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Colin helps me get settled in my new place:

The first week I live here there is no hot water
no telephone or cable TV
"my new place is a shithole," I tell people
going on to detail the incompetence of my maintenance man
if I even have one,
never forgetting to mention the explosive air conditioner,
the bathroom towel racks which you discovered are held to the wall with
chunked green sticky tack,
and the broken bed.

You cannot fix the hot water, even after I locate the tank
behind the building in a little room
cobwebbed and cool -
we crowd together and grasp the pipes, feeling for signs of warmth, and each
time I move
to press a button or open a valve you remind me of liable and smack my hand away,
because you think about things like that.

It is my sixth move in nineteen years,
from prep school to prep school and the boarding school I graduated from
to a semester at pricey Yale
from which I remember the drunk frat boys of Sigma Nu
clamoring one Tuesday evening at a Mexican bar to locate the cellular number
of a supposedly great hooker they'd all had prior encounters with
And now this place,
which I suspect will be imprinted as a series of quiet, sudden attacks
that are downright Tennessee Williams:
You come without warning from behind or across the couch
to push me through the heat onto the floor,
or else against the kitchen wall -

I slip around in the cold shower water and remember
Eddie, now a politician, once a Sigma Nu boy
who pissed out my third-story window one drunken morning
in the hush of New Haven's dawn and
watched me over his shoulder, one arm against the wall, the other out the window
and quoted from the Ginsberg poems taped above my desk
but who, over ostensibly sweet afternoon brunches, would often
suggestively carry on lengthy one-sided discussions praising autoerotic
asphyxiation, all the time
rubbing my leg under the table

I know that you, colin, are curled
drunk on my couch
one hand covering my keys on the coffee table
aware that I may try to grab them after my shower and drive intoxicated to
the store for ice cream,
lazily observing Army of Darkness for the third time this weekend,
waiting
for the ater to stop and the sounds of my feet
to move down the hall
so we can smoke that joint
from beneath the smooth cape of an Indiana evening
recall my slurred prediction that we'll look backwards someday and wish
for these nights, having long since parted ways -
tonight you give an extra shove with your hips as if to say
no to that
but what I'm saying the whole time,
baby,
is
yes yes yes.

Jessica Bush

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