my father who was a butcher would come home with slabs of meat tucked under his arm tied with twine that was a stale pink. my mother would avoid kissing him until he cornered her against the kitchen sink and she had no choice but to press her lips tightly together into a grimace that wished he would die. he would then turn and find me in the dining room doing my homework and place his thick but impossibly tender hands on my shoulders and lean on me the weight that his hips like tree barrels upheld the entire day. my sister yelped when his head suddenly filled the space above the bassinet and he laughed plumes of the cigar he just smoked outside before coming into our apartment. every night was like this save for the weekends when he took us to coney island, riding the train and i stared out the window at other apartment buildings that looked harsher than ours. he always forced me onto rides that turned me green and slapped me on the back laughing whenever i threw up between vendors selling hotdogs and cheap rubber souvenirs. these were the things i thought of as we buried him, the funeral home ushers pushing a waterfall of flowers off beneath the casket and men much bigger than him in construction boots lowered the corpse into the soft wet earth.

disheveled and quite drunk, he stumbles to the couch fingering his nose. somewhere he’s left his cigarettes and although he doesn’t know quite where, his finds his lighter and starts flicking it in the dark to find them. of course, they’re underneath the coffee table, rumpled and he’s quite sure they’re not the same ones he bought earlier in the day. lighting the first of undoubtedly many, definitely an old pack, stale and rough, he exhales and falls heavily onto the couch. it was supposed to be his big night out, his wife having taken his sister-in-law out to a surprise bachelorette party, but since he didn’t know the groom, he wasn’t invited to the corresponding bachelors. that was alright though, he never quite felt comfortable around strippers, always stared at the game playing above the girls’ heads whenever his friends dragged him to a strip club. and honestly, he was annoyed with the way other men would paw and gaze at these women: there was something passionless and disturbing in their eyes as if the women weren’t really there at all.

blech

in the distance, there is an old woman clipping coupons from the sunday paper, her cat nestled by the window sill. a man and a woman herding their two boys into a minivan for a laborous trip to the mall. another man arguing on the phone with his ex-wife about her new paramour and their daughter while the game plays silently on his tv. a teenage girl tip-toeing about her house, sneaking a bottle of rum into her room for tonight’s party while her parents sleep in. a counter-man in the corner deli handing over change to a woman he had a crush on in high school that doesn’t remember him. a bus driver who regrets taking on a double-shift today but needs the overtime because her husband, a mechanic, still hasn’t found a job. an executive awkwardly getting dressed in a hotel before taking the next flight home for the weekend. a council woman taking photographs with her constituents while her assistant jots down their grievances. a pedophile driving slowly by an empty playground two towns over from where he lives. a police officer thinking about the young girl he caught offering herself behind the industrial park just after he started his shift this morning. and a young man not old enough to drink boarding a bus off to war after having kissed his newly wed wife goodbye.

rancid and rapid, spoiled and soiled, his underwear wrapped around his ankles, biting his own knuckles, his faced shoved against the tiled wall, his lips smeared while being pumped from behind, did he ever fuck her like this, in a bathroom stall while her husband was at work, did it feel this good, her husband now fucking him the way he always wanted to fuck this man’s wife in her ass, and the husband grunts, did you fuck her like this, and his eyes tearing he gasps, no, never, and her husband grabs hold of his hair while reaching over and grabbing his dick, yanking the hair and squeezing his manhood as the husband thrusts even deeper, and he finds himself clenching his teeth because it’s as if the head of her husband’s cock is pushing his own erection further outward, making him even harder, he never had imagined it could be like this, he thought he was going to die in this man’s hands and here he was panting, catching his breath, impossibly hoping to catch every drop of her husband’s cum.

take a razor and tuck it between the gums and the inside of your lips, just underneath the nose and cut across, short steady strokes, making your way past the molars, prying your thick fingers inbetween the gumline and the pink slick insides of your mouth, and work your way down and around, saliva and blood sticky down your forearms, you look like you’re flossing, both hands crammed in there, mouth agape, top teeth shiny, slightly yellowed and outlined in red, cutting, working, around and down the inside of the jawline, bottom teeth flooded and crooked, tugging the bottom lip to get to the inside just before the chin, switching hands and back at it again, a little more unsure now with the left, again to the molars, the muscle holding the jaw together giving some resistance, and up and back to where you started.
you drop the razor into the sink, pausing before the mirror, then take both hands to your bottom lip, and pull down.

the knife in your hand, a set of teeth pressed deeply into someone’s shoulder. the hand around your neck, the nails along their spine. the cruel word heard in a moment of passion, the spit in your face before you leave. the pinch in your lungs as you run, the pinch of the needle as it breaks the skin. the despair of abandonment, the ache of mourning. the cradle, the bed, the grave. ultimately you cannot escape: inflicting and being inflicted upon, by your hand or someone else’s.
live and rejoice: at least you fucking feel everything.

we’re so used to hearing him, the man in the parking lot, the one with the boils on his feet and the lice in his hair. we’re so used to seeing him as he trudges by us, rusty shopping car rife with cans and plastic shopping bags, grunting as he goes along on three good wheels. we’re so used to spitting on him as it suited us when he asks for spare change. what we weren’t used to was setting him on fire, fifth story item on the evening news, between the president elect and this year’s hottest selling toys.