It is Halloween 2016 & we are two weeks away from
everyone talking about the world being on fire.
Jacki is dressed up as a vampire
but you can only tell if she smiled.
Donna is Nancy Kerrigan but doesn’t want to
make her knee bloody, she says.
because that is probably, you know,
too much.

I am Mia Wallace & I am trying too hard.

My lover doesn’t dress up as anybody because he didn’t have time.
Usually, he told me, he dresses up as a woman.
Not a specific woman, just a woman.
That’s the only joke.

I find him outside smoking.

He looks at me in my black wig & the bloody nose I gave myself with lipstick & says
Meli, it’s you. I look down at my feet, thought Meli, it’s you. I look out the window of his car. Meli, it’s you. I look at the ceiling as he takes off my costume in a hurry, with a hunger. It’s you.

The next morning he lays his guns out on the bed like dress socks.
He is very excited.
How did I get here?
We were just drinking orange juice.
We were just talking about music.
He hands me the cow boy pistol & I’m already forming
the story I’ll tell my friends later,
the ones I ditched the night before
when we were all dressed up as women from movies.

He tells me the first rule of gun safety is to point
to the safest spot in the room & since there’s a baby
downstairs & us right here
the best place to point
is up.

The gun isn’t loaded so there’s nothing to worry about.
Maybe this is his love language?
Maybe I’ve just got to hold it
the way the way I kiss people at parties:
like I’m never gonna be able to again,
like I know one day someone’s younger son
is gonna bring me out back.

Why doesn’t everything end
with something loud that shakes the room?
Like, boom-boom, its over, bye-bye, I don’t see you anymore
Boom-boom, the world ends, we gather our essentials, put on our good boots,
pack into our cars & head west.

I think I’m bringing my own end.
I’m making everything happen.
I’m moving the air around me
until I’m someone he can choose,
So I’m pointing up,
to the place where I can’t get hurt. So I’m pulling on the trigger.
So there is barely a noise. Just a sound that could’ve been.
An absent-minded click
of the tongue while searching through an email,
the snapping of fingers during a half-hearted
dance at the end of the night,
the sigh that escapes me
when I light a match
& it fails to strike.