things he wanted: good coffee someone to dance with poetry enough money to buy a plane ticket to Spain things she wanted: a warm body pancakes on Sunday mornings a black cat with white markings to hear her voice on this american life things they’ll remember next time: even great love can’t protect you from another person wanting what they want* *** his tattoos: a fishing boat, sailing across the muscles of his back in shades of brown Greek letters on both wrists, love and agony an alarm clock set to five o’clock on his upper arm her tattoos: a tenpenny nail below her breast hibiscus flowers, left ankle a ladder on her forearm three stars of David tracing the freckles on her neck things a body carries like tattoos: memories—needles piercing through skin, her teeth on his lips, the screen door left open the day she left him and moved back to the city *** what he lost: a faded college sweatshirt eighty dollars in tickets, for parking overnight on Main Street one package of gel-tip pens what she lost: the chair he broke the night they got high a public radio tote bag too many hair ties to count the unassailable sense of knowing exactly what she wanted things they lost: time—the twenty minute drive to the clam shack, a week in the mountains, three months of Sunday mornings with sunlight pouring across the sheets *** she dreams: her father making breakfast miles of film unspooled in a room with no windows immaculate conception, crying, a baby he dreams: a glittering party with slim-cut suits and gin and tonics an ex-girlfriend behind the high school gym a sea monster that rises from the depths, shipwrecks things they both dream about: mermaids with long flowing hair, gunshot wounds at the scene of the crime, flying ---------------- *This line is taken from the This American Life episode referenced in the title
Maggie Cooper is a graduate of the Clarion Writers Workshop and the MFA program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Ninth Letter, andelsewhere, and her chapbook, The Theme Park of Women’s Bodies, is forthcoming from Bull City Press. You can find her on Twitter @frecklywench.
Photo by Jp Valery on Unsplash