INCIPIENT SENTENCE

Something full of a lot of things falls and shatters all over the kitchen floor. Then there is the shouting. There are repetitions of sentences and an oblique use of an obscenity. You and your friends are told to leave.

The word cronies is used.

You move under an overhead light; through the crowd that spills from the kitchen in to the hallway, past walls that are close and are painted white over yellow over wallpaper. The bookcase, hickied in cloudy white rings left from the bottoms blue plastic cups, is the only one left that can stand upright at this hour. There is a reverberation of drums beats under our feet. Something as loud as a dog with a broken leg is trying to be birthed in the basement. The sounds are messy and awkward and sloppy. If you were sober enough to creep a look down the wooden steps, loose Christmas tree lights with their eyes crushed out, a bike pump that lays on its side, rusted paint cans, milk crates of paperbacks and beer bottles missing everything good but their redemption would be waiting.

Something kills the misery in the basement as your movement starts. All banter has ceases, everyone is looking at you, while someone ashes on the floor
and looks away.

They move you through the crowd.

I say to myself: Cull, to cull, the culling.

Drunk and oblivious, you pass me in the hall, as close as sex, and drag across me your hip, waist, and the swell of your breast.

Whatever I had been saying tastes of like dust on the tongue.

Because you are a red and black caterwaul; an unbelievable thing as you move to the front door.
Scintilla of a car wrecks, that all light from our eyes touch on your circle of dark fire.
Eye light twined in ours breaks off as cinders and smudges under your eyes like fingers of carbon black. We falter. We make ourselves small as you pass and you take all our sparkle and motion, replace it with focus, and
Then pull it to you. We will stand struck, until you leave.
Except for the one by the door.

The blue of your eyes marbled with blacks, shades of Mexican coppers and the green of everything you have lost, will not waver from her face.

You say: Get out of my way.

And she does.


I watch as they walk you to the door and then hear bottles break in the street under a circle of porch light.


Days later, you will tell me, as we sit in a parking lot and the April rains pounds the roof of my car, with the radio off and both feet on the dash board, sharing a chocolate chip cookie, that this scene made you wetter than any boy you have even met.