Scraps from My Bathroom Stall

DREW KALBACH

Our methods became clean. Slaughtered pigs hung hoof-first from the showerhead. The tumbled teeth and red-dot mustache struggled to form numbers. I have my own tricks that involve the high school teacher's haircut and her curriculum on the violent sexual fetishization of hand puppets. Kelsey was your television.

For years the snow melted into January. For years I stalked soldiers on the internet. Even Kelsey should know the Heimlich maneuver. Her dangled uvula earrings smelled like furr. Crawling into each other we learned about masculinity.


For years you settled down the hall in a hammock and jean shorts. Now we learn about psychopaths and mock-stabbings on the subway. Our white suits are stained and sweating with winter. For years unmatching socks hurt my stomach.


Never mind my lack of verbalization; I'm etching my genitals into the sandbar outside of Pizza Hut. She, in Pittsburgh, grows pruney from hotel Jacuzzi and stays rioted long enough to order room service from a payphone. The other girl confessed herpes. I lay myself into whale whores. They are blubber, the crying of which was stale. The other girl begged through the ventilation. Kelsey was busy being gagged and loved as I force fed myself old fornication magazines. I was bored in a body. My hand was bruised on a boat. We snuck spiked dinner plates through customs. Kelsey stayed behind. His dick widened. Her fist first gripped grey skin last night after soaking her feet in soda suds. It was sticky enough to be exciting, but not enough to keep the lights on. She keeps cameras in her closet and film in her furniture.


The drawers opened, her legs tattooed in green, some girls arguing outside the bell tower. I watched her beg the doors open. I felt like a subway train stuck on a curve. I tremble for my binky. I convulse for waves. I felt Kelsey's claw hand on my cock scraping the hair, the bumps, the knobs of knotted muscle. Into the hell of her mouth-- bathwater scrapings, strands of dark red hair covering the drain. My feet drip on bloodstained towels. Thick clotted mess in the trashcan. Kelsey's femur broken in three places. The girl in a leg-cast climbing stairs. I hold doors out of obligation. I felt her candles slide through a window. Me on my back and six bluebirds pecking at my nipples. Her convoluted fingernails, her mixed-up eyebrows, the floodlights sputtering like a whale. Somewhere her tongue is bleeding into mine.


Our sisters build the next tree house for stray cats. Cuteness only gets us so far, especially with infected earlobes. My class is interested in religious rape and long lines outside Chinese convenience stores. Xenophobia became our favorite ice-cream flavor. She wears bear skins to bed, liquorices thongs in the shower. The sinning homeless mock my ejaculate’s volume. The sinning homeless hang banners of ape intercourse in most large cities. Her teeth are the sinning homeless. My favorite game is hide the Frisbee. We took turns shopping for used sex toys and ended up with herpes instead. Babies are born to the sinning homeless and are lost in the maelstrom of their stench. She lies in bed and licks the ceiling tiles. Her hands flop like Egyptians. The sinning homeless wage war on evangelicals. My pornography name is the sinning homeless. The sinning homeless sit outside of her dorm room window and smoke crack until the morning. Her hair was chopped into pieces. I am chopped into pieces, but in a ticklish way. The sinning homeless fry earthworms and sell them to tourists. Without the sinning homeless I would never have gotten her drunk enough to kiss me. She was aggressive until we hit the bed. Afterwards, she moaned for the sinning homeless to break into her closet and to wrap their sweat-covered bodies in her clothing.


My mother's grass died last winter. My father hates growth. I've seen every movie about third world countries and slender Dalmatians. The venture capitalist keeps tabs on our old high school principal.


You are sloppy in tuna. You are writhing in tomato juice. I feed my dog your leftover makeup. The venture capitalist drains your tear ducts. If you would lend me some socks we could live together under the boardwalk. The venture capitalist stole my jar. The venture capitalist took you on a boat and threaded your hair through his fishing pole.


Stop breaking babies over ironing boards. Stop breastfeeding Kelsey with a bottle opener.


There are enough slanted penile implants for everyone. Stop shaving your testicles for teamsters.


The doorman fears faucets and nudity. Stop paying homage to rapists. Stop playing piano with empty windows. I walked through her snot-spun hair salon and fainted.


Kelsey smells my newly minted dementia. The doorman stopped traffic with his elbows. Stop pretending this isn't sick.


I rode her through a windstorm and she whined like a ferret. Stop with the poetic pretension to pornography.


Stop the little girl in my basement from leaving me for Kelsey. Stop reacting to emergency-service calls. The lines are dead. The little girl in my basement cut the chords, pulled the plugs, clogged my drain and left needles in my sheets. I wanted fun. I got crabs instead. Stop laying inert, there are little girls in my basement that need candy-corn and hugs.



My body was built for cold weather and cancer. I'm sweating the first of my semen. She let me grace her hand with a mock-up of my genitalia.

Afterwards the doorway was full of body-sized mountains looming over crotches. It was the morning and it was gross. The Oh God got me out of bed. She washed her hands with turpentine. When that didn't work, she peeled off a layer of skin. Without the tank top she was a tanned girl in a purple bed waiting to be spread. My head is a jukebox of child pornography soundtracks and old sitcom laughter. I was emasculated once and I loved it. There are questionable parts to my genitalia: knobs, dials, gauges, steam-fitted pressurized read-outs, rabbit ears. Weird girls think I'm boring. Normal girls think my obsession with homoerotica is serial-killer material. My mother cancels doctor's appointments as often as I masturbate. Weird girls find my logic boring, though it involves frogs having sex with steel-toed boots. The inanimate object of my dreams is sitting outside my room, buzzing like a vibrator, bleating like a llama. Weird girls like music but vomit when I sing. I wear extra coats to make up for my Auschwitz-like frame. My knees are knobby and beautiful. Weird girls need tall men. Flannel doesn't do it for me anymore, not since the cowboy stole my little sister. She is somewhere in Austin breeding ponies and learning to rope like a native. Weird girls find penis references tasteless. Weird girls find poetry as fun as fresh ink. My only excuse was smeared. Somewhere on a boat in a bay my little sister makes love to a cowboy. Weird girls create erotic stories from my poetry. I want to be put in my place. I want nature to burn like wicker cabinets in a furnace. I find beauty in concrete and plaster. Weird girls lick flowers. Weird girls lick my feet, suck my toes, and run their fingers through my pubic hairs. I lied; I'm too busy playing asshole to answer my phone.


My mother brought me into this world;
the CIA will take me out of it.


Weird girls find my lack of self-confidence sexy like getting sprayed with muddy water or listening to a toilet flush for hours. The truth is, I sold my little sister to an oil tycoon.


Now she sits in his office and screams whenever the phone rings. There she is now. Weird girls take photographs of my filthy kitchen and laugh. The phone is ringing. I'm somewhere on a grassy beach hoping for a compliment. I'm somewhere listening to a girl scream while the phone rings. My mother refused to settle; as a result, child services took me away. My little sister is happy with the oil tycoon. Weird girls like money and ten-gallon hats. I quoted an entire book and left it at that.



The Body Hangnail (Limited Edition Edition)

Somewhere someone is smelling dirty underwear. Kelsey

on her bidet, me in the closet trying on a monkey suit.
I have fingers inside the lake, swirling.
The suits they wear on boats gather sea-salt
and the teenage clerks hiding behind the fax machine
whisper come here come here and blow bubbles
like brontosaurus skulls.



I refer to my penis in the royal We. We think you need to gargle. We think you need to come help us hang this portrait. The portrait: you in a Speedo holding eighteen pounds of sausage.


I hold you accountable for the fun parts of the Holocaust. We need some time alone inside the teenage clerks. We need the bubble-baths bursting onto the scene like a one-eyed parrot into an evergreen tree. There was Christmas and there was you, dangling like an earring from the ass of a cop-car. You looked beautiful in spit. I imagine you in a spandex choker and we are pleased. I have chest pain, but no fever. You stole my flu medication to fuel your monosaturated fat addiction. I have a hangnail and you are rusty inside my shower.


I held her breath while she peed. She came. She came here. I came
on the toilet seat and wiped with bleach. Thank God
for the bible pages, thin enough to smoke, long enough
to bleed into her hair.


Versatile verses, little rivers of dry skin on her left breast my right. My tongued ideas keep breezing in my heavy chest, keep getting caught in her perfect white underwear. The semen stained stuff went home. The church down the street worships black Jesus, the accurate Jesus, the Jesus that keeps staring at me in my sleep. She's waiting for pants that won't stick to her hips. She's waiting for hands to slip from under her bed like cockroaches and to scuttle away from the light. I put most things in my mouth. I avoid lunch. My symbol is a lion. It stands for blatant carnivorous intent. It stands for hair and fear and loneliness, in that order. I had hamlet for breakfast. I had children wrapped in loin cloths throw books through my windows. I am plate glass. My wife's first name is Jolly. The toilet flushes through her abortions. She came through seaweed to get through my dinner party. There isn't enough room for my balls with my ego this large. She prunes her own porches and plays badminton in the back with my high school yearbook. Back then I ran in woods from lumberjacks jacking off onto stumps. Back then I knew she'd choke my slowly in a closet, one hand over the knob, the other wrapped in a sock and sliding down my throat. It felt like Christmas. It felt like frying onions in bacon fat. It felt like that girl leaning against a refrigerator, her eyes squinting, her hair ready to fall out and fuck.



My thesis is a silent film about post-immigrant women sleeping in tents.
My thesis is about my deep love for women and my recurring dream
about being swallowed by an enormous vagina.
It takes me like a snake takes a rat and I melt in her acid-walls.
I melty-melt, melty-melt. I melt in her acid-walls.