Deadra Acosta

July 17 20XX

Bronson’s Saturn

EAT EVERYTHING YOU NEED

I’m thinking when I wasn’t at all a moment ago. It’s back again, in my head.

“What’s this?” I ask. He changed the tape earlier. We just kept going, but not really saying anything now.

“Failure,” he said.

The speaker scuttles a fluorescent tone, in musical ambiguity. “Didn’t you rewind the tape?” Evidently not, but still, it’s different now. Somnambulant guitars slosh, half awake, caught somewhere hopeless, holding a hand out. In this space, the music is the distinction between dream and sleep, with wakefulness cracking on that line in between. And in other words, it makes me feel so too.

Maybe this is how men get after they touch themselves: empty, sticky; looking blankly at the face like it’s not even there; not actually looking but just thinking about looking, regretting later.

It’s like being cut open when he looks at me, and it is unafraid, I can tell. But it doesn’t feel like cheap erotica, or even naive boy fantasy. He doesn’t suggest a subterranean, fevered quality, at least not yet. And he doesn’t even know it when I look at him, what way I am left, like lightning’s remains shot through a cross.

I became a broken branch of the family tree. Being here marks me God’s unworthy specimen, streaking for something that doesn’t want me. I feel like a street peddler, Jezebel the leper cutting herself. And I am sitting in Bronson’s Saturn, hardly not crying.

But really, I’m not anywhere anymore but in the sound, in my head. There is no Bronson Gao, Daddy, none at all. You’re all I got, I’m reminded again.

I remember crying into the shoulder of his t-shirt. I’d hated him until bodily failure, screamed myself into emptiness until, “I love you.” He spat it all over me, as his skin gripped mine, arms of something pulling me in, pulling me down. I can still taste the things we ate. I can still taste your mouth. “Please help me stroke this world to sleep,” Dad.

I have no stake in my own skin. And when he did, I had not waited. Just, it was endless anticipation, never in wanting. All that I miss, rocking shut on my mattress at night, is the bedroom’s body, and the prognosis I watched. The wallpaper’s liver spots, moths in the wool, shame tastes to tell me I’d die, and it’d be worth what.

I don’t remember myself, other than the pelts of dulled fear I call my power. The taxidermy lines my peripheral chasm, what I admire at dark, hovering my hand over a lighter, holding martyrdom. It was me. “Softly licking her to sleep,” the bones of my fourteen-year-old carcass are given a context in the corner. Fungal, I watch.

“I’m goin’ down / To the wonderful life, I’m goin’ down.” I’m here, and that’s the only truth there is. I’ve given my sensations to silence, and now I lay bleeding on your bedsheets, waiting for you to finish your cigarette, holding on to the moment before it starts again. Aunt, Uncle, Bronson, you see the end result is all you see. You don’t see the in-between. You don’t see the moment: of knowing just what you’ve done.

Every one, every stroke is another scar on my limb. To think this is what I always wanted, seated at the dinner table with a smiling woman and a tired, but happy man.

I look in your eyes and see the simulation: “Your face is easy to hate / Looking helpless and sincere.”

Finally, I’ve descended, not knowing how good I had it. I’m going down. I’m goin’ down, I’m going the-fuck-down.

I feel the moisture on my face. I don’t care what happens next anymore. Like fingers, he can put his eyes all over me, like he wants a night in the bedroom, his bare spine reflected in my childhood mirror, hovering.

I’ll probably kill myself tonight.