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Wherever It Is
Beauty may be only skin deep, but so's hell. Men were
the whores of Babylon, wearing silky things that
draped the disguise. If she were a man, and I were a
woman, I'd want her to be a woman and I'd want to be a
man. But I don't think she thinks that. I don't think
she thinks that way. I don't know how she thinks, and
even if I did, our cells are far away and the men in
blue say the only way we're ever going to talk is at a
happy hour in hell.
But we're in hell, I tell them.
They think I'm as a crazy as a rummy directing traffic
at Thirty-Fourth and Fifth. But maybe that rummy isn't
so crazy.
Maybe that rummy is an apostle who lived too long. Or
maybe just some joe who saw into the black heart of
the world, like the way you lift up a rock and God
knows what's underneath. And he couldn't take it.
I can take it because I know we're in hell. And
because that's the jive, there's nowhere to go but up.
She and I, we'll have plenty of time to talk, wherever
it is we're going.
David Lazar is Associate Professor of Creative Writing
at Ohio University. He has edited Conversations with
M.F.K. Fisher and Michael Powell: Interviews for the
University Press of Mississippi. His essays and prose
poems have appeared in The Anchor Essay Annual, The
Best of The Prose Poem, Southwest Review, Chelsea, The
Denver Quarterly, The Ohio Review, and other journals
and magazines. Best American Essays has cited his
"Notable Essays of the Year" four times.
In Posse:
Potentially, might be ... 
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