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 | Lisa Ortiz Powder Room We enter armed with handbags lipstick ammunition, shotgun heels on our shoes. You are a stranger to me by one theory a sister and my mother mentioned I should love everyone but I do not love you. In the stall beside me I see your feet, the tropical print of your pants bunched around your ankles and I hear the sounds your body makes, yet today I want to say over the howl of pipes: We are all human, are we not? I want to say my body, too, is a burden, an embarrassment, a hex, an ode. And I think I should slide down and peek my head beneath the faux marble divide, appear at the bottom of your stall maybe pull a face so you will laugh or scream, paw at your tropical capris call in hysterical bursts the cops or maybe you will sigh, gaze down at me and say: yes, mine is a burden too, but a vessel, you'll explain, a delicious weight. Or perhaps you'll say no, not a burden, a feast of flesh, an all-night party or maybe sit sadly and trace with your finger a palm tree on your pants and say, yes, my body is a general, a locked board room my soul a young soldier under harsh command and I will stretch out upon my back there on the tile floor beheath the stalls hands beneath my head, and we will ignore the swinging door, the orchestral bursts of water the strains of others' bodies and we will talk of the loves we've clutched, the loves we've borne, the resentments calicifed in our bones, the way some men have touched us, the way some men have not, the heavy days that have wound like veins around our legs. But of course I do not stretch upon the floor, and we do not speak this naked way. As we wash our hands in the hollow hush, I nod to you in the mirror. And then I smell your breath amid the tile and bleach: it is mangoes and ginger and we do lean together toward our twin reflected faces, press lipsticks against the hollows, the ripened hollows, of our bullet-hole mouths. |