My Man
I have a man around me with a heart and flame. His arms are like vapors, like sweet carnival airs, like the cinch of a mermaid's purse. I'm inside of course, stretching and forming in a cartilage fire.
I've been told you can see the Cherokee in my family's cheekbones and in our hooded eyes that crossed the Bering Strait. These are the parts of us that didn't come from Paris. They are so far removed from our misty skin and the rosemary taste on our tongues
This morning I woke up and breathed him in—my man, whose soap scent and strands of hair are still on the pillow. I hear him singing like a record in a tunnel with some schmuck cranking it all by hand. There is a cup for change on the floor.
My man is green-eyed, but together we make brown eyes. Brown eyes that forget and seem of green. Brown eyes that don't mind being brown but look like broken leaves.
My man is one of three loves, whose footprints still wear the sheen off the floors.
Ekleksographia:
Wave Two
March, 2010
Fiction
Lydia Copeland
Lydia Copeland's stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Quick Fiction, Glimmer Train, Dogzplot, elimae, FRiGG, Twelve Stories, SmokeLong Quarterly and others. Her chapbook, Haircut Stories, is available from the Achilles Chapbook Series, as well as part of the chapbook collective Fox Force 5 from Paper Hero Press. She works at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan and lives in New Jersey with her husband and son.