Meg Tuite
THE SPACE WE OCCUPY
I walk home. The sun grinds. How come it smells like my rank retainer?
I sweat between veins of fat-dripping sky. Prying eyes limit each step as if stoned under enormous weights. Every muscle distracts from its neighbor. I don’t know how to maneuver this body, deranged and stiff. Ten days and nine nights withering back to the man with no face who thrashes holding his semi-erect penis inside me, the burn full of knife.
The man wears a pillowcase over his head. He whispers “shut-up” softly as if shushing a kid to sleep. His stink, of decay and cigarettes. Spreads himself in a battleground. Loose skin sticks to my flesh. An open window no longer illuminates the gaze of an indifferent view.
I want to stride like I used to. Bounce past sirens, stumble over sewer grills, text my boyfriend.
But none of the screeching peacocks in the city around me know how easy it is to die inside.
Meg Tuite is author of four story collections and five chapbooks. She won the Twin Antlers Poetry award for her poetry collection, Bare Bulbs Swinging. She teaches writing retreats and online classes hosted by Bending Genres. She is also the fiction editor of Bending Genres and associate editor at Narrative Magazine. http://megtuite.com.
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