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16. Would you rather it be sunny or rainy? & 17. Do you know anyone with the same middle name as you?

Thank you!

16. I’d rather it be rainy. It seems like I’m always the most energetic on rainy and cloudy days. I love it.

17. Nope. I don’t think Tina is a common middle name, but let me know if we have the same middle name!

Send me numbers!

a bird’s haiku

Serenading sky drunken poet in disguise clouds blinded by lies.

© Margaux Emmanuel 

sit on a tree, free

Tagging the streets with trembling hands, afraid he’ll break the lace.

Digging in the wind with trembling hands, knowing he’ll capture my pace.

Flirting with bridges with trembling hands, laughing

he’ll remember this face.

My hands stopped trembling 

it’s a chase

I whispered

the agony of the race.

© Margaux Emmanuel 

watercolors

A failing heart is brushed with the dust of silence

a shadowed mind shudders at a patient blindness

an orphaned violence

the whistle of our thoughts trickle

drip

while I fill the crevices in the canvas

with the remaining paint of your dying lips

for no sane words can describe my heart

sailing these fugitive waves

too strong for art.

© Margaux Emmanuel 

fountain pen leaks

The moon unsheathes its sword, binding our sins and swears to the interlacement of the railroad’s bones. Meanwhile, I am in a train where a furtive moonbeam has dangled off the blade to caress the half of my smile facing the window. The fugitive landscapes that have fallen into time and motion’s arms ask me to look away. I plead them to bring me to the coastal town of last night’s dream where I can inhale air unfamiliar with the term pain, where I can hear the moan of the tide telling me that I am indeed sane.

© Margaux Emmanuel

In the remainder of the tepid alcohol languishing in the flask of your eyes, we drink to the lost silhouette of love, burn our photographs wedged into the yellowed corners of our thoughts. We settle for cemented happiness, contemplating life through its glass corridors where mold is hidden, where I can feel the cracks of our suffering, where I can sense our hands dismembering our own poetry. When empty phrases harrow insomnia, I tape blossoms, breaths of life, to the pages of our unfinished chapters. But the trees’ barks where our initials dangle, imprisoned by a blistering heart, are peeling. I have just realized that flowers wither.

to slip on drunken petals 

© Margaux Emmanuel

You ran away when you were seventeen sleeping weeping in blurry cars and in eerie inns with no address no name trapped in time bordering the highway where you wrote to me poems in Latin stamped from the basement of my mind inspired by a denuded flower whimpering in a glass bottle of Coca-Cola beside a clumsy kitchen sink. You’re a vagabond tragedy a vagabond prodigy dipped in the paint of a raw sorrow quoting Virgil sitting in a bumper car sleepily howling Roman odes at a hollow night sky with swollen knuckles swollen eyes from trying to twist a drain of logic a faucet of amnesia only to find a leak of pain. I see you lying on the thirsty sand your eyes closed your lips apart morose saliva trickling out onto your chin a ripple of water comes to stroke your feet telling you to wake up but you don’t. A broken vinyl scratched from loving too hard.

headache | © Margaux Emmanuel

Empty paving stones, tinted by loose white lace bras’ humid shadows hanging on clothesline twine, run through melancholy second hand bookshops speckled with second hand souls, mostly unshaved musicians trying to find somebody else’s life to live. A bike, chips of fern-green paint flaking off its neck, rust engulfing the bent basket at its head, makes its way through timid rays of sunlight. Adorned with a pilling yellow beanie bordering his eyebrows and an upturned leather jacket tickling his cheekbones, he somehow still feels the aching bed slats pressing into his shoulder blades, still feels the tear-coated steering wheel pressing into his arms at the grocery store parking lot.   His hollow, blistered eyes sown into a purple-skinned mysterious past would make teenage girls silently turn around with throbbing hearts in their muddy stan smiths when he biked by. He would continue to snake through the maroon bricks, not noticing, not wanting to notice. He could vaguely make out, collapsed from the lethargy of our times on a coffee shop terrace, youngsters with thick white socks hiding their calves, sipping paper cup unsugared coffee.  And he would wonder how they could be so happy, or whatever it was they were. He would slow down his pace to take a paracetamol from his pocket. He would let it sit in his mouth. He wouldn’t swallow it. It would just sit, patiently. As he would. He wanted to forget the smell of her letters. He wanted to forget his brother who died at war dishonored. He wanted to close his eyelids, sink into the deep furrows of his forehead. He wanted to feel the shotgun’s barrel pressing against his tongue. He wanted to feel a new color scheme. Until then, he would continue to bike, perhaps forever.

second-hand soul | © Margaux Emmanuel

bath drain

Nine o’clock bath

and I run

my fingers

on the steam’s

ashes

on the mirror

revealing

your

unvaccinated

velvet

daydreams.

My knees

glance out at

unsigned checks

stolen aspirin

spoiled milk

her lipstick’s shards

in your cheeks.

My skin skims

unsent postcards

one-way tickets

to the depths

of your mind

but I missed the flight

every time

I will continue to stare

at the sad

air vents

the antiseptic.

I will continue

to cut my hair

until I won’t feel

your fingertips

knocking

at the auburn 

curls

at the door

of the past

so

do your

lips 

do receipts?

© Margaux Emmanuel

clumsy town boy

Your heart

is stuck

in a long

car ride

edging

an endless

desert

empty

road

in 1973

sitting in

the backseat

reading Kerouac

butter-colored

baseball cap

no watch

timeless

wrist

high school

bomber jacket

covering a

white shirt

a chagrined

blue bra

his

aviator

Ray Bans

sliding down

the bridge

of its nose

listening

to the cassette

of a shattered

existence.

Two years

thousands of miles

away

he’s still

the one

appearing

in the

highway landscapes

ghostlike

you can almost

smell

his cologne

you thought

that you had

written

the last act

of that

tragedy

licked the seal

of that envelope.

But the trunk

is still

full of his

letters

the cursive ink

bruises you

at night

oh

the clumsy

town

boys

they really

mess you up.

© Margaux Emmanuel

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

The diagonal scar swelling  on his cheek shadows the stalemate  of salvation  a glissando  of desire that flew west for the winter away from the tempered light of day. The anacoluthon  of love  trapped in the pillowcase feathers of the  "have you ever been hurt ?" speaks  the demotic language of the pinned knight on the chessboard  of neurasthenia.  His heart writes letters with no  return address  My heart is trembling  with haste. "Nunc scio quid sit amor."

la llovizna comprende | © 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 

women in love

Your face clouds over

when the picture

of the girl

with the red

octagonal

sunglasses

red cheeks

from having recently cried

leaning

on your car

falls out of your wallet

only to remind you

in the sotto voce

of memory

that she kept your

love letters

in a battered copy

of Women in love.

You wonder

if she kept it

she always said

that it was a mistake

to reread the novels

of your youth

Oh, she was a hesitation

You remember

every rhyme

every bite

of the poems

that she wrote

on your lips

for she always said

that you only know

what you feel

once it’s been written.

She was damnation

You remember

seeing the

ink stains

sprawled on the cover

of her

DH Lawrence

in the hands

of someone else

at that

end of the year

garage sale

he was laughing

chewing

his cheeks

but the book

isn’t funny

maybe he was laughing

at your poems

he was laughing

because he doesn’t love her

and he never will

maybe he was laughing

because you are trapped

in those pages

you still live

every curve

every sharpness

of her letters

and she now lives

in the verse of another

he wasn’t laughing.

© 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 

There was this boy, checkered Vans and we played charades in the back of the bus sixteen we sometimes we would always miss it and we would walk into the ring  and he would eat his vanilla ice-cream and our eyes would meet in full contact but I would fight in southpaw; our moves were mirrored but we never managed never dared to really hit.  His sticky chocolate eyes melted onto my black leather gloves and our words took our hearts into a headlock, silently skimming the sides  of every post of his sweet Cupid’s bow with bare knuckles,  untied shoes. One day he just wasn't at the bus stop I waited and waited he called  and said "I took bus fourteen" but I loved him too much and he didn't love me  enough  to sucker punch.

disqualified | © Margaux Emmanuel

thirty percent off

You should go inside

You should see all the pretty girls

You should’ve seen this one, oh boy her-

No thanks,

I just came here for the view

but the percent

wept

sang

in his smile

and betrayed

the slang and meth

hanging in his mouth

the poor lighting

the off-key voice crack karaoke

the interrupted sentences.

Quarter to three am

unfamiliar sheets

biting

married men’s skin

dampened by the nightlight

the droopy eyes

hell’s sigh

the sunlight inching

through the curtains

counter-clockwise

pushed

through the streets

of dawn

neon shards

of billboards

promoting their lives

unnamed bodies

still warm

still moaning

by their side

an ache

an itch

in their thighs

they stain

the pavement

with their silent cries

Is this what it’s like

to be dead,

or are we alive?

hitches a ride

into their minds

they still have

pictures of their kids

in their wallets

along with a string

of unattached numbers

for the occasional hunger

oh, no

they were

thirty percent off

I would’ve never

sunbaked hearts

fall apart

a la carte

but oh,

it doesn’t matter

as long as it stays

in the dark.

© Margaux Emmanuel

She rubbed her hand against her nose, smudging the blood still trickling out of her nostrils onto her index finger and cupid’s bow. She could still feel the outline of his knuckles pressing against her gum. They had left a fresh bruise on her lower cheek and her lip plump in its swollenness. Stiff from pain, she pressed her still moist palms, striped pink from the tight hand wraps, onto the parking lot concrete with a slight wince and attempted to straighten her back. She grabbed the icepack that she had angrily thrown to the floor, tears dripping out of its side from a rip in the blood-stained plastic, and despite the layer of sticky dirt thinly covering it, carelessly slapped it onto her face, her hunger for the cold solace betraying the hot rancour in her eyes. “All I did was make a fool of myself”, she thought as her eyes now woefully crawled towards the gloves, peaking out of a black-cloth gym bag, the ensanguined white flag shining from the timid light of a nearby lamppost. She laid her right hand onto her stomach, slightly discerning her drained muscles through the sticky shirt. Not a soul was in sight at this hour. She even leaned her ear onto the cement, awaiting the low grumble of some distant car, only to be confronted with a bitter silence. She was eventually lying on her side in the middle of the empty parking lot, the breeze leaving a cool impression on her humid hair, as her fingers danced, almost detached from her body, on a worn white line that had been painted onto the cement long ago. The blood from her nose slowed to a sideward drip. Her mind was elsewhere; she wallowed in the mud of her thoughts as she attempted to recall the intricacies of his face, a temptation that she could not resist. When she began to remember the rugged slit in his eyebrow and the grin of his pale green eyes, a violent nausea threatened her throat. She was on her knees, her arms pressed against the cold ground as she dryly coughed. “I need to get up”, she muttered to herself. She pushed herself up with the remaining strength in her muscles and arose with a tired lurch. She noticed a gas station sign, blinking red, bleeding into the blurred serenity of the night, floating in the darkness. She grabbed her bag and her leather gloves and, puffing her chest out, made her way into the moonless night.

fight | © Margaux Emmanuel

the drinks are on me

Past midnight, at a rusty bar, a young man conversing the outcome of a wrestling match. Quite charming, really: three shirt buttons undone, smooth grin of “the drinks are on me”. I heard the conversation make some turns, some more abrupt than others. The more drinks hit the counter, the more his words left tire tracks. He was soon boasting his fine palate for Japanese whiskey and saying “I saw scenery of the sort in Kyoto back in 2004”, “Hey Jim, here’s a quarter, go play me a song on the jukebox will ya”. 

He was in the booth in front of me, but I couldn’t see his face; I only caught a glimpse of his slicked-back brown hair. Maybe I had one or two, two or three drinks myself. Maybe it was a little too dark. I didn’t usually go to bars back then. 

“Wait, play that again, I’ve heard the tune before, just don’t quite remember from where”. 

A waitress, still bearing the traits of adolescence but old enough to look at you straight in the eye, came around. 

“Most people call me Connor. But you don’t look like ‘most people’. So call me whatever you want, it’ll do.” 

Connor. The way he pronounced his name, revealing his Boston accent, still rings in my ears. I still mouth it to this very day, letting my jaw slightly drop and my tongue press against the back of my lower teeth, just to make me remember that, despite the drunken haze the moment was soaked in, it was not a dream. It was something concrete in the stupor of it all. 

Soon enough, they were all loudly singing, their arms enlaced around their necks, swaying back and forth, tears swelling in their eyes. I watched, amused, possibly sipping the foam of yet another beer. 

And that’s when everything started to slow down. I laid my head against the wooden panel on my left side and let my heavy eyelids close. 

“We’re closing”; I was awoken, dazed, from the deep trance of a dreamless sleep. 

The bar was empty: only the manager, a heavily-built middle-aged man with tattoos covering his neck was standing right in front of me, slightly frowning. 

I rose from my seat, silent from the grogginess. As I was about to make my way out of the booth, I noticed a piece of paper, on the table, in the corner of my eye. Unsure if it was mine or not, I grabbed it and shoved it in my back pocket. 

I took the bus home but got off one stop too early. I stumbled my way through the streets, occasionally letting out a chuckle for no particular reason. The streets were bare; the town was dead. Ten minutes later, after fumbling with the keys and crawling in the stairs, I fell, fully clothed, onto my bed and fell back asleep.  

It was 4 o’clock in the afternoon, I was sitting down, my hand laying on the countertop, watching the coffee slowly drip, every drop tolling in my head. The piece of paper that I had taken the night before was in my right hand; it was a phone number. 

7911-75246 written in slanted black ink.

I grabbed my phone, turning it in my right hand indecisively. A few minutes later, the number was dialled; here we go again.

© Margaux Emmanuel

The way your eyes would bite my neck during the cigarette break when there was nothing between us and the moon except for the smell of stale tobacco.

© Margaux Emmanuel