"The Poet Confronts Bukowski's Ghost" by Kat Giordano
On the night that I open my first MFA rejection letter,
Charles Bukowski appears in the corner of my college apartment
in stained khakis and a yellowed white undershirt,
swirling Jim Beam in a lowball glass. “Baby,” he says,
the whiskey-dipped ribbon of his voice swirling out
into the still room, “remember
that day in high school
when we first talked
through your Apple headphones?
You were only seventeen
and blowing off class
but even then you saw
something special
about me. You
walked home
in a fog, altered
like old dads are
in their stories
of listening to Pink Floyd
for the first time,
the world falling to me.
Isn’t that right,
baby?”
It’s been a long night of self-insult, so my eyes are
glassy when they let go of my lap and find the creases of
his face, and my cheeks are scarlet-soggy from all
the crying. He curls his thin lips into a smile, which opens,
his teeth flaring in all directions like the keys of an old piano,
like in the video where I heard him read “Bluebird”
for the first time. A knot inside me tightens the way
it always seems to when a man is about to refuse to let me
get away with something important. “You think I don’t see
you in there,
behind all the shivering?” he
says. “You are still
that girl who wanted
to be like me. You can’t
get away from that.”
He’s got me, so I don’t move. Slowly, his airy presence
inches its way to the spot beside me on the floor
where I’ve been tearfully shaking, resting on my thigh
with the vapor of his fingers, colder than death.
“That’s why
this is so hard
for you, baby.
That’s why this moment
feels like a lie.
That’s why
you write poems
about self-love
then scratch your wrists
to pieces
on the bathroom floor,
why you condemn men
who buy their girls flowers
but secretly wonder
why you aren’t
pretty enough
to have ever received them,
why I’m still your favorite
years later,
even after I’ve beaten
women behind your computer screen
too many times to count,
why the man
who stole your poems
and told you
the only thing you could ever be
was a girlfriend
still appears in your dreams
and holds you down
hard
and tells you what to do
and why you sometimes
don’t mind that.”
His ghostly fingers trail upward. I say nothing, thinking
of those paranormal shows I used to watch
late into the night, how the specters would enact
their slow parasitic violence. His whisper lands
like a thousand cigarettes being put out on my tender neck,
all blasé fake-cool and ash. “You like to hurt,” he says. “You
like it
when I tell you
don’t try.
Rejection
for girls like you
is just permission.”
The knot in my stomach releases to pleasant heat. This does it
for me. I hum in satisfaction, gazing at the dirty old man
with half-lidded eyes. My hands find his crotch without thought,
as if by some animal instinct I’d forgotten. He trembles.
“You know,” I coo, all sugar and smoke, “you were wrong
about me.” Bukowski’s ghost gulps, frozen with lust,
and that’s when I go for it, a full year’s anger boiling
and pulsing in my fingers. With agonizing force, I grip both
of Charles Bukowski’s phantom testicles, numb
as his ghostly cry wobbles the walls of my shitty bedroom
in my shitty apartment. “I don’t need permission,” I say,
and I squeeze until all the pain is gone.