Write the Way You Talk - Leah Mueller

It's pride to say that you

don’t regret anything,

but I'm sure if I ever went back,

I'd avoid certain actions, like the time

I picked you up at a poetry reading 

the night before my mother's funeral,

then followed you home

to your room, which was filled with guitars,

stuffed toys, and empty wine bottles.

So, we emptied another bottle 

and fucked on Muppet sheets, left over

from the teenage girl who used to live there,

but had recently been sent to her dad's

because she had Problems. All of us did.

I was forty, and my mother had died

alone in a bed that didn't belong to her,

just shy of seventy, finally unable to talk,

which killed her, I think,

more than anything else. You had recently

been sprung from jail, having

failed a Drugstore Cowboy-style caper--

you awakened from your stupor

in a pile of broken glass and prescription bottles,

sprawled out on the floor of the Bisbee drugstore

with all the alarms ringing. It was a town

that you never greeted until one in the afternoon,

then you staggered through the streets

with a dazed smirk on your face,

hawking your book to the tourists,

asking strange women if they liked to read.

You corrected me later when

I called it a novel, and said haughtily, 

“It's NOT a novel. It's a MEMOIR.”

Only five years beforehand

Grove Press had published your tale

of being a junkie in Tucson during the late 70's.

You were off heroin now,

but much attached to wine and Percosets,

and your book was already out of print.

You were so mean to me,

and I never understood why.

On our last night, you finally broke down,

and we had sex again, and after it ended,

you quickly sat up and went to the bathroom,

came back out with a piece of toilet paper

wrapped around your dick, explaining

that since one of your testicles had accidentally

been removed by an incompetent doctor,

your penis dripped occasionally.

You said this casually, as if it didn't matter

what I thought about it, with a sort

of imperious air, and I was so infatuated with you

that I didn't mind. You said

you would leave in an hour,

and when I protested, you smirked at me

and said “You're used to getting

exactly what you want, aren't you?”

Many times, I've regretted my response;

the look that must have come over my face,

probably akin to the expression of a pet who has been

inexplicably clubbed by its owner,

but you completely ignored it, nodded

with satisfaction, then settled yourself

into my mother's bed with a weary sense

of obligation, combined with laziness.

For exactly an hour, you talked about yourself

and the review of your book in “Spin” magazine,

your head stretched out on the pillow

as you recalled a glory that had only faded

a couple of years beforehand,

but now seemed as distant as tumbleweeds.

You even checked your watch

to make certain that one hour had passed,

and after stopping in the kitchen

to feed my mother's starving, feral cats,

you went down the steep steps to the street

without looking back once.

Right before you left, you said,

“Good luck with your writing.

Remember to just write the way you talk.”

I thought of this many times 

and wondered how you could possibly know,

since you never listened to me.

One day, nine years later,

I googled your name, and discovered

that you had died only a week beforehand

from a highly invasive brain cancer--

attended to by a self-sacrificing woman

who thought you were a genius,

and she dutifully reported 

that your biggest regret in life

was that you never made it to Tibet,

but you did manage to get out of Bisbee

and make it back to Tucson, at least.

The older I get, the more I think 

I could have done without this experience,

but I'm quite sure that I would do it all again--

only this time I'd be the one

to walk away across the desert,

and you'd be forced to climb the mountain

in your rental car, 

with no other option except to leave

and drive home all by yourself.

Originally published by Dirty Chai, 2015

Leah Mueller is a Tulsa-based poet and prose writer. Her work is published in Rattle, NonBinary Review, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Citron Review, New Flash Fiction Review, Does It Have Pockets, Outlook Springs, Your Impossible Voice, etc. She has received several nominations for Pushcart and Best of the Net. One of her short stories appears in the 2022 edition of Best Small Fictions.  Leah is also a freelance arts journalist for the Sierra Vista, AZ Herald Review. Her fourteenth book, "Stealing Buddha" was published by Anxiety Press in 2024. Website: http://www.leahmueller.org.