Crooked Teeth

 A light rain falls in a city so bright it feels like mid day but my watch says the sun slept long ago. She laughs at me and says it doesn’t rain here love, its people misters. Mr. Peoples feels cool on my skin, but I still think he’s rude. I walk over advertisements of women and they stick to my shoes. Perhaps my sole is melting. Perhaps they’re damp from the rain. Mr. Peoples’s coating their nakedness making the colors run from their missing shame. She buys a necklace from a white man etching white names on brown grains of rice. She’s upset the rice man doesn’t have her name but the flyer on my shoe does. I am the cheese, standing alone in my amusement.

She leads me down a loveless tunnel with silent digital fireworks on repeat, arching over me. It looks like technology from decades ago that someone was once proud of and now someone is too lazy to fix. I count the pixels that have burnt out. Inverse stars in the city that cannot sleep. I name a constellation Morality and decide its up to the reader to decide if its a celebration or condemnation.

We walk in silence and questioning of my naming abilities. She’s considering renaming it Performance so I ask her if people kill their tigers before or after they attack the circus? She laughs and says before, and this is why they attack. I call them bastards and pay a drunk driver to take us away. As we drive I question every bump on the road and attribute it to a name. Fluffy? Prancer? Crystal. She doesn’t like my games but doesn’t argue that I’m wrong.

Our driver says for a hand job they’ll take us to see the real show. I let them know the car was too dark for me to see their hands and besides, I had no work for them so they let us out and we got to see the real stars. She cried too loudly at a missed opportunity. She never employed a real hand model before. I told her one day. One day.