie, Ashton, Eloise. After blank speech, a hush and a wedding.

I am writing in complete sentences. I am in love with the breasts of a lifetime of windows, I am drawn like blackwater in tin canoes. I am glass, fractured flies beating to the rhythm of Amy. Bodies. Mopping. I am revealed inside my blue pocket of new rules, I am twenty five. I am a drunk father and a swelling chaste. I am sunken under Starburst rocks and Iraq vets, home and dead in their pill-breath sheets. I am sunk in paper bags, floodlight hounds, washing mother Annabelle ears. I am a mopped floor, a roved drive. I am a cash register ringing full of glowstars, sheets wet with Amy, Elisabeth, Everett, sheets warm with fingers and I am a Kit-Kat wrapped in time, printed in a past hush of egg light.

I am a blooming chocolate time-bomb, I am in love on a lilac bedspread, fractured in a glass window full of Sprite and fingers, and my tongue is inside I am writing in complete sentences. I am the stringed move, the room, the rules, I am the warm launch of July, the bass glow of cello, I am twenty five, I am sky, I am waving hello to Amy, Elisabeth, Annabelle, and I am Darma. I am charged blood and why. The cello move of the sun sheds down like an egg spread on our suburb bedroom, across the carpet which hides the crushed shine of our closed lips.

I am inside a glass of blankets and your long body is spread before me, Audrey, and I am married, Elisabeth, and you are a driveway, Annabelle, and I am twenty-five, Amy, I am two drunk fathers in a canoe on dark water, two beating flies, Everett, two bedspreads waiting with charged ripples of stars, the sealed lips of corn. I am the Morningside widow, our reflection Sprites across the mopped floor, our gummy bear skid of Adidas and your wet mouth glows in the bloom of Diet Mountain Dew, the aisle a row of rules and towns of racked candy, straight lines of Starbursts, Elisabeth, elf, this is my body on the counter by the cash register; these are my zippers flying, my stolen Beemans gum, this is my pocket full of rules and Elisabeth, this is the harvest up through our pores, our ears, I kiss you in b-flat, our bike paths glow like stars.

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Yve Miller has worked with horses, boat engines, and barbecue. She is a reviewer of books and teaches students how to form counterarguments and write from their heartbeat. She is going to night school to become somebody. Her first manuscript is in the works.

See Yve’s 5 Things You Should Read in our ongoing contributors’ series, and her past pieces, Molting and When I Was a Train Passenger.