Caressing A Guitar, A Toothpick, Whose Frail Wood Had Been Bitten Into Far Too Many Times,submerging

Caressing a guitar, a toothpick, whose frail wood had been bitten into far too many times, submerging from between her lips, she tried to capture into the net of melody the feeling of nothingness that crawls into your consciousness when the sun has gone down. With some strands of hair escaping from a tight pony-tail, she slightly hit the instrument’s wooden body, feeling the frustration in her finger tips. She laid the guitar down on the worn carpet, that had suffered too many coffee stains and lied down on her steel-framed bed. The mattress had always been a little too hard. A ray of moonlight escaped from the curtains to obliquely rest on her face. And she sighed.  She could vaguely hear some voices outside. It was too late for them to sneak out of sober lips. She got up and leaned on the windowsill. She noticed a grey car, beaten by time and by carelessness. The headlights almost seemed to be sulking. A smirk etched itself on her face; the loudest voice came from by far the tallest of the three, shirtless, his boney ribs piercing through his pale skin. Their faces and words were a blur. A beer in his unsteady hand, he was leaning against a lamppost and would occasionally burst into a wild laughter. The second one was sitting inside the car, holding a cigarette in between his fingers, the small red fuse floating in the obscurity, the summer night’s breeze slightly pushing the smoke down the block. His legs were dangling out from the leather seats. A Supertramp song was playing on their car’s radio, and he was singing along in an off-key croaky voice, sometimes interrupted by a series of stray giggles. The last one caught her eye. A yellow and white baseball shirt that brought color’s pulse to the shades of the night. Sprawled on the lawn, his slick black wet hair was planted in the grass, his hemmed jeans overgrowing onto the pavement. The darkness wasn’t thick enough to hide his eternal beer-stained grin. She had seen him before. Or maybe she wished to have seen him before. She could imagine the shudder going through her body when he would have taken her by the hand and dragged her through the crowd of a breathless bar. Then, he would have turned around. He would have asked her for a smile. Their glances would have met for a little too long. He would have conjugated her eyes in the language of his soul. It would have been too right. She would have left. Suddenly, she opened the window: “The fuck you think you’re doing? It’s fucking four in the morning for God’s sake!” she screamed. She had her dad’s tongue. Somewhere in those words was hidden, even really well hidden, a hint of playfulness. They all turned around towards her, gawking in surprise. She had her mom’s eyes.

rendez-vous | © Margaux Emmanuel

bullet eclipse

an asylum for doubt

a saturated drought 

where your eyes spiral down

my arteries

unspoken words amble upon a shard 

of reason

of treason 

inoculation

against melancholia

palpitations

holding hands with dementia

I can now hear 

the moans of hysteria

 © Margaux Emmanuel

close the door on your way out

At night, her grey eyes faintly glistening in the light of a row of lampposts, she stood in the shadow of a suburban cul-de-sac front porch. She mouthed with a grin, in the language of cigarette smoke, the words he would pronounce, his back resting upon an orange steel locker. She’d usually roll her eyes and answer:

Well, that’s very nice. Now, be a dear and close the door on your way out.

She chuckled thinking about it. He didn’t know that, afterwards, she’d lock herself in the bathroom stall, the no man’s land where the wandering soldiers, enslaved by dreams with no perspective would carve the truth with their bitten bitter tongues. And oh boy the profanity. She’d sympathize with the blistering paint of sin while running her fingers over the walls’ scars and tattoos, let their meaning soak her fingertips. She liked it. But did she understand it? She once saw:

If only we could all love.

This sentence creeped back to her with the small-town breeze, seeping into her skin. She put out her cigarette against the shadowed brick wall and sat back on the patio chair. She noticed how rusty the metal was. Maybe it had always been that way.

She wanted to write a play. Not a famous one that would make the Hollywood actors drool, but one of those eighty-cents coffee stained and dog-eared garage sale plays that you’d buy out of pity and out of a tingling curiosity for the literary pariahs. The sort that receives a scattered applause, the actors timidly bowing in response. But it would be about the caesuras of the heartbeat of this town. It would be about the dark blue teenage dreams.

Her eyes wondered to the cigarette ashes laying on the floor, intently staring at her. She smiled in approval to her thoughts, got up, and went back in.

© Margaux Emmanuel

sandpaper

Lining up

empty

soft drink

bottles

on the

windowsill

of a

dented heart

peering at

the streets

of silence

discolored

by daylight

you remember

a checkered

red and white

picnic cloth

flattened

burnt

grass

screeching

underneath

an orange tree branch

dipping in

a timid

foamless

ocean

sky

his honey skin

melting in the tide

pruney words

kisses

a chronic daydream

he never

draws hearts

with sidewalk chalk

but his initials

are sown

into the collar

of your reverie

you’re the 

dissociative

teenager

that can’t help

but miss him so.

© Margaux Emmanuel

From that angle, the beer bottle glimmered in its green light. She was shaking as she was on the floor, desperately seeking comfort in rubbing her finger against the bottle's rim.  "For... fuck's... sake!", she yelled, letting the back of her throat burn and slamming her fist against the wooden floor, its surface dampened by tears. She took a stressful sip of beer, hoping it would soothe her strained throat and she let out a nervous, almost maniacal chuckle. She tightly held her knees against her breasts, muttering, out of breath,  "I wasn't supposed to know, I wasn't supposed to know, I wasn't supposed to-", her sentence interrupted by a forceful sob. She dug her face into her arms, her skin sticky from tears.  "Fuck...you", she whispered into her arms. "Fuck you!", she screamed, at nobody, at everybody, lifting her head to violently bang it against the wall supporting her back, a delicious spasm of pain massaging her skull at every thud. "You...promised", she said softly in a tired voice cracked by the violence of her sadness.  She had a sudden desire to throw the glass bottle that she had been holding in her hand, to hear it, watch it, shatter into pieces. Oh, how it would send a second of euphoria down her spine, but she was too weak; she let the bottle drunkenly roll out of her hands and onto the floor, out of her reach. She wouldn't dare to let her eyes rest for the image would tint the darkness of her eyelids.  She grabbed her phone, dialed the only number that she knew by heart.  "179-789-280", she chanted with a little laugh.    "Alex" "Yes" "I thought that you had... like blocked my number", she said, getting up to grab the bottle. She brought it to her bitter lips even though it was empty. She blew into it.  "How many? "How many what?" "Bottles have you had" "Come on Alex...Doesn't matter...I'm calling you because he of course didn't fucking stop" "It would’ve been more of a surprise if you said that he had" He was driving; she could tell by the nonchalance and calmness in the tone of his voice and by the impatience of every single one of his replies, as if he wasn't really paying attention, as if he had been in this situation much too many times before and he was now replying with coldness to the habitual.  "He... had promised", she said as she felt the fingers of emotion enlace around her throat. “What do you want me to do?” “Alex, you knew him better than any-“ “I’m sorry, I just can’t. I'm not some hotline” “Don’t say that to me you fucking little bastard” She heard the car door slam, a caesura in the conversation. “Well, you want people to be honest with you and I’ll tell you right now that I can’t deal with this, okay? Before taking care of him, take care of yourself; you sound pretty fucked up yourself.” She heard the sound of the sole of his shoes hit the cement. He probably wore expensive black ones, polished until some kid’s hands ached. She hesitated; they both knew very well which gun she was about to fire. “Okay,” she said meekly.  “but you know very well what happened to Raymond. Lost some sleep there, didn’t you?” Oh, she knew how to hit a nerve. The rhythmic click clack of his leather shoes abruptly stopped.  She could hear the quiver of his breath translating the pain inching onto him as she pronounced those words. “Listen here Quinn, I-“ “You know where to find him”. She hung up. She had said enough.

179-789-280 |  © Margaux Emmanuel 

What do you think?”, he asked in that raspy voice of his, an unlit cigarette between his teeth, the “-k” firmly pressed against his palate in an assertive manner, while unscrewing a burnt-out lightbulb. She was sitting on the windowsill, only wearing his dark blue Lacoste polo shirt, unbuttoned. Her back was towards him but she could feel his every move, she knew that he would have that slight habitual scowl resting on his face and that he would mutter “shit” under his breath any second now, realizing that the lightbulb didn’t fit. “Shit”, he whispered. There it goes. “About that book of yours?”, she finally answered. She could sense his head’s nod, he was too busy to notice that she wasn’t facing him. She slowly brought her naked legs, covered in a thin layer of goosebumps from the chilly morning air, back into the apartment. He was standing on the old chair, the straw seat deforming from his weight, a dozen lightbulbs at the chair’s feet, slightly rolling back and forth, back and forth, from the uneven floorboards. His head was a harvest of untamed blond curls that he had never quite grown out, tickling the back of his shirt’s collar. He had those green-blue marshland eyes that would remind her of those times when she used to swim in the dark green creeks with the small-town kids. But then, suddenly, you had to quickly jump out to run after the ice-cream truck’s music, the water dripping off your wet body, tracing your steps on the concrete pavements. You would never quite see the truck, you could only hear it; you had to trust the melody. He hadn’t known her back then.   “What do you want me to think about it?”, she inquired with a slightly flirtatious grin after a long, reflective pause.  He let out a small laugh, still fiddling with the lightbulbs. “I… want you to think that it captures the beauty of your touch”, he said in an almost mocking manner, his eyebrows rising as he pronounced those words.  “That doesn’t really mean anything does it?”, she replied with a perplexed smile. “It doesn’t. You need to understand that you aren’t a muse; all of the sentences of my book are already written in the crevices of your skin.“ He was silent after that. "Well, you could do better then.

water sizzling on the concrete | © Margaux Emmanuel