-Tammi-Louise-

I’ve drawn
A single line
through all the parts
on my naked body—
that you detest.

And now no white is showing.
And now you like me best.

The bite marks
of my broken teeth
spell I lust you
down your spine

To remind me when your back is turned.
I trace it as we intertwine.

My heart slams
around your
vacant,
sunken chest.

The rhythm is alarming.
The rhythm is grotesque.

I’m here
for:
lack of love
for:
life of loss.

But

I need
you,
I need
me
and you.

Stay.

I probably wrote this. Steal and die. 

Another She

 Fingernails dipped in blood rested on fire station stockings; the ladders spiralling across her thighs—or so he was forced to imagine—as they were artfully hidden beneath layers of vibrant dressing.  Dark tresses fell uncertainly over a solemn, gazing expression, dull with indifference.

He always noticed their eyes.  Right after they noticed him.  They were tiny wishing pools that glimmered as each golden whisper was delivered to their surface in the form of a hopeful night in.

Her bare foot tapped to a silent tune, fingers gripping worn leather sandals protectively in her lap.  He’s always preferred their lives on the outside of their bodies where he could see them.

They had all been open books, just like her, but were written in a language he didn’t understand.  He’d met them all the same way and he’d like to think he’d picked them all the same way afterwards—but they hadn’t lasted, he wouldn’t let them.  Never longer than a conversation and a coffee; sometimes he left their sheets before the next bus.                           

There was the girl who stumbled onto that same 207 bus, just after 11pm, intoxicated on her own free spirit, body suffocated in a snug floral number.  She spoke in rambled, broken English with screaming eyes—every part of her just as loud as the next; every word she spoke just as colour-filled as the last.  She had enraged him, but he found that enticing.  Her slovenly housemates had greeted him as if he visited regularly, though he imagined he would have appeared different every time.  Her expressions were raw, almost demanding, as she put herself on show to the audience of a musky, unkempt bedroom.  He’d felt as if he could have stepped out for a cigarette break and she wouldn’t have noticed—too absorbed and overwhelmed with her vivacious movements.

There was another, much older, back in the summer, who’d stepped onto the bus heavy in the arms of another woman, but left with him the next week all the same.   She was the first he’d spent the entire night with, out of pure intrigue.  She was self-protective in a more flamboyant manner—flawed of any emotional contact, and aware of it.  He searched for a shimmer of brokenness; was there family once?  He concluded from her well-loved body and thorough technique that any neglect had been on her own part; seeking sporadic social contact, but nothing more.  He woke alone, a weighted, patterned ceiling looking down on him.  He’d stepped cautiously through the ancient, empty house to the distant melody of a piano.  He found her leaning heatedly into an old mahogany, embraced only by the deep tune she created; her chest and thighs bare.  He left her to paint the empty walls with her rhythm, and took the first bus home.

But there had always been her, his one, his never-ending.  He didn’t like to think of her because he found himself smothered.  The very memory—her face pressed against his naked chest, watching his skin rise in rows of chills as her tears landed there and her breath slowly dried them—it choked him.  We only needed two things she’d told him, a heart for beating and a body for wasting.

So waste me she whispered, twisting herself around his breathless form and leaving him almost wounded.

That body.  Her skin.  She wore it like a delicate patchwork she’d spent her whole life making—embracing every scar and the story that came with it.

Suddenly an empty month had passed and he wondered, how much more bliss can I get from this ignorance?   Because her patchwork had faded; cleansed itself to be spread over a new lover.  And with that she was gone.

But there were many more that he pocketed to fill the time, either for good luck, or in attempt to mend the tattered hole he refused to acknowledge—each one of them seething with the same bitter needs as him.

            He approached the front seats, a little unsteady as the bus sped down a winding stretch of road.  What was her name?  Her vacant eyes glanced away a moment, Leena. She was lying.  He smiled at her unconscious lack of commitment, deciding he liked her very much.

There was another:  a lot younger, who dressed as cheaply as her perfume suggested but made up for her appearance with rich enthusiasm.  She ranted loudly, swore obviously, and spoke keenly with a sense of vacuity, yet he didn’t care to ask to clear his confusion.  She was city-lit and street-familiar; knew all about the places she had never visited, and embraced the city she owned like a second pair of home-stitched tights.

At the click of the bedroom door she approached him with delirium, swept him up fiercely—hair matted, eyes everywhere at once.  He appreciated her only-for-the-moment passion, because it meant he could leave when the moment was over.

There was the dancer.  He remembered her studio apartment, the one with the flaking walls which stained his palms and her back, and the mirrors that reflected their ballet so boldly in the dim light.  She was frail and neat.  She spoke weakly but her eyes shone with the thought of a performance.  He almost expected a curtsey to finish the night—but instead she curled up in her lace trimmed bed, not even questioning what he chose to do with his company.  He left.

He’d done more than search the beds of other women for her.  He found himself on her doorstep after a curious number of broken weeks.  He’d stood there a while with no need to knock—the curtain-bare windows of the cottage giving him a view of its empty inside.  He left his final glance with a rusty nail that protruded out of the faded, blue doorframe; intertwining with a single thread that was forced there from an evening’s rough entry.  

He remembered one particular evening; her thighs sealing him into the battered lounge chair, her wide, striking greens misty, her lips parted as his name fell from them achingly.

I am in love with you, she breathed, every Thursday night.

He’d laughed in his arousal, but recalled the nauseous feeling afterwards, and his reluctance to shape her naked body as they slept.

            I make pottery Leena said, sweeping a terracotta hand over one of her crossed legs and mentioning something about a small out of town boutique.  He’d nodded thoughtlessly; taking note of the tiny slip smudges above her brow, worn threaded side bag and flaking imitation pearls along her wrists.

I’m in Landscape Architecture he repeated his usual spiel of history.  I travel a fair bit. She continued speaking in non-specifics, and although she barely shifted, and her tone gave little away, her smouldering look had already invited him home.  He returned the gaze, browsing her as if she were already stark and splayed beneath him.

There was the student.  Not his youngest, but memorable all the same.  He still revelled in excitement at the memory of her shimmer as she descended on him; hair still pinned tightly and glasses in place in her grinding silence—beached skin enveloping him with her room mate sleeping all the while.  She licked her lips, slipped a biro from her up-style and pulled a text book from under the bed moments after she’d finished with him:  her study break.

He was so in love with being disposable.

            Then his mistake.  She was too neat, he realised, too well-spoken.  Too leather handbag, tailored jacket and lace-trimmed camisole.  But she smelled of faded Jean Patou and vodka and had her hand on his thigh ten minutes into their conversation; long enough for him to decide which stop he would be exiting at that evening.

            She didn’t even undress.  Just let him judge his progress by the sweat seeping through her white satin blouse.  She offered him a drink afterwards—her post-work bar trip having worn off.

I can’t stay he’d apologised, he never could.

Can’t or won’t? She queried, pressing a cold spirits glass between his fingers and insisting she had work in the morning as well.  She liked her drinks dry, he learned, and her humour even more so.  She worked in antiquities but preferred her men younger; less culture-moulded than the inherited collections around her lounge room.  She became less attractive with each minute of conversation.  He hated the look of intense interest she gave him, of longing.  He hated the flow of questions, the way she recalled everything he said, the way she poured his drinks one after the other on the marble-topped bar.  I’ll need your number, she announced, as he eventually made his way to the door.  In a hotel room he’d mumbled, scrawling down something false and filled with hope, not staying in town too long.  He’d gotten a cab home for the next fortnight, passing the bus stop with a yearning, but afraid of trapping himself even more so.

            Once, after arriving back to her house, shivering—the result of her insistence to walk in the rain, he’d found himself undressed and sinking into the claw-footed tub; her trembling body around his waist long before the water could reach there.  Long after the bath had turned cold, he draped her across the wet-stained wooden boards in front of the radiator, and they drip dried together.  She lay breathing for a long while, moving her hands across her body to replace his—she didn’t need him, and he knew.  After a moment she turned on her side and etched his name into the splintering floorboards, the graffiti being hidden by the watered-down silhouettes of their drying bodies. He sometimes wondered what his name looked like, scratched into the floor of an empty house like the deed of an idle child.

He felt unfamiliar heartstrings bend, twist and ache with each wrong lover that carried him further away.  He hated the disease he’d become—as he clung to that nauseas feeling in the curved shape of a naked woman.

            He often wondered,—if she stepped onto the bus that evening, if she threw herself onto him, clothes askew, if she hushed more gypsy proverbs and danced her earth-owned body to his—would he tell her yet?  Would he say stay this time?  Would he stumble after her once more in a late-night storm and whisper forever into her neck from the frozen silence of a bathroom floor?  No.

And so his willing silence faded into her disappearance.

            Leena was subdued and slightly prudish.  She leaned to smooth her skirt, her cardigan falling away to reveal deep, clashing layers of clothing, then sat back to pull her hair in a knot at the nape of her neck, watching him all the while.  He knew she would never be the first to speak. 

Are you into art?  He asked. He knew enough about it to entertain a conversation, but she shook her head.

Only my own.  But she didn’t tell him about her art, simply recoiled and watched her reflection pass over the night landscape in the adjacent window.  He was impressed with her deliberate disinterest.

            There was the tattooist.  Her voice was as rough as a pack of Cuban cigars, even though he never saw her light one.  She was on her way to work—the night shift—and he couldn’t resist the thought of bringing some comfort to one of those sterile, leather rooms.  He inhaled the scent of alcohol swabs as her metal-rimmed lips clashed with his; his hands skimming over her jagged, spontaneously trimmed hair. He left the parlour with a small smile—the nervous teenager in the waiting room—sleeve rolled up—being delighted with this boost of confidence.

            There was another, who’d eyed him across the coffee shop beneath a beret, seven minutes before his bus.  Almost every seat was taken as it left the city that night, the result of a sporting match that he took no interest in.  As long as the face paint stayed on the children, and the children in the laps of their mothers, that was all the interest he needed.  She poised the styrofoam cup between her lips, the colour being lost to the whiteness of her latte, as she took her ticket and scanned the seat next to him.

Stiff drink to celebrate?  She commented with light sarcasm, as he glanced down to his lukewarm coffee in a matching cup.

It reflects my dislike for soccer he’d retorted, flashing a quick eye of insult over the drunkards on the seats before his.  Her lips swelled into a grin.

I can see that—it was a football game.  He lost himself superficially in her shameless laugh, and then once again as she spiralled into more playful conversation. Minutes later, she tugged his arm and whispered something about a celebratory soccer party, urging him to step off with her.  He gave the driver his same, knowing look before the door folded behind him.

            They crossed the road into a dim, gravel car park, stopping a few feet from a two-toned Mercury Montclair, as she closed a single key into his palm like some sort of secret.  He’d nodded chivalrously and opened the back door for her to step inside.  She seemed to have a peculiar order.  She slid her shoes off neatly and placed them side-by-side on the passenger seat, smoothed down her empty dress on top of them, and turned the heat to high before even turning to face him.  He nipped curiously at the ink-carvings across her chest with his warming mouth, until her toes skimmed the radio dial, emitting smooth sounding instrumentals, and he found his rhythm within her. 

            Leena cocked her head towards the front of the bus with interest, peering through the windscreen. She buried her sandals in her side bag and smiled to him weakly. She was leaving soon. He breathed sharply, confidently, knowingly.

How about some company?  She stood to leave and looked down to him with her still, wishing-pool eyes, glimmerless.

I don’t think so.  And they left, in a trail, one behind the other.  The brazen foreigner, the older woman, the ignorant city-girl, the dancer—stepping off the bus with their blank glances back at him.  The student, the drunken mistake, the tattooist, the woman with the beret—all going home without him and leaving their last negative words.

But one woman was still missing.