Two Micros
by Chelsea Voulgares
Constant in all Things
New Year’s Eve at the punk club. Skulls painted white against the thick black of the steel doors. The street lights along North Avenue glared. (They created day well past midnight.) You squeezed my hand as we walked through the door, even though we had been pulling away from each other for months, even though we had a fight before we left when I asked to borrow your leather skirt. The inside of the place radiated with bleach, yeast, and mold. On the second story a dance floor, surrounded on all sides by a chain-link cage, vibrated with the heavy rhythmic thud of industrial music. “Christian zombie vampires. I am the father, the father, of nothing!” I drank and swayed and made out with a guy with a mohawk and a neck tattoo while you stood in the corner, arms crossed. You pulled my belt loop — time to leave. Why do you always do this? But the room rotated around me like it was the last night on earth and besides I was having such a good fucking time. I waved you off, see you tomorrow, I said, and melted back into Mohawk’s leather jacket and high cheek bones. Over and over. Try to act sober. The ball dropped. Kisses were had. You were finally able to drag me and Mohawk and Mohawk’s friend out of the bar. On the way out, I tripped over my own foot, fell, and scraped my palms on the concrete sidewalk. We laughed. We stalked to the late-night diner, ordered burgers and french fries and chocolate shakes, and when I ran to the bathroom to throw up, you followed me, rubbed my back and held my hair. Everything’s going to be all right, you said, and like a fool, I believed you.
Let me cut my brain out,
Pink and writhing. I’ll rest it on the dining room table, next to the spotted orchid and my husband’s pile of discarded books. Who needs a mind anyway, when all it does is pace and twirl? We can remove them all, line them up together in messy, glob-filled rows, an orchestra of lobotomy, a big band of curling meat. They’ll reach for us. (They all think they’ve got telepathy.) But obviously, we’ll have forgotten them. When they’re gone, when they’ve dried up and shut up and stopped their endless screeching, we can sleep.
Chelsea Voulgares lives just outside Chicago, where she is the Editor in Chief of Lost Balloon. Her work has appeared in journals such as Passages North, Electric Literature, Cheap Pop, and X-R-A-Y. You can find her online at www.chelseavoulgares.com or on Twitter @chelsvoulgares.
