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Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 3825 Registered: 11-1998 |
Honorable Mention Low Rent Graeme Mullen At 2 am, I saw a man stumble from the tunnel out onto the station platform. Grey sack over his shoulder, crazed rat hair beard, a kind of ruined Santa Claus, creeping from a sideways chimney; He must have timed his exit with the late night train schedule. When I got in you stroked my cheekbones, each finger hard and slender, like a poker for coals. “People live down there,” you said, almost warmly, as if saying something like that was comforting. You led me by the hand from the kitchen. We shivered and had sex on the tiny floor of the bedroom. For just a moment, from a window across the alley I saw the face of a small Mexican kid, and a plastic toy tuba in his mouth. He was staring at us, eyes large as baubles and glowing blue from the light of a television. Afterwards, I kept looking across the alley. He was gone, but while you slept I thought I could hear tuba squeaks, and our roaches fucking in the closet, the sound of their tiny black shells clacking in the dark like pairs of castanets. |
