The 27 Club Has a Good Marketing Department
K writes, under eggs and tampons while we brag about moving anywhere but
another corn basin. Sexy, especially in this economy, but K says we are in
our 30s now and too old to kill ourselves and too broke to afford the kind
of drugs that would make it painless. We’ve spent our checks on plane
tickets to weddings on diamond cut lawns in New Hampshire. K loathes the
bride. I don’t know the groom. We google “Roth IRA” and “retirement
age” and rub our eyes. Somewhere on a stratus cloud Jimi Hendrix gets
blown by an angel-I think-or maybe smokes a blunt while cutting zinnias
for a bouquet. I stir the slow oats on the stove. We both hold onto the wet,
writhing body of gender, our hands like our fathers, as big as our mother’s
faces-though we’ve never felt like proving it. A simple truth percolates and
burns off the electric stovetop: you cannot fuck people you want to be and
become them. Still some nights they ask me to come lie on their chest and
hold them down in their body. Some nights they’re Janis breathing into the
beige hotel phone. Some nights they’re Amy in the sequin dress shocking
the dark in lascivious pearls of light.
Infidelity and Other Cryptids of the Mississippi River Basin
In a third smoke session of the night sort of way I ask him
what’s the worst thing he’s ever done. He searches me for the
fish hook, says he was unfaithful-a few times-to the first girl he
loved. He waits, maybe for me to punch his teeth in or a smash
cut to the credits like in the artsy films that used to play at the
Sundance before it was the AMC 6. The honey locusts yellow
and strip naked in the center of the green city. A fresh stretch
of asphalt heats and cools and heats until it gravels under the
weight of a small car. The body of my lover curls in on itself,
a caterpillar slipping its insides, an ecstatic chrysalis. We make
love in a room so quiet the hiccups of involuntary vowels rise
and lie like smoke in the mouth of a matte black ceiling.
Matti Powers is a writer, illustrator and comic artist from Clinton, WI. Their illustrations have found success among the “farmers who enjoy cow themed illustrated poetry” demographic with Christmas in Dairyland, published in 2018 by the National Dairy Shrine Museum. In 2022, they moved to Madison and begin collecting their experiences on queer intimacy for their first chapbook “Infidelity and Other Cryptids of the Mississippi River Basin.”
Photo credit: George Becker