Bittersweet Arts Company

Original text by David Stobbe
Conceived by Lesley Keller
Read by John and Zach

Look
Calm.
Like rain
in a small green and plastic cup.
Your cheeks are the Sahara.
Your mouth is Amazon rain water.
Collected like grandfather's stamps,
If they were strewn about my bedroom floor,
Limp and
Saved and
thick and
Licked and stuck to a young interns forehead,
Who's writing her dissertation on Desdemona’s handkerchief.

I’m thinking like the next hour is mine.
So I listen to libraries.
The chaos of them on the shelf.
And you, turning over Emily Dickinson.
While I'm looking for your eyes,
And you're fingering around for your choice,
like a western romance.
Not a gunslinger ballad, and no time for lunch,
because one of the lovers is dying of cancer.

The librarian dyed her hair again, a deep red,
like wine or a fluid Jesus.
Because she misses her brother and her father can’t tell her not to.
Because her body is Alice in Wonderland and she has control.

“Your legs are like thunder!"
I want to say,
"A great mast for a storm! Bukowski wanted me to tell you, the small of your back moves like trains at nighttime."

She'd roll her eyes,
At boys in sunglasses
rolling unfiltered cigarettes,
hacking out phlegm Bukowski would swallow.

“Your shoulders are Georgia clay. Fatal if swallowed.”

I feel my muscles when you slip in books by their call number.
They make my eyes laugh, and they're on you.
I want to hall bales of hay onto pick-ups when you stroke the binding of Sinatra’s life in the nonfiction section.
He's still singing to the Hubble telescope and making spring on Jupiter and Mars.

I'm a part of a problem.

I'm a part of a problem.

I'm a part of a problem.