Jolting, like drinking two five-hour energies. You’re seventeen and driving through the night. Cold air feels exhilarating. Icicles form in science and wonder. This cold caffeination transforming you into a wizard. Elemental and strong. If you think too hard, you’re trite. If you think too hard, you’re marvelous. There’s room here for jewelry boxes doubling as ballet houses. Also, for rabid horses. For stern mothers with monster teeth. The pastel and hair curlers, soft focus, iconic characters of the eighties. But also, the hollow halls of tradition. The never-ending road spackled with film noir.
What did you expect? Just a few short notes on words and their uses. A little driver’s manual for the well-worn poetry road. Not a flash of heat lightning through the flat and criminal Florida night. The light analogizing the air conditioning, chugging along, building an atmosphere of rebellion from the humidity of the night.
There’s a reptile under the moon. This iguana, say, is the star of her own story. Ruffled shirts buttoned up through South Carolina. I’m letting this get away.
You also have a diamond crusted choker collar. You are rich, in a short black dress and riding a Billy Joel style motorcycle. Riding away into the dark night. The exhaust fumes could almost be pink.
Call for your mother, she’ll know how to help. The flowers flounce and spin in the space of your third eye. But the eighties were too early to say it straight out. At least, I think? You’d know better than me. How it really felt. My mother wore a vinyl tablecloth over her frilly underskirts. Tied together with a pink patent leather belt. Thick, I’m sure. She bounded down the stairs in yellow high tops when her date arrived. Her unforgiving father said something about no one wanting her, dressed like a clown. She looked like a Barbie cake. Barbie before she had the work done. With raven black hair. And Alice Fulton, are you my mother?
Elaina Girlfriend 
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