your old ways

       We had only been seeing each other five months before we got married on a trip to Las Vegas. At Caesar's Palace, we blew a thousand dollars in the casino below our hotel suite, high on complimentary drinks and white rabbit pot we'd smoked in our bathroom upstairs. At a drive-through chapel with a huge roadside neon sign, we made it official and when we kissed, it was more with our tongues and our teeth than with our mouths. His hands in my hair, my hands over his shirt--a reminiscently animalistic, symbiotic pose. Now after five more months, there's nothing that can level me like his hand on the slippery skin underneath my skirt.

       He hits me deep South, right above the garters and between my thighs, ripe with memory. Crawls like a buzz up and down my spinal cord, sinking his insidious fingers into all my hot spots like a disease until I'm nothing more than a marionette in my smeared eyeliner and a messily torn dress. The vicious uppercut of his hipbones, my cutthroat fingernails and nothing else but the noises we make. We leave each other bruised for days, purpled shoulderblades and blue-blackened hips, and the images we leave behind on the mirrored ceiling are slow to fade.

       This is a violent union, never a tender affair. He's stapled my shape to every wall of the apartment and I've been on my knees in manipulation more times than I can count. Glasses have shattered, the dead bodies have piled up, and now we're swimming through the undertow of our sins. Watch as the skeletons in the closet shake and one by one the walls fall away like exhaled smoke.

       Anything now. He's taking anything he wants.