perhaps it's because i never asked for his name,
perhaps that's why he never became a statistic,
i never engraved his initials into my collection
of motel soaps that only made me dirtier,
maybe i never asked because he always felt so familiar
his face is one that i have seen a thousand times before,
his arms felt like home
his smile felt like a pillowcase

maybe it's because i see names as labels; person-to-person identifiers
but no name, no matter how symbolic, ever eludes to who people really are,
i have seen an entire catalogue of the human condition
with inserts, editorials, and press packages,
no two toms have the same face, no two dicks have the same head
and in so many ways a name is just a tag that identifies bad memories

it was obvious from the first day we met that his hands
were cleansed with better soap than my entire body,
and the oil scents of his skin told me more than any name could ever tell,
names are like tiny walls that people hide behind,
until they become definitions for the names they inherit,
a name is a label that smears and bleeds with time,
but it is the person that leaves their scent in your nostrils
and their taste on your breath
and their presence in your memory,

he sits me down for a spaghetti dinner that he has prepared
and everything, including him, looks delicious
and i distinctly remember when i was younger
there were two containers left in our refrigerator freezer
one sat unmarked, left nameless, left over time with no label
and the other one was clearly marked in mom's penmanship, spaghetti,
two containers in similar conditions,
the nameless hump of mold, so far past recognition
that it gets tossed easily without a second thought,
and then there was the spaghetti,
a memory triggered, a memory so old that it has frostbite,
it's a cold memory of that one last time our family sat down together for dinner,
this of course is before daddy found porn and mommy found tranquilizers
and it sits in some landfill now decomposing,
what once was love now... isn't

and from across the table he looks at me and gestures to his chin,
i wipe my face and he smiles as accurately as a human face can smile,
i don't have the heart to tell him that i'm not wearing underwear
and i feel underdressed,
he doesn't have the heart to tell me that he picked angel hair
because it reminded him of me,

the sauce on our lips
the wine on our tongues
the thoughts on our minds

he tells me he can turn the heat up, says, "doll, you look a little chilly,"
i look down to see if maybe my nipples are showing,

oddly enough, he never stuck to one name with me either
he has called me his princess, his baby, his angel
on the good days when i had wings and my skin was soft
and on bad days, he called me allison
like the street where he found me, like the concrete,
like a statue with no charm, just a history,
a plaque to commemorate the place and the event,

allison; a permanent fixture wrapped in a freezer burnt memory,
and her eyes feel like ice cubes
and her tears feel like parts of her, melting.

01/28/2008

Author's Note: The first new piece of our book Containers by myself & Frankie Sanchez. Please critique at will. Also, do you think it warrants the explicit label?

Posted on 01/29/2008
Copyright © 2010 Nicole Hyde