The Deliberate DrunkStephanie RogersWe don't know what we're doing. Broken beer bottles lie in the parking lot like this, like night, a swapping of pavement and sky, or, an ocean let's say, no. Instead say this, the dropped and forgotten about jewelry of the stars. Let's not say anything more, I say to this boy, so gone now, drunk or scared. I'm not sure those aren't cracked- off pieces of body glinting back, not stars, ocean, not sky, barely pavement, a little more like skin. Be careful, I say to myself, not out loud because he's not listening now, his hands deep in my blue jean pockets, his tongue breaking a current of words inside my mouth. Stop, I say, to my fingers as they glide somewhere underneath. I will be wholly, I say to no one, undone by this, yes this, I say, this beginning of the bruise, fine art of the kiss. And yet I want to be touched like this, lips shattering language against lips, though not this gone, his thoughts maybe about the last girl, my face not her face, my hair not her blonde ringlets, not her shoulders, hands, lips, and yet he isn't quite lost, is he? Didn't he pause there, caught, in that brief sigh, and look? See, the stars still shake light across his face and no and yes, he isn't all the way gone, not yet. I can see behind the thick lens of his glasses a flicker there, maybe not a flicker but rather a drowning, the way a hand jumps, at night, from cold blue water and waves, poking from the moon's splintered light. He must know my mouth is my mouth, this: my skin, this: my delicate just- kissed chin and yes! Do you see? There, that hand pushing from the clotted dark water -- a quick flash -- but the body, buried inside the surf, the body, frantic, tugging against another set of hands, soft but insistent -- that's how an ocean catches the unsuspecting -- it reaches up from its grand bottomless tunnel and finds a swimmer lurking, lost, possibly forgotten, and it reaches, comes closer, stroking, at first, the mysterious flopping legs of the not yet, the still not dead, and whispers this is what it feels like in the beginning to be touched.
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Stephanie Rogers