/lit/ - Literature

Girls Are Nice

By Chad

Girls are nice. They look at you twice. And then again, and again. The side of their mouth curls, their cheeks blush, their eyes soften. They have a cute name, on their name tag, or the way the look up at you and say it quietly. You can talk to them without knowing their name, such are girls. They all have that shell that they're already poked out of just to see you, fingers over the edge of a warm pearl bath tub. There she is again, making her rounds, perfect circles around the event, the exchange of glances, the permission, her yield. Her grown figure and frail body and you warm her by making her. Love is right there, no more no less, absolute male and female. Nothing but the most eternal sentence, a life together forever, why not? It could be, you know it. She’s amused by me, I who she could never understand but who she feels a strong impulsiveness to look over, as if she assigned, sometime at the moment of conception.

>It never fails to surprise me when someone has read my work. It’s always a pleasant surprise, and I take more pleasure in it the more I can see someone has connected with me, recognised me, and seen what I’m trying to say. If Hegel was right about anything, it was the sheer structural importance of mutual recognition both personally and socially. To be read, and to be read well, is always a unique delight.

Have you been read?

Never before had I been faced with the dangers
of peeling a kohlrabi.
The tiny smile growing across your face confessed
your excitment for the stout cabbage.
You danced around the kitchen, taking leaps of faith
at which ingredients might taste best.
You decided upon the finest knife on the highest shelf
and stretched skyward.

My body finally released the wind from my lungs,
as if it no longer had a use for it,
when I saw you standing there
in high arabesque.
You were a photograph, skin of stone
carved from the earth and dirt and
soil where you bathed and grew up,
now in lasting repose.

We never saw the house Nana raised our mothers in,
that stonepile whose walls ached to learn that
eight children weren't enough, nor nine,
nor ten or eleven.
Twelve children slept upon the floor,
kitchen to the door, and never felt warmer
than during the coldest winters when
they felt so closely the love that I'd forgotten.

That summer, there were seventy-nine milking goats,
coarse-haired and cloven, each you cared for,
each trusting in your judgement and grace,
each willing to share your time with me.
You taught me their names
and we watched them graze
the only fields they'd ever know,
content with their eternity in that single, happy acre.

The blade slipped,
cutting my hand and then yours,
our blood separate for a moment,
then coalescing into a single, crimson pool.