Mitchell Jacobs

My Own Private New Hampshire

I rented a room 53 miles west of Venus
                                                   so I could be with my college boyfriend
who dumped me immediately. He lived
                                                   next door, in another dimension. To get him
to notice me, I took aimless walks
                                                   in electric blue pants, like some sad
horny alien. I would have done anything
                                                   except call him. The B-52’s sang to me
from my hail-pocked Honda’s tape deck
                                                   about runaway poodles, a bottomless pool,
and when to kiss the pineapple between
                                                   a lover’s legs. Which is to say, after kissing
his stomach. Which is to say, never again.
                                                   My walls were strung with purple constellations,
Christmas lights for mood lighting. In case.
                                                   This was the techno-future, 2014,
except I couldn’t afford a smartphone
                                                   so everyone’s invisible conversations
ripped through me like gamma radiation.
                                                   Instead of raves, I ran around graveyards,
imagining the dead in love triangles,
                                                   love rhombuses, perverted love parabolas.
My dad had died that spring, but he didn’t
                                                   belong to the dead and their interstellar
daisy chain. He was in that middle space,
                                                   a foggy soundstage barren as the moon,
knotting and unknotting his paisley necktie
                                                   on loop. It’s where Ricky taps his foot,
rocks his hips and guitar neck back and forth
                                                   in the video of “Give Me Back My Man”
that glared from my laptop screen. Ricky hadn’t
                                                   died of AIDS yet. That would be in five years,
so twenty-nine years ago. Barefoot, Cindy
                                                   turns around to look at him, her brother,
on a riser above her, wearing shades.
                                                   I’ll give you fish. I’ll give you candy.
I’ll give you everything I have in my hand.
                                                   What my clenched hand could offer
was a sweaty clump of Swedish Fish
                                                   from the planet’s longest candy counter:
waxy, melted together, red dye #40
                                                   seeping outward along my palm lines.
I didn’t want to go bed with a stranger
                                                   and tie a bow of caution tape around my neck
but I did. My shirt with squids on it
                                                   absorbed my stupid tears, squirts of ink,
while I sat on my car’s dented hood
                                                   and leaned against the windshield’s firework-
display of bug guts. I took off my clothes
                                                   and touched myself beneath a satellite’s
slow strobe. On treeless summits,
                                                   it turned out I could stack a cairn in memory
of anything, and somebody would balance
                                                   their own lopsided rock on top. The air
was so sparse. When I finally drove back
                                                   to Earth, I sprinkled glitter on the highway,
only the glitter was that shiny crud
                                                   that gathers in your eyes from sleep.

Mitchell Jacobs is a writer from Minnesota. His work has appeared in journals such as the Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and Willow Springs, as well as on the Slowdown podcast. He is currently a PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California.