The Way Your Eyes Speak, Hidden Under Those Sunglasses In The Ink-seeped Night, Where I Can See The Reflection

The way your eyes speak, hidden under those sunglasses in the ink-seeped night, where I can see the reflection of our nightmares’ neon headlights, where I can see a hanged man, life tugging at his throat, his foggy, unstringed eyes peering at the existential questions left at the gallows’ steps. Astray in the poetry of half-alighted movie theater marquees and of weeping red diner booths paralyzed under the sterilized silence of the blinding white lights interrogating and polishing the checkered floor tile, time stops. With blood-stained eyes and a delirious steering wheel, quarantine my heart and let me sleep.

roadside mirages | © Margaux Emmanuel

From that angle, the beer bottle glimmered in its green light. She was shaking as she was on the floor, desperately seeking comfort in rubbing her finger against the bottle's rim.  "For... fuck's... sake!", she yelled, letting the back of her throat burn and slamming her fist against the wooden floor, its surface dampened by tears. She took a stressful sip of beer, hoping it would soothe her strained throat and she let out a nervous, almost maniacal chuckle. She tightly held her knees against her breasts, muttering, out of breath,  "I wasn't supposed to know, I wasn't supposed to know, I wasn't supposed to-", her sentence interrupted by a forceful sob. She dug her face into her arms, her skin sticky from tears.  "Fuck...you", she whispered into her arms. "Fuck you!", she screamed, at nobody, at everybody, lifting her head to violently bang it against the wall supporting her back, a delicious spasm of pain massaging her skull at every thud. "You...promised", she said softly in a tired voice cracked by the violence of her sadness.  She had a sudden desire to throw the glass bottle that she had been holding in her hand, to hear it, watch it, shatter into pieces. Oh, how it would send a second of euphoria down her spine, but she was too weak; she let the bottle drunkenly roll out of her hands and onto the floor, out of her reach. She wouldn't dare to let her eyes rest for the image would tint the darkness of her eyelids.  She grabbed her phone, dialed the only number that she knew by heart.  "179-789-280", she chanted with a little laugh.    "Alex" "Yes" "I thought that you had... like blocked my number", she said, getting up to grab the bottle. She brought it to her bitter lips even though it was empty. She blew into it.  "How many? "How many what?" "Bottles have you had" "Come on Alex...Doesn't matter...I'm calling you because he of course didn't fucking stop" "It would’ve been more of a surprise if you said that he had" He was driving; she could tell by the nonchalance and calmness in the tone of his voice and by the impatience of every single one of his replies, as if he wasn't really paying attention, as if he had been in this situation much too many times before and he was now replying with coldness to the habitual.  "He... had promised", she said as she felt the fingers of emotion enlace around her throat. “What do you want me to do?” “Alex, you knew him better than any-“ “I’m sorry, I just can’t. I'm not some hotline” “Don’t say that to me you fucking little bastard” She heard the car door slam, a caesura in the conversation. “Well, you want people to be honest with you and I’ll tell you right now that I can’t deal with this, okay? Before taking care of him, take care of yourself; you sound pretty fucked up yourself.” She heard the sound of the sole of his shoes hit the cement. He probably wore expensive black ones, polished until some kid’s hands ached. She hesitated; they both knew very well which gun she was about to fire. “Okay,” she said meekly.  “but you know very well what happened to Raymond. Lost some sleep there, didn’t you?” Oh, she knew how to hit a nerve. The rhythmic click clack of his leather shoes abruptly stopped.  She could hear the quiver of his breath translating the pain inching onto him as she pronounced those words. “Listen here Quinn, I-“ “You know where to find him”. She hung up. She had said enough.

179-789-280 |  © Margaux Emmanuel 

In the remainder of the tepid alcohol languishing in the flask of your eyes, we drink to the lost silhouette of love, burn our photographs wedged into the yellowed corners of our thoughts. We settle for cemented happiness, contemplating life through its glass corridors where mold is hidden, where I can feel the cracks of our suffering, where I can sense our hands dismembering our own poetry. When empty phrases harrow insomnia, I tape blossoms, breaths of life, to the pages of our unfinished chapters. But the trees’ barks where our initials dangle, imprisoned by a blistering heart, are peeling. I have just realized that flowers wither.

to slip on drunken petals 

© Margaux Emmanuel

bittersweet

Swirling in the ashes of honey, I awake crying under a bridge. A blur of roses forcefully blooms in my lips letting faraway delusions plague me in the twilight. When the crepuscule flees while passionately kissing the horizon, when there is nothing to write, nothing right and nothing to feel, where do the lonely petals of sentiment go? The scream of silence reigns, misunderstood. My reflection in a tearful cup of tea has suddenly dulled reality.

© Margaux Emmanuel

women in love

Your face clouds over

when the picture

of the girl

with the red

octagonal

sunglasses

red cheeks

from having recently cried

leaning

on your car

falls out of your wallet

only to remind you

in the sotto voce

of memory

that she kept your

love letters

in a battered copy

of Women in love.

You wonder

if she kept it

she always said

that it was a mistake

to reread the novels

of your youth

Oh, she was a hesitation

You remember

every rhyme

every bite

of the poems

that she wrote

on your lips

for she always said

that you only know

what you feel

once it’s been written.

She was damnation

You remember

seeing the

ink stains

sprawled on the cover

of her

DH Lawrence

in the hands

of someone else

at that

end of the year

garage sale

he was laughing

chewing

his cheeks

but the book

isn’t funny

maybe he was laughing

at your poems

he was laughing

because he doesn’t love her

and he never will

maybe he was laughing

because you are trapped

in those pages

you still live

every curve

every sharpness

of her letters

and she now lives

in the verse of another

he wasn’t laughing.

© Margaux Emmanuel 

Empty paving stones, tinted by loose white lace bras’ humid shadows hanging on clothesline twine, run through melancholy second hand bookshops speckled with second hand souls, mostly unshaved musicians trying to find somebody else’s life to live. A bike, chips of fern-green paint flaking off its neck, rust engulfing the bent basket at its head, makes its way through timid rays of sunlight. Adorned with a pilling yellow beanie bordering his eyebrows and an upturned leather jacket tickling his cheekbones, he somehow still feels the aching bed slats pressing into his shoulder blades, still feels the tear-coated steering wheel pressing into his arms at the grocery store parking lot.   His hollow, blistered eyes sown into a purple-skinned mysterious past would make teenage girls silently turn around with throbbing hearts in their muddy stan smiths when he biked by. He would continue to snake through the maroon bricks, not noticing, not wanting to notice. He could vaguely make out, collapsed from the lethargy of our times on a coffee shop terrace, youngsters with thick white socks hiding their calves, sipping paper cup unsugared coffee.  And he would wonder how they could be so happy, or whatever it was they were. He would slow down his pace to take a paracetamol from his pocket. He would let it sit in his mouth. He wouldn’t swallow it. It would just sit, patiently. As he would. He wanted to forget the smell of her letters. He wanted to forget his brother who died at war dishonored. He wanted to close his eyelids, sink into the deep furrows of his forehead. He wanted to feel the shotgun’s barrel pressing against his tongue. He wanted to feel a new color scheme. Until then, he would continue to bike, perhaps forever.

second-hand soul | © Margaux Emmanuel