Up on a hill across the blue lake, that's where I had my first heartbreak

In the Beginning // Chad deNiord We lived in bed, no matter where we went or what we did; we were always there, pulling the sheets up over our heads like souls for whom bodies are gowns that weigh too much, pressing ourselves so close to each other we felt our skin cross over to bone. How many days did we dream like this in our high stone room to which we'd flown on the wings of little deaths? We slept awake and woke asleep in a fire we couldn’t put out; in a fire that burned from the inside out. What did we know without saying? That we would suffer the weight we lost without even trying when we returned, then walk like turtles on the beach? How fast do you think we said "Yes! Yes!" to the poor first god when he asked us twice in separate rooms, "Are you sure about this?" So fast, I can tell you, that the birds outside our broken window thought we were singing a song only they remembered.

Fuck a fake friend, where you real friends at

The First Straw I used to think love was two people sucking on the same straw to see whose thirst was stronger, but then I whiffed the crushed walnuts of your nape, traced jackals in the snow-covered tombstones of your teeth. I used to think love was a non-stop saxophone solo in the lungs, till I hung with you like a pair of sneakers from a phone line, and you promised to always smell the rose in my kerosene. I used to think love was terminal pelvic ballet, till you let me jog beside while you pedaled all over hell on the menstrual bicycle, your tongue ripping through my prairie like a tornado of paper cuts. I used to think love was an old man smashing a mirror over his knee, till you helped me carry the barbell of my spirit back up the stairs after my car pirouetted in the desert. You are my history book. I used to not believe in fairy tales till I played the dunce in sheep’s clothing and felt how perfectly your foot fit in the glass slipper of my ass. But then duty wrapped its phone cord around my ankle and yanked me across the continent. And now there are three thousand miles between the u and the s in esophagus. And being without you is like standing at a cement-filled well with a roll of Yugoslavian nickels and making a wish. Some days I miss you so much I’d jump off the roof of your office building just to catch a glimpse of you on the way down. I wish we could trade left eyeballs, so we could always see what the others see. But you’re here, I’m there, and we have only words, a nightly phone call — one chance to mix feelings into syllables and pour into the receiver, hope they don’t disassemble in that calculus of wire. And lately — with this whole war thing — the language machine supporting it — I feel betrayed by the alphabet, like they’re injecting strychnine into my vowels, infecting my consonants, naming attack helicopters after shattered Indian tribes: Apache, Blackhawk; and West Bank colonizers are settlers, so Sharon is Davey Crockett, and Arafat: Geronimo, and it’s the Wild West all over again. And I imagine Picasso looking in a mirror, decorating his face in war paint, washing his brushes in venom, and I think of Jenin in all that rubble, and I feel like a Cyclops with two eyes, like an anorexic with three mouths, like a scuba diver in quicksand, like a shark with plastic vampire teeth, like I’m the executioner’s fingernail trying to reason with the hand. And I don’t know how to speak love when the heart is a busted cup filling with spit and paste, and the only sexual fantasy I have is busting into the Pentagon with a bazooka-sized pen and blowing open the minds of generals. And I comfort myself with the thought that we’ll name our first child Jenin, and her middle name will be Terezin, and we’ll teach her how to glow in the dark, and how to swallow firecrackers, and to never neglect the first straw, because no one ever talks about the first straw, it’s always the last straw that gets all the attention, but by then it’s way too late. - Jeffrey McDaniel