poetry

Love Isn’t Meant to Be Chicken-Scratched At. {poetry}

 

“Love isn’t meant
to be chicken-scratched at.”

He told me that again.

He,
with the lines etched in his face.
He,
with the one shrunken eye;
It was milky in that eye.
It was blind.

He was blind –
in that eye.

But it didn’t keep him
from mandating basic truths at me
Like it was his job.

Sometimes I’d hold wadded dollar bills –
sooty monetary value
in my patient hands
until I could feel my palms beginning to sweat.

What was I doing there?

Sometimes his eyes would skip off
and I’d have to help tether him
Back to this existence.

“I’m paying you for gas, Bill.”

I’d have to remind him.

“Pump 7,”
I’d tell him.
An airy gesture
to my little mechanical steed
parked outside.

An airy gesture
to the honeyed California sunlight.

Maybe air
Would help pull him back.

Sometimes I’d come in
Just to make sure
he hadn’t floated up to the ceiling
And to ask him
what else
he could tell me about love.

“Someone once promised me
They could give me
Stars in jars,”
he said.
“And I believed them.”

…

And did they?

“What do you think?”
he said.

And he fixed
his blue eyes
right on me.

The last time I saw him
he had unwrapped
all of the silver foil
from the York Peppermint Patties
he sold in his gas station store.

The chocolate
was meticulously
vertically
stacked on itself,
and left forgotten.

But he had taken all of the tinfoil wrappers
Must have been hundreds of them
And sculpted them
into two shiny angel wings.

They were perfect works of art.
I hadn’t known he had it in him.

He wore them
Strapped around his little shoulders.

His two eyes were closed,
seeing and unseeing,
His heart had blipped out,
Stopped,
his lips were smiling.

Maybe he had finally fallen
From all of that floating on the ceiling.

The entire convenience store
smelled like York Peppermint Pattie.

Maybe the fumes had gotten to him.

I laughed
as tears slid in between my lips.

But I always remembered
what he said.
Love
wasn’t meant
to be chicken-scratched at.

I courted you,
accompanied by
visits to dreamt-of art museums
and with pockets full
of York Peppermint Patties.

Someone told me
They could give me
Stars in jars
And I believed them.

A season or so after he died,
in the flower haze of the Spring,
I noticed
Scattered here and there,
A miniature colony
of tinfoil stars,
Looking like so many tiny mistakes
Trapped between the pavement.

I picked them up
floated them into the air
and let them fly.

***

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Brittany Connors

Brittany Connors

Brittany Connors is an actress, writer, and general life enthusiast based out of NYC. She is a lover of story, text, and all of the various expressions we find to make sense of ourselves and the world around us. She believes all expression is a celebration of this breathtaking existence.
Brittany Connors