poem from last week

it was a tuesday after a laundry day and you and luella and elvis and and. that was the crowd plus the beaded eye from that blinking doll you carry in your breast pocket like a miniature fennec fox whispering lines from children's tales, grim and genderized like the little blue boy in all his teenage waste and the intravenous literature was not enough to update his thesaurus. and that is when elvis dialed out on the peeling blue rotary phone with the numbers that spelled l-o-s-t-y-o-u. i painted my face white and left my face on every pillow in the house. i found you in the kitchen swallowing your fist and luella is eating faded polaroids of me from two summers ago, you know the one in my underwear in front of the old oak tree by the lake where your parents first met?      you replaced that memory with the equations for your geometry on the twenty-ninth and seventh and i sing dolly parton songs backwards in that faded buckskin costume we borrowed from the children's choir three thanksgivings ago and elvis is laughing on the empty reciever. thanks for calling me slugger is the note sprawled across your breast bone with the wetted ash from the bottom of my purse, but i used the freckle under your nipple to dot the i, after that night where i followed you home and it never almost happened and i wait at the bus stop with the woman and her three children dressed as skeleton ducklings tied together with twine. she whispers 'laundry day' but it is may.