Stanley Tucci Is in Sardinia and I’m on Your Sofa
by Kara Lewis
watching as he stretches a goat’s stomach
over a clothesline. Stanley Tucci is making illegal cheese
in Chelsea boots and slim-fit jeans, an unlikely culinary criminal.
I envision you outrunning sirens
in seventies corduroys, a cleaver nestled in your back pocket.
Each flared ankle jeopardizing your exit. I would break the law
to taste you. But when cheese ferments, we’ll be a dead language. A rind
incised by bite marks. Stanley Tucci is blowing into a reed
glued with beeswax. I ask you if you ever played an instrument
and put your stinging chapstick on my lips in secret.
Stanley Tucci calls wine full-throated, swirls it
in a long-stemmed glass the way I swish mouthwash before spitting
into your sink. I will never know if Stanley Tucci gets cavities.
I’m not supposed to know your last name, its curly font
across your mailbox. It sounds like an oblong pasta, just like Stanley Tucci’s.
Just like Stanley Tucci, you are bald and gleaming.
I Googled, Do bald men get a lot of likes on Hinge and imagined
other hands sliding down your scalp. A headline reads, Stanley Tucci is sexy
and we need to talk about it now! I wanted to talk to you
about when your hair started falling out. When you stood in the mirror
with whirring clippers and decided to cross over. You told me
your friends kept getting married and you lingered in the background
like a character actor. You gave toasts on cue in exaggerated accents.
Stanley Tucci is windsurfing and I’m memorizing the velocity
of your ceiling blades. Mornings I stand barefoot on your cushions to dust them.
Stanley Tucci does chores promptly and is always polite. I left my Spanx
in your duvet and you called them bike shorts.
You held them out to me like a souvenir.
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