After reading Aimee Bender and Listening to Radio Head

There is a girl who is good with a needle.

She embroiders words upon her underwear. Intimate words.

This girl notices the boy who sings in a high school band. The band performs covers of Radio Head songs. The boy sings to the girl, "I'm a creep. I'm a weirdo."

The girl takes up her needle and needles the word SPECIAL onto her crotchless panties. She carves the word WEIRDO hidden somewhere in all that lace.

She seam stresses every curve and line of every letter of every lyric.

When she is done, she shows the skirt to the band boy. He casually strums his guitar, acts as if he doesn't notice; or, he doesn't get it. She is scared.

She tears off the skirt. She crumbles the skirt. She throws the skirt, her words, into a dumpster that floats in a rocky river.

He trembles. She thinks that a male person's trembling is eternally meaningful.

She dances before the band man, who maybe thinks she is not just another girl. She turns. She aches strange.

She drinks wine and grows sad.

She writes letters.

He thinks?

The night ends with a dream that he uses a strong, strange, hairy arm to pull her out from a deep, dark spinning bowl.

She feels? She wants hairy arms.

She thinks it must be so warm to have body hair to stay warm through the long winter.

She moves to a town in California where the word SWEATER is foreign, quaint.

She drinks wine and sunshine. She yields. She tosses away all knits and underwear. She yawns. She yearns.

For the needle, for hair, for nothing.

Sunshine and freeways uninspire her.

She gets a tatoo on her labia--the words WHAT THE HELL'M I DOIN' HERE?

The Coaster train whistles by. She's got a phony ticket east. She sits in a depot, staring down a glass of wine through the eye of a needle. A little boy teases her with his loaded squirt gun.

She embroiders the word BANG on her cocktail dress, smack dab in the middle of the the cock's tail. She loops her arm through the arm of her date to the company party, her bodybuilder.

She remembers, ages ago, giving a blow job to a disguised rock star in Strawberry Fields. But now she sips petite Shirah from Los Gatos and writes I DON'T BELONG HERE on the walls of the setting sun.

Sunset, outside these windows on Guy Street, looks like a trembling man before he fucks his passion. Hard, pink, rippling and brilliant.

When dark settles over this much beauty, everyone is relieved to fall asleep.