The kind of woman who will look you in the eye while she rips from her throat a meaty burp the quality one would imagine only a truck driver could after guzzling down a half bottle of tepid Miller Lite, after a bowl of one day old freeway diner chili, was she. A delight to all of the senses: hair auburnesque and flowing in ribbons of waves, a poitrine of considerable heft and weight and bulbousness, stretching the limitations of any Elaine Bryant outlet store attempt of concealment, nails long and fake and painted in a metallic hue one associates with muscle cars of the late 50s, a build both athletic and curvaceous leading one to think such thoughts as “what would it be like to be tackled by her?,” and shoes chosen ever so perfectly to feature the daintiest and meticulously well-cared for feet. When she spoke, it was a series of champagne bottles uncorking and then the popping of the billion-fold effervescent bubbles as thoughts and dreams and notions of an untamed nature spilled from her breast to her throat to her indefinable shade of red-painted lips that reminded the potential kisser of a night gone awry in New Orleans in 1998, and that, they say, is the story of another story. The fantasies that she would share, the improbable affairs, the tattoos she might allow on her un-tattoed body, could shatter the mind in as many scenarios one might wonder as wine glasses she has dropped at the many lame excuses you both have attended as parties, as scenarios just to cop a buzz off this long, meticulous life in which two people like the two of you rarely if ever meet. She had you at the way light reflected off of her green eyes which you wear had flecks of orange in them, in the way she got up from a chair, how she ran her fingers through her hair as if it were a lesson to be noted and remembered for future practice, and in the easily predictable cracked smartphone screen in which she showed you innumerable erotic photographs her and her friends in some egroup just had to share during the course of anther boring day, one after the other, each upping the ante of both of your desires, until she got to one of an entirely different genre and it was her, in a bright white bathroom, on the day of her wedding, in which she was pre-vows said, drunk off her ass, in front of the vanity and surrounded by her court of bridesmaids, passed the fuck out on the floor and you then knew oh my god she was the one.

Work of Philip Kobylarz has appeared in Paris Review, Epoch, Poetry, and Best American Poetry. His published books are rues,Now Leaving Nowheresville, A Miscellany of Diverse Things, All Roads Lead from Massilia, and Kanji Amerikana.