3B
Wednesday, February 24, 2016 // The Statement
“I hear you’re bad at sex,” she says to the boy. A chuck-
le bursts out but they don’t notice. No one ever notices
the sometimes shy one posted against the wall, pants or
no pants.
The boy looks startled a bit. She grins.
“Me? Who t(old) you that?” Pathetic, but who can
blame the boy. The party noise eats the rest, so refocus
to left eye corner. She’s still smiling, and so is the boy but
less surely. Is that a pickup line? Her chin juts to a point
and her black lipstick is good. Either way, what a fucking
line. If this is a movie, the line is “Well, let me prove ‘em
wrong.” But no one says that. This isn’t a movie.
She walks away and the boy goes back to looking
for his coat in the coat mountain piled on the hallway
couch. Canada Goose doesn’t win in these parts. The
party is full of funny butts and sexy butts and uncom-
fortable losers with their pants on.
Sid walks by and slaps each naked hairy thigh, two
laughs together and he’s gone. He’s here with one of the
ones. Exposed in the hallway. Take a lap.
Took a lap and another shot. Living room still packed.
Catie introduced Will. A golfer with another pointy
chin. Couldn’t help imagining her letting him fuck her
later after the cops come like she described over stir
fry the other night. Alone on top of the stairs now sit-
ting. Watching them leave and come and drink and talk.
For the one to talk to. Height is (in)escapable power
that feels good to have. Heels Castles Dunks Penthouse
Swimming Pools.
One boy climbs and squeezes by in those new red
briefs on the plastic person in American Apparel. Incon-
venient mannequin boner. The weirdness in the great-
ness of underwear. The anger in the disappointment in
people who tried to shut this joy down. Don’t come if
you’re uncomfortable.
One girl in the bedroom to the right is barfing bad.
Check if she’s OK? Instead, stay seated, assume her girl-
friend is pulling back her hair. Like Aron in high school
carrying one to the subway and riding uptown after
washing the pavement a pink bottle of wine outside
Gray’s Papaya in SoHo. First time and second to last so
far. Proud of it.
Why come to these? is the classic loner thought. It’s
goddamn Valentine’s Day, pants are off, and the ending
is off to sleep. Came but didn’t come last time. Good play.
Slinky down the stairs like Christmas lights twirled
around the banister.
Too drunk for all of it.
A mural appears on the stair wall of a cute village
in a rural valley. Orange roofs littered between green
trees below a big blue sky and faint clouds. Like a big fat
beautiful cliché. Kid with ‘80s grandpa glasses butts in.
Black plastic choker. Pale see-through skin like a seal.
Say what’s known, judge what’s not. Fuck it. Denial is
healthy sometimes.
“Pretty amazing right?” His eyes look like conde-
scending politicians. “German exchange students
painted it like a hundred years ago supposedly.” He
knows too.
“Looks like Germany yeah.” Never been, but fuck it
without fucking it. The period squashes his smile like a
bubble of silence in the sound growing fast. Murdering
conversation intentionally is satisfying sometimes.
Take a piss. “Do you know where the bathroom is?”
He points with skinny bones. “Thanks.”
Pissed on the seat and wiped it. A gold cased lipstick
on the sink counter. Black on the mirror. A chuckle
bursts and no one notices except the mirror. Eyes widen
and vaseline lashes in the mirror. When you go back
out, you’ll notice everyone again. The night girl with the
black lipstick did one’s lips in the air — but next level is
in the mirror. And on Wednesday sometime see her in
the mirror at Cantinas with that Australian clementine.
On a Wednesday.
Drunk and Overheard
B Y YA R D A I N A M R O N , L S A S E N I O R
Larva
B Y G AV I N G A O , L S A S E N I O R
It’s the first snow of a new year
where nothing is new, and everything
wants to lug
its turgid body into the flour
sack of quietude. Even the landscape unfurls
its fur like the back of a white
buffalo. Some child’s red
balloon seized by the speartip of a mountain
ash, a bird heart quivering in the center
of a coma. And the scare
-crow, strung up on a broomstick, bears
the weight of his humiliation
on his straw mind where
winter falls upon a ryefield, and the owlet sings a
plain song of despair, its notes –
gurgling water in a mouth
made out of blue cloth, the same gauze
the silkworms once
spun to fashion
a robe for an emperor, whose men and
women prostrated before his palace, his servants
swarming around his ivory
throne like botflies
around a bull’s flank. The empress wore
her face like a carnival, her loneliness
so extravagant. She patted
the blue-lipped baby
in her lap the way she
stroked her husband’s pride. There’s a lot
to desire in this life. But not
these pale colonnades, or a woman’s
shriek piercing the night
like the light from a kerosene lamp. She
stared into her garden
and saw two geese atop the frozen
fountain, still as weathervanes,
huddling around a silver
egg, that nascent eye, that luminous
larva spoiled with love
given freely. The wolf
-white world just
shrugs, bats
its infant eyelashes
and goes on to dream
another stillbirth.
Magazine Editor, Karl Williams
ILLUSTRATION BY ZOEY HOLMSTROM