Creative Cardinal #2

Summer Girls

Blonde California girls sauteeing on a windshield
Their sweat sliding between ripe breasts in a way that it never does mine.
There's something about their slenderness that makes me want to smear them with salsa
Crunch them between my teeth to the tune of a mariachi band.

In the Summer, everything smells just a little bit like BBQ sauce
And marijuana smoke. Somebody sucks a bud the color of dank jade.
Meanwhile, I sit innocently on my parent's plaid picnic blanket
Pretending I'm not looking at the girl who looks nice reaching for her frisby.
I wish you'd clutch me with that enthusiasm, sweet cunt-sister.
She doesn't see me looking. Probably just as well.
My parent's words hum like bumblebees so I turn away. I mumble something.
"That's nice, honey."
The strawberries in my mouth are firm. They burst like red blood vessels.

The lightness in everybody else just makes me feel a little heavy.
It's the season for laughing shoulders to be clutched by soft, smiling elbows and pinched hips,
And obscenity. It's a custom. We say things on our cell phones that we never would in the snow.
"So, you know, like," [a girl passes, ribs constrained by red fabric] "we were just friends." Pause. "Just hanging out. Chilling out, talking, oral sex, whatever."
She laughs a little at something the other says.
"Yeah, exactly. I don't want any of those complications."

I've discovered that there are two kinds of women in the world:
The kind for whom bikinis mold like chocolate syrrup
The kind who can pull off freckles without looking eleven
The kind who, after diving for a volleyball, can get up without sneezing sand.
Then... there are the rest of us. We are the awkward ones.
Hustling back to our corners, we are contrite in our petrified shadow:
The kind who look better swathed in layers of fur and felt
The kind for whom red roses pierce their eyes painfully as a bad mushroom trip
The kind who have secret dreams that make them shiver, late at night.
[I never meant to objectify you, girl, but I never meant to break my lime-green umbrella either. Clumsiness is in my nature. I do apologize.]
I feel more visible under sunlight, thrown on a microscope slide.
It's unbearably awkward, in its way.

Sighs echo around my cold shower like fruitflies buzzing...
[I dream of watermelons]
God, I miss the half-thawed mud squeezing between my toes.