sore thumbs(primero)

 



  i.
alix

    my parents spelled my name wrong on the birth certificate. they told me last october in the midst of a blue wind.
a mistake. was that me?

        ice eyes drifting downwards, smoke clouding up lips.
telling me i should have been an alex and not an alix.



                i should have been angry, but i was relieved.
i mean, don't you hate when parents spell names weird on birth certificates to be different?

        it's a sin of michaels and marys everywhere.
rebelling against parents who doused them with the lower side of the name train.
but my parents names were

    summer and daniel.
two shattered french globes who took hits off badly rolled joints and made me on day one.
they met in a subway station in atlanta, georgia. a month later they were interlocked by golden rings and disapproving relatives.
         

i slept on the underside of a broken trampoline the first night that i was without shelter, and the sky was crosshatched by the winter black fabric.
            my nose hurt and i wondered if it was bleeding again.


my nose spits red flowers when my emotions overwhelm me. instead of tears and snot, i sneeze out blood drops like cherry juice.
but right now i was just blank, like someone had wrapped me in a spiderweb and turned off the lights.

               


  maybe the world was finally ending and my nose was experiencing esp.
the world has been experiencing pre-rapture for ages now.                we nuked antarctica for experimental purposes and everything was rainbows; a volcanic winter where we saw diamond dust killing those who dared to gawk. i crushed the grey into eyeshadow and mixed it into clear lipgloss i borrowed from victoria's secret.


    i like that store, even though i'm not a girl .
          it smells like the insides of my mother's shirts and the metallic perfume of teenage girls.
   
        i like to arrange lingerie into smiley-face cuisine and smear it with cinnamon sample gloss.
i like to have imaginary dialogues with the liquid-lipped mannequins who stare over my shoulder

  always someone more important to see.
i am a butterfly, a crushed moth, i ran away and the sky split.

everything sticks to me and sometimes i'll stand in the middle of a street between the lanes and just bleed down my chin and tear cigarette butts from the pavement and chuck them at minivan gas guzzlers.

  people don't get me.







          do you know how i like to eat cheese pizza? i like it when i'm tired and i eat it nice and slow


  heat it with a microwave when it starts to cool.
i like to fold it over, bread-and-sauce origami so the cheese is a surprise.
  my mouth is a lacerated mine field after i eat a slice or two.
burnt and black.

          i think pizza is my favorite food.
either that or duck sauce from china-imitations in the mall.

    i eat it for free and suck it like a capri sun.
and that is my story.

        or maybe it's just me.
in the story there are whispered caricatures of villians and heroes and girls with cornsilk hair.
i'm just a boy.