Black Coffee and Skinned Pigs
Before the endless cups of black coffee, you dreamed one night of a plump man the shape of a pear hanging above your bed screwing on a golden penis. “It wasn’t the fact that it was gold that made me wake up in tears it was the fact he was turning it to the left and it was getting tighter.” She told me she hated things involving force penetration, but loved watching Law & Order. The montage of banana rapes and the most famous person who done it kept it real enough with a tinge of fairytale, like she likes her coffee: dark & sweet. After black rings paste together cup and table we exit in front the cha-ching of a register then through doors chiming with golden bells, “wait, can you smell that?” She had often stopped me to smell things: fresh cut cold cuts, smoked fish, all reminding her of a place she barely knew. The night carried more than honking cabs wrestling for uppity travelers. “That’s Poland, right there, breathe in deep.” Pacing over Queens Village’s empty nine dollar Georgi Vodka bottles, our feet crunched on broken glass, onto the lawn of an abandoned house, it came: firewood burning. “That’s the Poland I know, but New York strips people like a butcher skinning a pig, all that’s left are bones.”
