Read Online 2000 Deciduous Trees : Memories of a Zine (9781937316051) by Nath Jones - Free Book Online

and stood up. "No more than I am
of you." She looked at the dishes and bottles in the sink and then
turned her attention back to the television. Her hair was weak and
hid behind her ears sheepishly. She moved around the small room,
waiting.
    He tried again. "So what do you think about
this weekend?"
    She looked at cans of pasta. Her mother
never served pasta from a can. She looked at the vegetables and the
tiny jars of baby food. She held onto a little gold cross on a
necklace. She pulled it from one side of her neck to the other. She
held in her mouth and rubbed it over her lips absently.
    Shutting the cabinet she said, "I can think
of better things to do than listen to your brothers talk about
their cars and sports and all their other bullshit.”
    He flipped channels. Passed the news. Passed
the evangelists. Slowed at a cartoon and landed on a special about
Siamese twins.

 
    DRESS UP
    The engineer (and his girlfriend)
    walking head tilted away
    self-conscious and a tube
    of yellow plans in the left hand
    (her glove in his right) rush down
    a paved alley wasting
    youth in a hurried game of
    dress up.
     
    But just another of the bubbles
    she keeps up and can't wait
    for twenty years of looking
    out a kitchen window,
    hoping the diamond won't
    get washed down a drain.
     
    But I can't deny
    how happy he seems or that
    she has him this morning
    at 7:37 clenched in her own
    plans with a left gloved
    "Good morning, honey" hand.

 

    I wish I had someone to watch me get undressed.

 
    JUST SO
    Sometimes as a child I was left in the
library of Saint Joseph's College. I never read much but I wandered
through the old, still stacks smelling the paper die. I climbed on
the radiators, sometimes burning the insides of skinny legs to sit
in a window and watch the trees let go their leaves.
    On brave days I eased
myself down a steep flight of stairs and looked at art books in the
orange half-light, scared of the studying students. But almost
every time, after I had looked up my birth announcement from The Republican on
microfilm, I would go find Jodi or Mr. V. and ask to be let into
the record room.
    A smile, and the librarian would finish with
the stamping or rubber bands around cards or checking out a student
or phone call question. Then the slowish figure would move back to
a desk or an office in order to find a set of keys that seemed too
loud for a library.
    And I followed the swinging skirt or the
skinny pants, always watching the tile change in diamonds from
black to maroon and back again and again. Until the light swept up
an old wooden floor and crossed us over onto gray hard linoleum.
And the keys would come. "Maybe this one. No, let's try it with the
longer one." Or, "Maybe I grabbed the wrong set."
    When the dark door opened past the groove in
the floor a room sat up drearily and welcomed us for a visit. (Even
though it would rather not have.) Two windows for light and wall
shelves made for display. "Pick anything you would like to listen
to, dear. We will find it." Patiently.
    But I always chose the same thing. I never
wanted music. And I never wanted too much yesterday laughter. So we
found the place where I saw what I needed and used the chair to
reach it again.
    Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories . I guess,
now, I could blame him for his faults as a man or for teaching me
that very European empirical morality that determines so much of my
worldview. But at the time, the LP sat thin in its bright orange
package and always remembered me. Even when I had been out to play
every day for the summer or hadn't seen it for a winter of school.
The librarian's special walking away after the locked-up door.
Trusting me and confident I knew the players well.
    I pulled at an edge of the wooden room and
sat down amidst the thick blond lacquer with my chest close enough
to the table. The record came out and went spinning away. The
headphones were turquoise and plastic and old. They fell sometimes.
Too big for me, but they could