Chew

When he eats, his teeth don’t mesh properly – they make you think: eww, they make you think: he has a rough tongue plagued with moss – the bacteria that will not stop smelling.  His breath smells like garlic, pork fat, cola, because he eats little more than bologna and Pepsi.  His teeth mesh so poorly that watching him chew is a train wreck; you wait for the collision, the derailment, the dentist bill.  You ask him, “wouldn’t it be better if you didn’t, I mean, if you just gave up chewing all together, because I would feel so much better if I never had to see that again, but I know you will be in my house again in a month, or perhaps six, eating a cheese cracker or a cocktail shrimp and making everyone nervous about that inevitable collision you go around smiling at everyone with as if it were some sort of Cheshire cat set you picked up on ebay - but it isn’t, it’s something that even George Washington would have thrown out.”  But there you are and you keep chewing, dodging at just the right moment, just out of the way when we all thought for sure that tooth upon tooth, or tooth upon lip was inevitable – another near miss, the fall guy of the dental world.  But the truth is, I can’t stand to watch it.  I can’t have you over to eat and I can’t come to your house and now I can’t even watch you talk because all I can do is look at those teeth and put the pieces, the tooth puzzle you call jaw lines, together in my head and suddenly, while you are busy being smug and pompous, you are being political and atheistic, I begin screaming and begging you to stop and pulling at my hair and you think it is because you have made a compelling point, that you have finally driven me over to your side out of your shear logic and superior mental acumen, but really it is my own lucid imagination hearing the terrible squeaking scrape, clatter and crash of your teeth as they finally make mal adjusted trajectories through a nacho and into one another.  I can’t watch. You should try pudding.

February Night

She lives in a painted row house.  It stands out because it is painted a creamy white.  All the other row houses are plain red brick and when you look at them you think, ‘why did they even make a seam or separation between them - why not just start laying bricks and keep on going until you hit the intersection.’  But one building, hers, looks different, but just because it’s painted and the paint helps you see the separation, the demarcation between it and the defined red brick, to the left, to the right – like two inches or less.  Or maybe more.  She lives on the second floor, the only floor with burning lights at two in the morning, the only apartment NOT afraid to keep the shades pulled up, drawn high and open to the world.  She lives on the second floor where the palms grow – the only palms in the inner city of the semi grown up, but desperately ancient city of the Midwest, the Cincinnati, not the Cincinnatus, not the Nati because there are no palms growing in the Nati.  She lives in a second floor apartment in the OTR, in a cream colored, paint saturated building among palms and disintegrating tapestries, sleeping in white billowing taffeta, stretched over oaken slats that mate with her spine like bruised, grating lovers.  She lays, illuminated by incandescent revelry that no one extinguishes, that she doesn’t even know how to shut off -  which always and continuously streams from the windows, even in the daylight when you cannot see it – it is still there, streaming out from the bulbs and tubes, from the second floor where she lives among the palms and ferns - where the ceiling fans always spin, exhaling the same breath that has never left the second floor, that is always in the second floor, that is the same air breathed in by extinct German immigrants.  The same air that lived for a time in their lungs, bringing things into and taking things out of - them – it now does the same to her lungs, to your lungs if you visit, but it never leaves the second floor of the inner city cream painted row house.  It floats amid the palms, ignoring the surplus oxygen they try to contribute.  It swirls past the brightly lit bulbs, past the decaying tapestries, refusing to be stirred or influenced by ceiling fans or the hot constant belch of the forced air furnace.  It stands its ground as it pushes against the wide transparency of the windows.  It does not yield as it sucks the glass, clings to the walls, ignores the door.  Please exhale before you go, leave the air where it belongs, because, you are new to the neighborhood if you are anything less than 151 years old.  She is 151 year old.  Your lungs are now, 151 years old.