DEAD-EYED WOMAN
1.
The woman with dead eyes joined the Aryan Sisterhood. She’ll be out soon, then she’ll resume
stalking me. She wants to make love to me. Making love to her would be Death. Each strand of
her black hair is coarse as a horse tail and sharp as razor wire, a trick she learned in prison.
Once she had money. Once I had money. Once we loved people better than ourselves, people
with hearts and livers. Now this woman with the dead eyes and the Aryan tattoos on her neck
stalks me. I jump on city buses trying to get away, but before she was incarcerated she tied me
down and impregnated me with a microchip. Even from prison she tracked my whereabouts.
I should have hitchhiked to a foreign country, but she cut my thumbs off. That’s how committed
she is to me. True commitment is hard to find.
2.
In prison, she read Bukowski. Now she fancies herself a female Bukowski. She threw the laptop
her father gave her out the window, went to the pawn shop and bought a typewriter, what she
calls a typer, made me carry it home. It must have weighed seventy-five pounds.
She said: No, it only weighs about 55 poems, and a novel, and a tube of smoked bologna. She
said: If you drop that, I’ll strangle you right here on the sidewalk, crowded with old ladies and
dachshunds and alcoholics and my former lesbian lovers. You don’t think I will? Why the fuck do
you think I was in prison?
Glint Literary Journal 