I’ve placed my promises in the garbage disposal,
throwing away words I believed to be true
and ripping up unbridled romance,
recycling 101 for the eco-conscious egoist.
She tells me a secret that only her doctor knows,
she shows me the medical note with coffee stains
and cigarette ash,
she’s being medicated with music.
The dosage is enough to educate one on the finer points of jazz,
to count melodies and keep a rhyme scheme.
I’ve seen her real face in a mirror,
only once or twice,
I blinked and missed it.
Her story was published in the afternoon issue of a newspaper,
the print was small and riddled with foreign alphabet letters,
letters that looked like houses one second and serpents the next.
The ink left gray marks on my fingers
all ten of them,
I couldn’t read the story, so I licked my fingers instead.
Yevgeniy Levitskiy has received a B.A. in English-Education from Brooklyn College, and is currently pursuing a M.A. His writing has been published numerous times in The Junction. His forthcoming publications include The Books They Gave Me (Free Press/Simon & Schuster), Maggot Bible, and Sea Giraffe. He is currently at work on his second novel.
