Tammy and Elsa

                                            
                                                         Elsa and Tammy pt. 1
                                     
                                              Tammy and her daughter Elsa watched neighborhood cars hiss by a late living-room window one lazy summer afternoon
                                             cherry-lacquered awnings dripped summer moisture as sweat fervently gathered upon Elsa's auburn brow
                                             blond highlighted and seared to a crisp as burnt matchstick fingertips from lightened sparklers of a leftover 5th of July procession
                                             a polished hearse-like Chrysler rolled down fifth street one Saturday morning before a notable attack on homeland security ignited
                                            we (this woman and I) were a well furnished, well-to-do, young-adulthood couple, gardening through emotional tumult
                                           clinical ups and downs reciprocated
                                           between modern after-school episodes
                                           a censored evening television spoke through screened backdoor windows to us  in what was to be regarded as
                    "a vague residential attempt at creating somewhat of a therapeutic environment."
         
                                                ii) the evening kitchen boys
                                         
                                        In August's after-hour playpen, a rotary fan whitened a cushioned perimeter of sticky marooned-crayoned recreation, when we were alive,  myriad years ago, too cheap to cool our offspring, we'd crack a window and snooze through radiant Easter morning ceremonies, a sharpened butter knife resided beside my bedroom window, springtime never payed off in sullen suburbia, receipts of last years groceries still had to be recycled, you and I still hadn't begun being tired of Elsa's unnecessary aftermath.  
                                       
                                               iii)  a stupid bloodless equator
                                     
                                               Before you die, lovely lady, and I will not kill you
                                               say you're gonna miss me when you're gone
                                               these northern Pennsylvania battlefields are full of arid winter solace and nostalgic historical landmarks, for my deceased daughter I'll provide an antique palate of decorated brandy-wine and pretend she's dead already; now recall the beach of northern Maine that unendurable April, year of the last bicentennial, before you solemnly discovered my drinking problem, how I stole from the poor and gave to the rich adolescent drug dealers on Midwestern college campuses. 
                                     These sullen mansion corridors are faded azure and waxen, dingy in atmospheric dust-filled moonlight, beneath lunar billboard cycles a bible-belt  interstate thrived on solar midnight luminescence, off hidden county highways, brilliantly electric and eclectically rural, these southern neon theaters brimming with baptist bigotry, apocalyptic and inbred, initiated in preeminent centuries of worn architecture 
                                                   Elsa and Tammy pt. 2
                
                                  Elsa and Tammy knew the hollow lull of those old Jersey roads
                                  demurely dulled intricately between
                                   lackadaisical seaside twining 
                                  off old ocean avenues of Wildwood's
                                   seethed silent silhouettes all
                                  seasick and sourly out of season, two young girls
                                  scouring a vintage Atlantic city boardwalk of old splintered floorboard
                                  pour me another through
                                 dusty daytime barroom windows behind
                                 velour varsity curtains of dusk-filled deceit,
                                 bottles of lower-shelf bourbon and decade old grenadine
                                 unkempt bedsores on her once motherly contoured thighs
                                 thinned out throughout amphetamine seasons of
                                 widowed debauchery unraveling lonesomely
                                 down sinuous avenues
                                 bleated eyes grown pale and tiresomely puffy
                                 articulating routine days on end, what's the
                                 bounty on your son Ms. Beatrice what
                                 uncharted seaboard hillside settlement has he run off to now
                                 amidst trailer park television seminars on how to duplicate
                                 duplicate identification cards among artificial autumnal nests and
                                 refrigerator campgrounds where
                                 aluminum cans sweat, rust and carbonate
                                 now anxiously her
                                          feline eyes wept smeared water-colors onto a condominium lofted canvas;
                                 an older brother incarcerated upstate,
                                   their sibling camaraderie terminology is torturous and terminal.
                                     We all lose sight of what's important here (Elsa)
                                      local cathedral bells pealed in a remote churchyard cemetery ,
                                     welcoming the forthcoming night a
                                      distant freight train rattled a downstairs diamond
                                       chandelier, an imitation boar's head antlers centered
                                       a residential mantelpiece
                                        an unearthly game of backgammon
                                       threw a twisted shade onto her darkened
                                       republican eyeliner
                                                          Elsa's bourgeois perfumes pervaded these conventional lemon stenciled corridors, 
                                       Tammy, the horoscope liaison lioness pulled another parliament from her senior year sleeve and backed onto fifth street
                                    accountable for the weather now as the next girl
                                    paint a zebra-striped tattoo on her family-room portrait
                                    the center-city undertow is always sly and vacuous 
                                     resilient especially along these insidious downtown flats where
                                     cigarette filtered alleyways would remain long after
                                     Tammy and I discovered Elsa's body in the morning obituary headline
                                     in black ink getting headonned in a hit and run
                                      around midnight walking back from a dive along a main street sidewalk.,   her young tobacco lungs and feeble limbs climaxed into non-existence