C o u r t n e y B u s h —

Meditation

You are meeting your dad at the tennis club on the bayou to watch your stepmother who hates you play tennis.

When you arrive, you walk up the steps into the trailer that has been converted into a bar.

There’s your dad.

He is wearing a polo and khaki shorts.

He’s sunburned.

You hear him order a Miller Lite.

He hands you a Diet Coke.

In the trailer, a skinny woman with froggy cigarette voice tells you, “I grew up with your mama.”

“This is my sixth beer,” your dad says as you walk out of the trailer and over the grass toward the furthest tennis court, where you can already see Kelly’s bright blonde hair dancing in the breeze.

“She’s playing with Rhonda tonight,” your dad says, with trepidation.

“She’s going to be in a horrible mood. Rhonda is terrible at tennis.”

“Why is she playing with Rhonda?” you ask.

“It’s Rhonda’s team,” he says.

You sit on a set of old bleachers.

He says, “If they lose, she is going to be pissed off. We should skip dinner if they lose.”

You say, “Oh, it will be fine,” but you are scared.

You size up Kelly and Rhonda’s opponents.

One can barely get her serve over the net.

The other cannot run.

You think Kelly and Rhonda will probably beat these two.

After you drink the Diet Coke, you walk down to the bayou for a break from the match, which Kelly and Rhonda are not winning.

On your way, you encounter a drunk man who thinks you are your sister.

He says hello.

You say hello in return.

He looks at you strangely.

You say “I’m sorry, have we met?”

He says, “Am I not your dentist?”

You say, “No, no, you must be thinking of my sister Grace. We look the same.”

He says, “Oh, yes, I am thinking of her.”

You say, “I had to stay with the worse dentist, because he is a family friend.”

You part ways.

He yells over his shoulder, “Feel free to walk through my yard.”

You smile and thank him, but don’t know where his yard is or what he means.

Still, you feel free.

You walk to the edge of the bayou.

You remember falling in there a lot as a kid.

Falling off of jet skis.

Falling off the pier.

You look at the trees alongside the bayou and remember how your friend once, while tubing, flew into them and was severely injured and hospitalized for a few weeks.

He was hot.

You return to the match, perhaps walking through the dentist’s yard, you couldn’t possibly know.

A dog barks from a hundred yards away, clearly having stopped at the edge of his invisible fence.

He barks at you with sorrow.

He is some sort of labradoodle.

Kelly and Rhonda lose the match.

Your dad warns you not to say a single word, but you do.

You tell Kelly it was nice to see her play tennis.

She thanks you.

You walk shoulder to shoulder back to the trailer.

Kelly orders Tito’s on ice in a styrofoam cup.

She drinks the vodka in the car on the way to a sushi restaurant.

At dinner, you learn that Rhonda is bad at tennis all the time, but she’s especially bad right now, because her daughter’s trial is coming up, and that her daughter is on trial for getting in a car wreck that killed her best friend and she will probably go to prison for manslaughter because she was driving 119 miles per hour. 

I Learned It From You

My old boss sank kelp to the bathosphere on recycled chains

My new boss fed me a slice of Alp Blossom Cheddar from the end of a knife

While his kids watched

Almonds are made of wood

Foam rollers hurt

There was a meadow but there was no one singing in it

I knew the bunnies on the trampoline were AI

When you see a person, any person at all, ask if they have a job

This comedian says his dad killed Osama Bin Laden

That other comedian says she was detained in Paris for being too ugly

Might as well stay home and make shit up for free

I’m investigating a murder in the Arctic circle for instance

Say what you need to say about the South

At least down there we learn it’s rude to talk about yourself

I heard a man play Amazing Grace on the saxophone

With such skill and precision the instrument formed words

I want to be friends with language

The way a kid in a movie is friends with a dolphin

I heard the word wretch

Come from the saxophone

Not the man playing the saxophone

In the middle of the moving train

There is no non-contextual language

But imagine there is and it’s suddenly there

Anti-Desire

Tonight I dreamed of the tweaker
Dreamed while I was awake
Like a thought enforced with some ethereal thing
Belief I guessed, or desire
But I don’t give a shit about desire
Desire in the human realm
The realm of love and fucking
I just wanted the tweaker to live
I wanted him sober, more factual, grayer
And on the train together
The saxophone playing Amazing Grace
That saxophone making words somehow
Wretch it said as clearly as he or I could
I wanted to love him the most but I loved the word more
He was from a movie
The tweaker I knew was a rich young actor
He lived in a blue tent
He played a loud game in the back of a bar
In the word I heard I felt myself change
I hated myself for changing because it felt like going away
I went into the word
The man I love remains beautiful, but I don’t care about that
It’s actually distracting me from some other thing
Which everyone knows is there
Which I have spent enough time noticing
I am sick of noticing and ready to go in
To be digested into it
To smell of its blood
The word was spherical
With a blue sheen on the inside
I don’t know what it was like on the outside
Maybe upon it there were vines
Indiscriminate he called me
Itinerant and curious I corrected him in a loud voice
I was angry
Almost vomiting
Almost crashing the car for fun
Preparing to laugh that kind of laugh
I forget how to show inventively so I just tell you
I was angry
I don’t have the time or the need to figure out how to write it
I smell of its blood now
Because I am of its blood
Being in this word was all I’d wanted
Frozen into some part of it
Not its sound, not its meaning
The part which drags the real
The part which holds onto the real as only a word does
The last words the people in my life ever said to me gone
I found a clean place in the one word
Free of judgment and intellect
In the blood of the word the saxophone somehow made
The saxophone which also breathed
My phone took a breath
The word took a breath when I took a breath
We were the same thing
The tent took a breath and choked on its blood
The sphere breathed
The sphere killed
I was finally in there

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