Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

On Meeting Want Next Time (Again), and: Confessions from Here, and: Letters to my Would-Be Lover on Dolls and Repeating

2016; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 39; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cal.2016.0057

1080-6512

Airea D. Matthews,

American and British Literature Analysis

On Meeting Want Next Time (Again), and: Confessions from Here*, and: Letters to my Would-Be Lover on Dolls and Repeating Airea D. Matthews (bio) ON MEETING WANT NEXT TIME (AGAIN), Empty street. No lampposts. No buildings. No pavement. We spin inside a tornado funnel. Dizzy, I yelled, Want, I never asked for you. She spoke barely above a whisper yet, somehow, her breath broke through the fevered whip, Jaded Ingenue. It’s not in your words but your body. Where’s your head, anyway? I shouted, On my nightstand with my other faces, adjusted my belted dress, stuffed my breast inside my bra cup, tossed my hair to the left, reapplied MAC Ready-the-Red lipstick and turned away. Want laughed. Her voice to my back, See you soon, sooner than soon. I walked out of the twisting into a familiar vacancy, inside a man’s mouth, wave of his tongue. I swung from his uvula. My mother, smoking a Newport nearby, instructed, Say hello to your father, Dear. Snuffed out her cig on his bottom lip, Now, what are you doing with your hair these days? [End Page 292] CONFESSIONS FROM HERE* I left our window open most nights. A man with winged ankles would visit while you slept. He’d ask about my doings, how the syrah finished, noticed the dimple on my chin when I smiled, touched the thick swell of my waist, lightly. When the wind whistled like the Northeast Corridor, he’d tongue the small of my back before leaving. After 2 most mornings. I wailed a tempest that last time. Flooded our basement. Asked him to stay or carry me over. He tucked me in the crook of his elbow and flew here. Where I am now. When you woke the next morning, I imagine you thought it rained the night before. You called the plumber, didn’t you? To fix the basement, swollen from squalls? Did you dig your fingernail under the blistering cinder? Check for mold? Did the walls crumble? When you asked the children where their mother was? Did they shrug? Bounce my name between rooms? Weep into their porridge? If they beat their bare feet against the cracked tiles in the hallway, did you notice those tiny feathers sprouting from their Achilles? Did you wrinkle your brow? Grab your shears? [End Page 291] LETTERS TO MY WOULD-BE LOVER ON DOLLS AND REPEATING Dear __________, Girl Scout for 2 years, then I quit. I can tie 37 types of knots. I can untie none of them. Dear _________, I don’t understand when you wrote, “I am full of shit, imbalanced and you can’t stand me.” I don’t want to be presumptuous, so I’ll just wait to hear back from you. I have a tendency to read into things. Dear _________, Things are a language. I read that in a horribly written book, once. Whenever my mother neglected me, she’d buy me a doll. I hated dolls. Yet, there was something oddly comforting in getting the thing I didn’t want. I’d opt for a Barbie, of course. I’d get home and pile her into her pink Barbie Dream House with the others. I didn’t even pry the box tethers off her neck. I liked them. They reminded me of a noose. Dear _________, A faith healer/psychic/medium/pagan/evangelist told me I could raise dead things. I don’t know what that means exactly. Seems selfish to rouse those from eternal slumber because I’m sleepwalking. Dear __________, Father was a moody bastard genius. Same as yours. And I don’t know if I blame the drugs or schizophrenia. I do know I worry. Lunacy is genetic, I’m told. Anyway, I’m off to pick up some shiraz and my prescriptions. Nothing serious: one to stay awake, one to fall asleep, one to feel normal, one to feel nothing. [End Page 293] Dear ________, Eleven. Lost it to a Ken doll. Don’t tell anyone. It was one of those secrets shared between childhood friends. Whenever she slept over, we would take our hard Kens and rub their smooth...