The Diagonal Scarswellingon His Cheekshadowsthe Stalemateof Salvationa Glissandoof Desirethat Flew Westfor

The diagonal scar swelling  on his cheek shadows the stalemate  of salvation  a glissando  of desire that flew west for the winter away from the tempered light of day. The anacoluthon  of love  trapped in the pillowcase feathers of the  "have you ever been hurt ?" speaks  the demotic language of the pinned knight on the chessboard  of neurasthenia.  His heart writes letters with no  return address  My heart is trembling  with haste. "Nunc scio quid sit amor."

la llovizna comprende | © Margaux Emmanuel

From that angle, the beer bottle glimmered in its green light. She was shaking as she was on the floor, desperately seeking comfort in rubbing her finger against the bottle's rim.  "For... fuck's... sake!", she yelled, letting the back of her throat burn and slamming her fist against the wooden floor, its surface dampened by tears. She took a stressful sip of beer, hoping it would soothe her strained throat and she let out a nervous, almost maniacal chuckle. She tightly held her knees against her breasts, muttering, out of breath,  "I wasn't supposed to know, I wasn't supposed to know, I wasn't supposed to-", her sentence interrupted by a forceful sob. She dug her face into her arms, her skin sticky from tears.  "Fuck...you", she whispered into her arms. "Fuck you!", she screamed, at nobody, at everybody, lifting her head to violently bang it against the wall supporting her back, a delicious spasm of pain massaging her skull at every thud. "You...promised", she said softly in a tired voice cracked by the violence of her sadness.  She had a sudden desire to throw the glass bottle that she had been holding in her hand, to hear it, watch it, shatter into pieces. Oh, how it would send a second of euphoria down her spine, but she was too weak; she let the bottle drunkenly roll out of her hands and onto the floor, out of her reach. She wouldn't dare to let her eyes rest for the image would tint the darkness of her eyelids.  She grabbed her phone, dialed the only number that she knew by heart.  "179-789-280", she chanted with a little laugh.    "Alex" "Yes" "I thought that you had... like blocked my number", she said, getting up to grab the bottle. She brought it to her bitter lips even though it was empty. She blew into it.  "How many? "How many what?" "Bottles have you had" "Come on Alex...Doesn't matter...I'm calling you because he of course didn't fucking stop" "It would’ve been more of a surprise if you said that he had" He was driving; she could tell by the nonchalance and calmness in the tone of his voice and by the impatience of every single one of his replies, as if he wasn't really paying attention, as if he had been in this situation much too many times before and he was now replying with coldness to the habitual.  "He... had promised", she said as she felt the fingers of emotion enlace around her throat. “What do you want me to do?” “Alex, you knew him better than any-“ “I’m sorry, I just can’t. I'm not some hotline” “Don’t say that to me you fucking little bastard” She heard the car door slam, a caesura in the conversation. “Well, you want people to be honest with you and I’ll tell you right now that I can’t deal with this, okay? Before taking care of him, take care of yourself; you sound pretty fucked up yourself.” She heard the sound of the sole of his shoes hit the cement. He probably wore expensive black ones, polished until some kid’s hands ached. She hesitated; they both knew very well which gun she was about to fire. “Okay,” she said meekly.  “but you know very well what happened to Raymond. Lost some sleep there, didn’t you?” Oh, she knew how to hit a nerve. The rhythmic click clack of his leather shoes abruptly stopped.  She could hear the quiver of his breath translating the pain inching onto him as she pronounced those words. “Listen here Quinn, I-“ “You know where to find him”. She hung up. She had said enough.

179-789-280 |  © Margaux Emmanuel 

Empty paving stones, tinted by loose white lace bras’ humid shadows hanging on clothesline twine, run through melancholy second hand bookshops speckled with second hand souls, mostly unshaved musicians trying to find somebody else’s life to live. A bike, chips of fern-green paint flaking off its neck, rust engulfing the bent basket at its head, makes its way through timid rays of sunlight. Adorned with a pilling yellow beanie bordering his eyebrows and an upturned leather jacket tickling his cheekbones, he somehow still feels the aching bed slats pressing into his shoulder blades, still feels the tear-coated steering wheel pressing into his arms at the grocery store parking lot.   His hollow, blistered eyes sown into a purple-skinned mysterious past would make teenage girls silently turn around with throbbing hearts in their muddy stan smiths when he biked by. He would continue to snake through the maroon bricks, not noticing, not wanting to notice. He could vaguely make out, collapsed from the lethargy of our times on a coffee shop terrace, youngsters with thick white socks hiding their calves, sipping paper cup unsugared coffee.  And he would wonder how they could be so happy, or whatever it was they were. He would slow down his pace to take a paracetamol from his pocket. He would let it sit in his mouth. He wouldn’t swallow it. It would just sit, patiently. As he would. He wanted to forget the smell of her letters. He wanted to forget his brother who died at war dishonored. He wanted to close his eyelids, sink into the deep furrows of his forehead. He wanted to feel the shotgun’s barrel pressing against his tongue. He wanted to feel a new color scheme. Until then, he would continue to bike, perhaps forever.

second-hand soul | © Margaux Emmanuel

The way your eyes speak, hidden under those sunglasses in the ink-seeped night, where I can see the reflection of our nightmares’ neon headlights, where I can see a hanged man, life tugging at his throat, his foggy, unstringed eyes peering at the existential questions left at the gallows’ steps. Astray in the poetry of half-alighted movie theater marquees and of weeping red diner booths paralyzed under the sterilized silence of the blinding white lights interrogating and polishing the checkered floor tile, time stops. With blood-stained eyes and a delirious steering wheel, quarantine my heart and let me sleep.

roadside mirages | © Margaux Emmanuel

clumsy town boy

Your heart

is stuck

in a long

car ride

edging

an endless

desert

empty

road

in 1973

sitting in

the backseat

reading Kerouac

butter-colored

baseball cap

no watch

timeless

wrist

high school

bomber jacket

covering a

white shirt

a chagrined

blue bra

his

aviator

Ray Bans

sliding down

the bridge

of its nose

listening

to the cassette

of a shattered

existence.

Two years

thousands of miles

away

he’s still

the one

appearing

in the

highway landscapes

ghostlike

you can almost

smell

his cologne

you thought

that you had

written

the last act

of that

tragedy

licked the seal

of that envelope.

But the trunk

is still

full of his

letters

the cursive ink

bruises you

at night

oh

the clumsy

town

boys

they really

mess you up.

© Margaux Emmanuel

Caressing a guitar, a toothpick, whose frail wood had been bitten into far too many times, submerging from between her lips, she tried to capture into the net of melody the feeling of nothingness that crawls into your consciousness when the sun has gone down. With some strands of hair escaping from a tight pony-tail, she slightly hit the instrument’s wooden body, feeling the frustration in her finger tips. She laid the guitar down on the worn carpet, that had suffered too many coffee stains and lied down on her steel-framed bed. The mattress had always been a little too hard. A ray of moonlight escaped from the curtains to obliquely rest on her face. And she sighed.  She could vaguely hear some voices outside. It was too late for them to sneak out of sober lips. She got up and leaned on the windowsill. She noticed a grey car, beaten by time and by carelessness. The headlights almost seemed to be sulking. A smirk etched itself on her face; the loudest voice came from by far the tallest of the three, shirtless, his boney ribs piercing through his pale skin. Their faces and words were a blur. A beer in his unsteady hand, he was leaning against a lamppost and would occasionally burst into a wild laughter. The second one was sitting inside the car, holding a cigarette in between his fingers, the small red fuse floating in the obscurity, the summer night’s breeze slightly pushing the smoke down the block. His legs were dangling out from the leather seats. A Supertramp song was playing on their car’s radio, and he was singing along in an off-key croaky voice, sometimes interrupted by a series of stray giggles. The last one caught her eye. A yellow and white baseball shirt that brought color’s pulse to the shades of the night. Sprawled on the lawn, his slick black wet hair was planted in the grass, his hemmed jeans overgrowing onto the pavement. The darkness wasn’t thick enough to hide his eternal beer-stained grin. She had seen him before. Or maybe she wished to have seen him before. She could imagine the shudder going through her body when he would have taken her by the hand and dragged her through the crowd of a breathless bar. Then, he would have turned around. He would have asked her for a smile. Their glances would have met for a little too long. He would have conjugated her eyes in the language of his soul. It would have been too right. She would have left. Suddenly, she opened the window: “The fuck you think you’re doing? It’s fucking four in the morning for God’s sake!” she screamed. She had her dad’s tongue. Somewhere in those words was hidden, even really well hidden, a hint of playfulness. They all turned around towards her, gawking in surprise. She had her mom’s eyes.

rendez-vous | © Margaux Emmanuel