Free Crush by Richard Siken, Louise Gluck Page B

thought I was the dragon.
    I guess I can tell you that now. And, for a while, I thought I was
    the princess,
    cotton candy pink, sitting there in my room, in the tower of the castle,
    young and beautiful and in love and waiting for you with
    confidence
    but the princess looks into her mirror and only sees the princess,
    while I'm out here, slogging through the mud, breathing fire,
    and getting stabbed to death.
    Okay, so I'm the dragon. Bid deal.
    You still get to be the hero.
    You get the magic gloves! A fish that talks! You get eyes like flashlights!
    What more do you want?
    I make you pancakes, I take you hunting, I talk to you as if you're
    really there.
    Are you there, sweetheart? Do you know me? Is this microphone live?
    Let me do it right for once,
    for the record, let me make a thing of cream and stars that becomes,
    you know the story, simply heaven.
    Inside your head you hear a phone ringing
    and when you open your eyes
    only a clearing with deer in it. Hello deer.
    Inside your head the sound of glass,
    a car crash sound as the trucks roll over and explode in slow motion.
    Hello darling, sorry about that.
    Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we
    lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwell
    and how I ruined everything by saying it out loud.
    Especially that, but I should have known.
    You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together
    to make a creature that will do what I say
    or love me back.
    I'm not really sure why I do it, but in this version you are not
    feeding yourself to a bad man
    against a black sky prickled with small lights.
    I take it back.
    The wooden halls likes caskets. These terms from the lower depths.
    I take them back.
    Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed.
    Crossed out.
    Clumsy hands in a dark room. Crossed out. There is something
    underneath the floorboards.
    Crossed out. And here is the tabernacle
    reconstructed.
    Here is the part where everyone was happy all the time and we were all
    forgiven,
    even though we didn't deserve it.
    Inside your head you hear
    a phone ringing, and when you open your eyes you're washing up
    in a stranger's bathroom,
    standing by the window in a yellow towel, only twenty minutes away
    from the dirtiest thing you know.
    All the rooms of the castle except this one, says someone, and suddenly
    darkness,
    suddenly only darkness.
    In the living room, in the broken yard,
    in the back of the car as the lights go by. In the airport
    bathroom's gurgle and flush, bathed in a pharmacy of
    unnatural light,
    my hands looking weird, my face weird, my feet too far away.
    And the the airplane, the window seat over the wing with a view
    of the wing and a little foil bag of peanuts.
    I arrived in the city and you met me at the station,
    smiling in a way
    that made me frightened. Down the alley, around the arcade,
    up the stairs of the building
    to the little room with the broken faucets, your drawings, all your things,
    I looked out the window and said
    This doesn't look that much different from home,
    because it didn't,
    but then I noticed the black sky and all those lights.
    We walked through the house to the elevated train.
    All these buildings, all that glass and the shiny beautiful
    mechanical wind.
    We were inside the train car when I started to cry. You were crying too,
    smiling and crying in a way that made me
    even more hysterical. You said I could have anything I wanted, but I
    just couldn't say it out loud.
    Actually, you said Love, for you,
    is larger than the usual romantic love. It's like a religion. It's
    terrifying. No one
    will ever want to sleep with you.
    Okay, if you're so great, you do it—
    here's the pencil, make it work . . .
    If the window is on your right, you are in your own bed. If the window
    is over your heart, and it is painted shut, then we are breathing
    river water.
    Build me a city and call it Jerusalem. Build me another and call it
    Jerusalem.
    We have come back from Jerusalem where we found