BALLAD
Your love’s got me looking so crazy right now, from the right, from the left and in close-up. If you only knew all the things that flow through my mind while I’m dancing in a desolate industrial district with only a flaming car for warmth. Turn around! I’m trashing your bathroom, I’m startling a dove, I’m smiling at your image projected on a curtain. Near far wherever you are, I’m part of you indefinitely, flying over tall buildings in a helicopter. Cause I am your lady and you are no one, no one, no one can get in the way of uh oh, uh oh, uh oh. I’m in love, sweet love, surrounded by a thousand tea-lights. I’m on a balcony in summer air; I’m fallin’ in and out of a convertible from some leftover teenage dream. I’ve got no shame instead I’ve got a model of the city and I’m burning it up, baby. There’s a ninja breaking crockery in my heart. Now I get, I get what I want — every now and then I get a little bit I-I-I-I — how do I get you alone? I had a vision of love and it was wearing a crown and dancing in circles under the stars, it was holding up traffic in both directions, it was leaning against a glass-block wall — And I can’t stop thinking about — do you believe in life after love? If so, how do I, how do I, how do I live?
THE ONE
In the midst of a dystopia, we shared a cigarette. You revealed your supernatural
abilities: to send anything aloft using a rubber band, to ignore pop songs and
unpleasant people, to make a masterpiece from a pile of parts. Also, your face.
We set out on a long, long road trip through a devastated American landscape
full of car troubles, android doubles, roommates, red states, slumlords, scare
chords, flooded basements, cracked pavements, lattices of laser beams on
every side, and explosions unfolding in slow motion like flowers. Now you
hide your x-ray vision with eyeglasses and tons of stuff I thought had been
thrown away in the hallway closet. Do you like my cyborg arm? I use it to
slam doors. You simply dematerialize when you disagree. And so it took me
almost twenty years to realize that you don’t enjoy the countryside. Sorry
for all the camping trips. You like to make a fire, even in the woods. And it’s
wonderful how you can move furniture with your mind—you’ve transformed
our abandoned subway tunnel into a cloud palace, but this lamp should go
right back on the street. You can illuminate this place with your hands, you
pyro, the same way you light up my life.
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Emily Blair’s work has appeared in Sixth Finch, Amethyst Arsenic, Blue Lyra, Stolen Island, WSQ, Cura Magazine and the Mississippi Review. In 2014, she received a New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship in Poetry.
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