Ars Erotica

My father died while I wept on his lap. We didn’t much care for each other at that point, but still, he stroked the back of my head. That same year in the late summer an eerie series of freezing rains were followed by eight inches of ice pellets in Mora County. The whole valley bled mist and steam. The plums, apples, and chokecherries were scattered and ruined, but the swaths of color looked exact after a quick melt. We dug osha root, hung beef jerky in the attic, watched the scoundrel barn cats become engorged off sated mice, and shot parades of rabbits from the porch with an old .22. By winter there were rare thundersnows, the frozen spines of the continental Rockies flickering in blown-out neons. My lover left me soon after that in Denver proper; a thirteen-year yoke of small unkindnesses burdened us. I soused in the drug realm of dive bartending, watched the pickled punks dance in formaldehydes along Colfax, but I made it home. That autumn, I ate an abundance of wild-apple butter out of a nostalgic slippage. Sticky fingers and achy smiles, the door handles clingy with fruit sugar. I think I discerned how compassionate all of my impoverished childhood friends were, how we nursed each other on long teats, how sensitive we were of delusions, and how unthinking and inhuman the world was after we splintered. I don’t think we all reached the same conclusion, but I can feel the crackling of their thoughts when it’s cold, and I’ve returned home to an empty woodbox, no mail to burn, no palitos, and no bourbon. The cat, Vincent Venom, jumps up and claws at my shoulders and bites my earlobes and makes febrile purrs. I yowl, he yowls, and it is clean and good blood. The crescent god-eye rises, the Milk of the Way, shears of snow beneath. A few years ago a golden blush of prairie wildfire spread up the mountains and left black tendrils all the way up to the blue-gray nakedness of the higher peaks. The limits of hostility were discovered when a certain degree of starvation had been agreed upon; the regarding nature not so much a fear of expiration, but an illumination of the curious arousal of loneliness. In King’s Palace in Carlsbad Caverns, one thousand vertical feet under the earth, the ranger turns out the trail lights, shuts a door, and all that exists is the air between stalagmite and stalactite.

Read more from Issue 22.1.