I Have Touched You

Terrible Love

I smoke a hand rolled cigarette and cough. I have to relight it before every hit. Girl #4 doesn’t wear her pink wig at night. She wears nothing at night. She is pale and I am grateful for my small bed, her slim wrists. Tonight my bed is empty. Too many pills left my heart dull. Girl #5 says Pick. She looks at the prescription, her thighs, the dirty bed sheets. There is Vicodin in everything if you look hard enough. Like Girl #6’s tongue, almost as red as her hair.

Poem as Leaving

Girl #7 paints me eating snow. Then there are wings and everything looks like pepper. She says This is the sound I hear while you’re in the shower. She helicopters around the room so fast her hands look like burned out glow sticks. Seven days later I don’t smell her on my pillow. Here I am missing Girl #1 and the fake lumps in her breasts, the laugh track between her thighs. Between her teeth: Big Red. The flavor went out so quickly but I never cared. I think about smiling and what that would mean for the rest of my body, what that might mean for this poem. Listening to Elliott Smith makes me sad. I have dated tall girls and not tall girls. I have dated pretty and prettier. Girl #2 is married but she still sends me e-mails. She writes Remember when you came on my chest? Her fingers were so bent they hurt. Girl #3 is making a documentary about her heart. I make a cameo in the second act, right after she throws up in a garbage can, her hair too short to get in the way. Girl #6 doesn’t call and I don’t care.

Blacksburg, VA

Girl #7 paints me building a sailboat. She is liberal with my muscles, which I am grateful for. I say I can’t take this down 460, there’s no water on concrete. She paints wheels to the bottom of the boat. I’ve been sleeping better alone. Girl #6 wears a green apron when she works. In bed, she smells like roasted coffee. She followed me to Blacksburg from Tallahassee even though I said Really don’t and now my neck hurts because I’ve been sleeping on the couch. She lays in bed all day watching TV shows on Hulu. She used to roll sushi, now she cries when I make too much noise. Girl #3 made a documentary about her heart. It’s playing at the Lyric sometime after the sun falls below the dirt. I sit in the balcony. The soundtrack is someone slapping a rubber band against an empty plastic bottle. A voiceover goes There are days when we only know what we know. In the opening scene Girl #3 wears a polka dot dress I remember touching her in, but here, in this scene, there’s someone else touching her. I have a headache but no Tylenol, only cough syrup. I drink it anyway. The timeline is fucked up, I am agitated I didn’t buy popcorn. 47 minutes into the film Girl #3 and I smoke cigarettes on my patio. I say If I were a TV show I would change my title every year. We only fuck twice. Each time I lick the beads of sweat off her upper lip. I have never left Virginia and missed it.

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Gregory Sherl is the author of THE OREGON TRAIL IS THE OREGON TRAIL (Mud Luscious Press, 2012) and SWALLOW (Mud Luscious Press, 2013). He has recently dropped out of the MFA program at Virginia Tech. He blogs at http://gregorysherl.com/.