Martyrs

Martyrs
By B. D. Lynch

Sometime last June, after she disappeared

into the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art

with her green notebook and brown glasses to

philosophize with a teenage soul about a topic she feels is damn near religious

I pressed open the gray glass doors and hobbled into the hall

to catch a glimpse of the exhibits-- violins rose from the end of the hall

like the smoke that drifted off the macaroni she cooked me yesterday

in the middle of the matchstick kitchen.

A small flock of big eyed city girls for the third time this week

were inching their way along the new paintings in the marble halls;

they're romantic to me, if you look at them right. But

she calls them racoons, their eyes surrounded in make-up rings

and they'll bite you when you stand too close.

At the end of the day, I walked into a thirty foot tall statue of Jesus Christ

hanging upside down by his toenails while a radio hidden somewhere

in the wall played the sounds of pencil droppings. Maybe this made me

sit down to a napkin. I folded it over to get rid of the coffee stain, but

I could still make out the Starbucks emblem. I wrote anyways:

Martyrs. On a June day, in the afternoon heat,

we kiss eyes with the city girls. And last night.

we stood outside the dining hall, her eyes threw me

down like dreams of seaweed.