peshee-eh man-eh

Shila joon
you are my rhythm and blues
in your red cowboy boots
and goddess eyes
from lola leigh to lola laa
make it up pick it up

where’s your passport?

my Atlanta lemur
only one
remember when we drank habibis in the bathtub?
(that was the best night of my life)
i’m lowering the rent in my shoulder blade,wanna

have a look?

Oh Story, you’re a story

and the only one with more identities than me.
I’ll always be your Persian party trick
you make it happen—
there’s magic in your flase eyelashes.

i'll never be jack kerouac

i'll never be jack kerouac
no matter how
much cheap wine i drink but

i think he would agree
that the red port fills the void
but can never fill the empty.

le weekend // flash (non?)fiction

So its sunday morning and I am getting back into 'bed' with a cup of peach mango tea in front of a badly-dubbed lifetime movie about another bulimic middle-class white girl, when I look up to see Nachos in his boxers on the terrace, surveying the scene.

I say 'bed' because these days I've been sleeping on the couch. My room is on the mountain side of the apartment and when the sun starts to rise (4:30 island time) the rays slither through every slit of my shutters and slowly heat up the room like an unsuspecting cattle ant under an 8-year-olds magnifying glass in early August. By 7 AM my skin in covered in sweat and I'm in a cold shower by 9.

So I'm sleeping like a scorned husband in the salon nowadays, which led me to witness, as I said, Nachos -boxer clad- on the terrace. The famous Nachos is a friend of Rapheal (AKA meathead). He is so-named because both me and Anna agree that he vaguely reminds us of movie theater nachos, in the way that they are sinful and irresitible but also a little repulsive. I thought I had seen the last of him seeing as a week before, Raphael, in a bout of guilt or responsibility, told me that we could be friends but not sleep together anymore, in a move I can only imagine was inspired and initiated by his girlfriend- this being a week after he was in my bed lecturing me on 'la révolution sexuelle'. Where's the sexual revolution now?

I guess I should have known better than to believe him because Saturday night around midnight thirty he called me. Apparently it was his birthday and he wanted to invite me to join him, Nachos, and any number of their rugby-playing, massage-giving meathead friends for a night out. He asked about his birthday present, which he was certain was waiting for him chez moi. I declined seeing as I was already sleeping because the night before, friday, there had been a Spanish party down the street.

Spanish parties are infititely cooler than French parties in that the food and music are better and Spanish boys are adorable. The night was too long, however, ending in a sangria-drugged tryst with Vincent from Catalonia, who is writing his masters thesis on some spanish literature hullabaloo. Not to mention that the little sleep we actually achieved was in the bedroom, where, as I mentioned, people from the Sahara come in the summertime to get a little sun.

After the midnight phone call I slept sound in the salon until, with tea in hand and dressed only in my pink polka-dot underwear and matching tanktop, Nachos waltzes in from the balcony, giving me a sly smile with one eyebrow barely raised and grumbles a 'bonjour' on the way to my bathroom where I am sure he used my towel. By this time I am thoroughly confused, knowing that Anna, just as tired as I was, had also fallen asleep after the birthday call.

Minutes later Anna appears from her bedroom, and after dropping Nachos off at Raphael's house, later relays to me that he had called her at 7 AM. Apparently he had fallen asleep at a club in St Pierre and in the meantime meathead and co. all left him there. Finding himself alone and drunk under the rising sun, he figured it would be a good idea to call Anna, finding the temptation of a combination of a ride and possibly sex too good to pass up. So Anna found him in the supermarket parking lot around 8:00 and brought him to the apartment.

She said, 'you should have seen him wandering around the parking lot. He looked just like a lost puppy.'

You can't make this stuff up.

23 is the year of trench coats and berets and shaking hips in seamed stockings, miss mohito says hello and how are the kids? (22 is so apocalyptic)

tu peux m’appeler ta Clara Bow
et je peux t’appeler mon Fred Astaire
si tu porte ton tuxedo,
je commencerai à fumer
(mais dans une façon très féminine)
nous pouvons se disputer comme des américains
tant que nous nous embrassons comme les français.
j’ai envie de mettre les mains sur ton ventre….
enfin, ici, tu veux me montre ?
avec mon accent, c’est un peu difficile de comprendre,
en plus
autour des mecs très charmants,
je deviens nerveuse, mais c’est évident,
non ?
danse !.
je peux pas non plus,
j’ai mal aux pieds, trop d’années en pointe
si tu m’appelle Grace -- je reste
ici, notre royaume, mais danse ,
je t’attend, nue,
enfin, tu….
tu peux… répéter s’il te plaît ?—plaît plaît
désolée,
je suis pas très forte en langues étrangères.
(mais les mensonges, c’est une autre histoire)

..lilla..

Lilla hates the kind of humor that is dredged in misogyny and violence, those kind of jokes that are too ‘cool’ to not find funny. Nazis-gangbanging-a-nun type humor, it’s obligatory to laugh otherwise you seem uptight and too politically correct. “Aren’t we already desensitized enough?” she tries to explain.

She saw a volcano when she was 15. The dried lava flows looked like elephant skin, piled up together, with Lorax trees randomly dispersed. She likes to think the world used to look like that. She dyed her hair black the next year so that people would take her seriously.

Lilla lost her virginity to Tony the same summer that she saw the volcano. He was 19, and she didn’t realize it at the time but seeming attractive to a 15-year-old was scores easier than getting laid in his own age bracket. They were under the boardwalk and Lilla had half a bottle of peach schnapps. She was trying to tell him about elephant skin, and an elephant skin world, but he wasn’t interested.

She thought a lot about elephant skin and Tony’s skin and after a while the two became one memory, especially after he skipped town to do some illegal work in New Mexico. She wanted to show him her black hair, and ask him what to do about the baby; one was just as difficult as the other. Later she thought he wasn’t even that cute.

She moved to New York and always keeps the shutters all closed. Marc, the latest, eats too many boiled eggs and never dusts, but he has nice arms and a nice apartment. He tells racist jokes- she never thinks they are funny.

our place; or- affairs in st pierre

“you are beautiful” he says, Mathieu is his name

i am in the club where i first met you

“are you german?”

you had asked if I wanted a drink, even though I had been checking out your friend

“American” I say

I took a vodka and coke and left christophe to fend for himself

“I can’t believe my eyes” he said.

I can see the chair that we sat on.

“My horoscope today said I would fall in love with a foreigner.”

there is where I first looked into your eyes, your sunken cheeks, your crooked smile.

“How old are you?” I asked. “21” he said.

I told you I teach at the university. you asked what I was studying.

“I don’t believe you” I said. “you can’t be a day over 19.”

I said it again, I don’t take classes, I give classes.

“Horoscopes aren’t always right” I said.

I have to get out of this place, your taste is still in my throat.