H’s legs were skinny and lucent. I wasn’t there for her when she was grieving.I had only known her for a week. She was done with me and she has been done with herself for some time.
Some people stay with me even when we don’t get to know each other. The nicotine
mouth alcoholic will be one of them. I would have stayed with her and helped her
had she accepted my not wanting to be with her that night. She called me at eleven. She was tired and she was in a stupor. The doc said he has meth head patients in his office who are agitated and fidgety. I think when I first met her she was on something like meth. She was all over the place. She said she was grieving her stepfather so I wasn’t suspicious.
My good friend Anne wants me to get tested for stds. You get around she said.
God only knows where she has been.
One of her students was a suicide. I wanted to know his name. She gave it to me.
It’s not easy being a teacher sometimes, Anne said.
I met W in Seattle. We went to a Vietnamese restaurant. A black man and a black woman in a muslim garment were seated next to us. The man and the woman spoke in a language I didn’t understand and then spoke in english. I liked the bluish grey garb the woman wore and the dark skin of the man.
When they left two old white men took their table. They looked virile and strong. The one
man next to me had big strong white teeth. I didn’t like them. I thought about how many
other men and women they hadn’t accepted in their society.

I hadn’t seen Wendy in a couple of months. She said things she had said to me when I last saw her and when I pointed it out to her she didn’t relent. I thought about how many other men she had said what she had now repeated to me. When we were in my hotel room lying on the soft bedsheets
she admitted she was involved with another older unattractive man. When I earlier had kissed her she had given me her teeth. It reminded me of another sparse kiss Q, who talked about losing weight for hours, had given me.
W said that her sadist lover had applied clamps to her nipples and her vagina and had instructed her.
He had omitted the clamps as the relationship had evolved.
I grew up in a strange household, W said. Her mother had a lover who gave W a pill and she woke up with her underwear down.
W has age spots on her face and arms. She talks about her bladder and her impending death. A team of doctors are looking into something peculiar that is happening with her uterus. She has a fear of poverty and bemoans that she won’t be able to retire.
We have hazel eyes, W said. They are evil eyes.
W has been at the same office job for twenty years and hasn’t advanced because she
doesn’t have a college degree.
W’s ex husband made her itemize. She didn’t want to do it but she did it for her two boys.
W’s lucent skin reminds me of my mother’s skin when she was fifty.
In my dream my mother was fussy and played with my ass.
I wonder how I’m going to die, W said.
W’s mother was a chain smoker. W inhaled second hand smoke in her childhood.
I have an age spot on my face. I eye it in the mirror and compare it to age spots I have seen on the elderly. I noticed it this year.