Joey

the cheerful clinking of coffee mugs always reminded me of how my keys sound when i’m coming in from the night or the rain. joey always hated jingling noises, said they reminded her of words with too many syllables. josephine elizabeth walker schlaeganfritz especially hated having a name with four parts, let alone the fact that it ended in schlaeganfritz. so she went by joe or joey which i thought was cute. it was like she resented the loss of precious time every time she felt like a word was unreasonable long. time lost was a sin to her, and she spent much of her time on the road to redemption. time promised away in carefully decorated boxes was foolish. time saved was a precious commodity and digital watches are of the devil because they hack into time, chopping away in digital silence. god knows she’d much rather spare some change than spare the time.

but i remember joey in the garden of roses and lotus. her laughter; something about the way her soft, white belly would rise and fall while she was on her back laughing up at the roaring stars, fireflies kissing her eyelashes... i swear it made all the blossoms bloom in the dead of nightfall. hell, her laughter could make blossoms bloom during nuclear fucking winter. and it was her kind of beautiful, uncompromising and altruistic. the hurricane season brought with it an indian summer and i remember the matchbooks from dive bars in the city i pilfered with a fake id. we use to layout by the train tracks after midnight to feel the ground rumble beneath us while we looked for shooting stars. when the perseids came that year, i was flat on my back in ripped levis with a bottle of jack daniels in one hand, a joint in the other, howling at the moon until my voice gave out. we laughed and laughed in an out of breath rapture. she reached over and drew what felt like a word on my arm. i pushed her hair out of her face to see the moonlight on her flushed cheeks, she put a hand over my heart and then we succumbed to the silence.

sometimes i think back and finish the paragraph we were unraveling. i think about that last word, stretched across my skin. but that’s what makes us poets, and as poets we are kin.