One Hit Wonder
Jessica Lohafer
I wanted to pop you like a bottle of champagne. I wanted to dive straight down into your electric hair and let myself drown. I wanted to lick your platform heels, climb your hollow legs and sing your skin satin, nibbling at its burnt brown creases. I wanted your name, collected and curated on my mantle like a Pulitzer, like a Nobel Peace Prize, like an Emmy.
I had it all planned out, how we would find each other in the middle of an Adderall adrenaline rush, the walls pulsing with privilege as we danced our way towards each other across the filthy club floor. We’d be married immediately, buying out every share of stock in each other’s bliss, and our publicists would have a field day, tripping over each other’s exposure orgasms,
suddenly set for life, as we wet ourselves down with water skis and Chardonnay.
When we got really cute, I’d call you a perfect mistake, and you'd full throat a bottle of Cognac, subtle as a steak knife. When we got really cute, we’d tie each other up and role play hostages, always switching from captor to captive to keep things sexy, to keep things fresh. We’d
romanticize our rope burns, and scour the LA landscape for even tighter knots.
I had everything for you, my darling dynamite. But you ran through me like so much white
powder, always anxious for the next twitch. Be certain, my love: no man would have let you know yourself like me. My rising star, I would have let you light up the night sky, brighter than a brush fire, even as my hands shook at the cost of the matches we struck.
Jessica Lohafer's work has appeared in Red Sky: Poetry on the Global Epidemic of Violence Against Women, The Noisy Water Review, Your Hands, Your Mouth, and elsewhere. Her poetry chapbook, What’s Left to Be Done, was published by Radical Lunchbox Press in 2009. She holds an MFA in poetry from Western Washington University and coordinates the Chuckanut Writer's Conferences. Contact her at jessicalohafer.com.