Ally Malinenko
Ally Malinenko has been published by Alembic, Blind Man's Review, Breeding Ground, Small Brushes, Whisky Island Magazine, The Unknown Writer, HeART, Mad Poets Society, Posey and Jack Magazine. Her first book of poems entitled, The Wanting Bone, was published by Six Gallery Press in 2008. She is currently working on a novel for children. Ally lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two cats.
Garbage Day It's bulk garbage day in Brooklyn and I can't help, in the rain, balancing my umbrella, to look at what people throw away. The wood expanding in the wetness, warping and popping. The broken loveseats, exposed springs like ribcages, the bones and torn flesh, hunks of foamcore, lean against the soggy couch pillows, like little city walls protecting the unwanted. These things that people throw away. And then suddenly, a door opens and she appears, red streaked hair, pulled away from her face, pale, open, clear. She is wearing tight black jeans and giant boots and she springs from the doorway, her closed umbrella in her hand like a sword and with a wide gait, hopping between the raindrops, jumps to the waiting car and is gone. But she leaves a trail, ghostly recreations of her birth from the doorway and I can see them coming one after another. Her heartbreak is minutes away and I know that but I want so badly to touch her hair, to sit in the car and listen to her talk, her white teeth and bright eyes. Standing there in the rain, I can feel my weight, I think of my rough soles, the skin on my feet cracked and peeling, little ridges carved like canyons, my brittle hair, my tired knuckles, hands that have felt lover's flesh, hands that write poems, hands that bury, hands that clean out apartments, hands with too many bones in them a universe in the cells of my scars. I think of my belly, the little residue cat scratch scars of surgery, my blood sluicing through veins that expand and contract, my muscles torn and healed, a whole world inside a little city. Just me and the bulk garbage, on 3rd Avenue in the rain, wet and expanding. These things people throw away. The Ninth Apartment Listening to the zip of the key sliding into the lock and the smell of the rain outside with the windows that have been locked all day the cats greeting me in the evening light of this room, I realized this is my ninth apartment. Nine sets of white walls, spotted with fingerprints and newsprint stains. Nine floors I don't sweep often enough. Nine different cabinets filled with the unused baking sheets, bed sheets, and towels. Nine clogging showers growing mildew in the tiles. Nine ways to line up the couch and end tables, the gathering and keeping of objects. And that's in about twelve years, which doesn't seem as bad when I think of the cities I have lived in, the cars that died on the side of the road, and the pets that have come and gone the fucking, bending, cooking, bleeding, the surgery, driving, the study, testing, the work and quitting. The turns this planet has made, hanging as if weightless, rolling lonely in all that quiet darkness, dotted with the business of our ant lives, the times I have hauled this mattress out of another truck, through another door, onto another floor, and collapsed there with you. Still you. Always you. Manic Words, like extra teeth that I am choking on second this time. The ice in the glass, is rolling in the amber scotch like a mosquito from another lifetime and I'm gripping it so hard I can feel my hand starting to cramp. My eyes are locked on yours watching the wrinkle in your brow come together and apart a tide, or possibly a sea change of your thoughts I pace the floor moving like a haunt from one room to another, My ears hear the chatter of what I am, this woman, enraged. Demanding you to see the difference between the court composer and the genius wailing about the sea of failure that I would happily drown in rather than the pittance of his sour lifeboat. Things I want so desperately to believe. And I am gone, adrift in my own madness, manic and feeling more alive than I have in ages, I can hear the blood pumping in my ears and for a second I am that girl, again, before I come back down, sleep in the next morning and return to the grey pallor a shadow of my former self. And darling, this cycle, these days they have seemed endless and I am pushing this rock uphill as far as I can, thinking to myself that at least if I fail, it will still belong to me, carved from the bones of this ribcage, soaked in the hot sticky blood of me. Like the car crash, decades ago and the beaded glass, the smashed hood, my old lover looking somehow peaceful trapped in that wreckage. I think I started bleeding that day, and it's taking all these long years to finally die. |