Girl Glitter
Written by Noel Martin
Fiction
Phoenix stands blue in my mind, a craze for something burning as hot as the car fumes that warm my body on cold summer nights.
I zig zag between bored vehicles with quickened drivers, men wagging their lips to the click from my shoes, my fallout has always been country and it’s always been dark.
Robert crunches his hair next to me, beaten down leather, shiny clean paint, he has railroad hands with a father’s gaze, but we don’t talk about it much. I had it stamped into my skin that something as neutral as an observation upon men, to men, might be a waste of my hour. So instead, we would walk along the river in a disguise perpendicular to the junkie’s beaming crouch.
His words on my mouth tasted like sweet lead pulling back into a vinegar grimace, and he let me into his bed, made me black coffee, let me lay in the sun like a chameleon, and that was enough.
Robert knew nothing of my thievery curdled in those long nights of backend dime’s blues, hot brass in my lungs and trickles of his stash swerving between my breasts. He never let me wear white, too assuming, too dead underneath the village stage lights. So I wore red down every block, to and from basement playhouses, I wore my ticket on my skin like luxury. And he, puzzled as the moonlight dancing on my hips, paid for my presence in cocaine.
I called it girl glitter, the studs around my ears unwinding to the sound of the tiny yellow bag crinkling in his pockets. I wore him upwards, outwards, inside out over time, over the gingham skies of the city summer. He glistened like tin foil next to my crimson satin. I let him brush my hair, draw fairies onto my back, I let him scatter over my fog like lightning, and that was enough.
He always told me, in that golden whisper, louder than me, that the most american thing we could do was leave, leave, leave. In constant rivalry to the moon, to flee, flee, flee.
And his bourbon was always the same, maple and hard like his feet stuck in sixth avenue concrete. He would never leave, too busy pinching himself at the right moment at the wrong time. Like that rancid Thursday eve when he left me at the river two hours past nine when the crawlers began to get curious. I stood in scarlet thunder as the rats got calm, Robert gone, nose deep in girl glitter, railroad hands gone into cash fields, I waited for his wired grin and velvet embrace.
Hymns rolled over the water when glass was blown in. Two men and the road across from my toes with iron games and metallic sting, stung right past me into the hudson. Nothing clattered me colder than midnight rage and iron on iron infrastructure, my flesh; untouched but scattered.
The only flight in my legs was that crinkle cut of girl glitter standing blue in my mind. I fled to Robert’s under the eyes of the big man in the clouds, singing to me sounds of tire screams and siren belts, nails under my skin. This was the only time I felt bad about wanting to get high.
When I climbed up the six floors to fray my man, the keys loosely mocking me from an intoxicated flower pot, I found him asleep backwards, face down on the white sheets. His back rising and falling with no rhythm, I saw only lungs on the bed. I was left alone at dawn, and he was a pair of lungs. No longer a withering boy with a howl that paged me, he knew none of the violence I had worn; upwards, outwards, inside out over time, he could’ve never known with his lung brain and lung hands lung legs and lung glands. New York, like him, was only lungs too. Shrouded in imports to exports, seduction to betrayal, leaving to leave again, expansion to limitation.
I’ve waited this long to weep, but I couldn’t. Even now with a bullet song following my bowed head, I wish I wept. Robert’s metal ring, his iron kiss still twisted my shadow; unfreezing under a neon light when I was going mad behind closed windows. He was on white sheets while I laid in violet hell. Water marched out of the kitchen faucet with a sudden force, I gathered my feet and angled them over the rushing river, like a baby. You could see the smoke wash off my ankles and follow the cocaine trace out the window back into the streets like reformation. All I had abundantly felt through absent weeping, came gushing through the veins of the sink, running into my coney island tan and naive drawl. And my mind was blue again, like the third stone from the sun, like Phoenix who draws circles and canyons onto my back. I was still again, swimming in 1s, 2s, 3s, until a countdown from 10 damned my midsummer hunt.
He thought I didn’t know his hiding places, where he’d crawl to for a push and a shove into the great abyss, but I knew better than him. Every crack in the floor licking up to the bottom cupboard behind the jar of grape jelly. His diamond snow ripened for me, in front of me, and I listened closely.
Then the leather duffel Robert’s grandfather left him when he was six, came into my pulse like electric shock. Fast in my grasp, yellow in the leather, I began pulling my panties from the drawers, the letters I wrote on the back of receipt paper, I put on his belt like a man around my lower hips and it sat just where I’d want it to. My belly button opened up like sunrise and gathered the last few pairs of shoes next to the wine bottles on the floor. I left it all red and spinning and painless, all for vacant reminders of me drugged and stowed away inside cherry dresses in the closet we shared. I moved like liquid across dainty checkered lines in the bathroom, wicking away all that belonged to me, his powder and pawns dangling at the bottom of the duffel, all that were always mine.
I didn’t race against his waking body, only against the clattering pangs of the car keys in my hand. His old man’s railroad hand’s 1969 mustang that hasn’t been driven since the night Robert held me for the first time and let me wail into the wind on the FDR. Every roll from his parade, pre-owned castaways second-hand from men who were more beautiful than him.
In the car, my fingertips had forgotten what an open road felt like under the scorched scrape of my nails. I lit a cigarette with the windows up and began blowing everything into blue shapes in the likeness of cacti. In the blanket of a snake’s shade, coiling girl glitter into money with my lipstick stain on Ben Franklin. Everything was slow, and wonderful. My very own little American debauchery. The zones of frequency mattered to my lizard heart; zoning frequently in and out of western primes and cold bar darts, Arizona zealous fever. I am alone and I am leaving, I am alone with great companionship to the moon, I run my free hand over my chest, I hold myself, wavering and widening into stories I fish out on the dash. I drove, and listened, and that was enough.
About the Author
Noel Martin is a writer and poet from Indiana. In 2021 at 18 years old, she moved to New York City to study acting at the Lee Strasberg Institute. In her first only semester there, Martin was hand selected to be in a rendition of the play Bent by Martin Sherman. This is her debut poetry collection. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
In 2024 Noel Martin, alongside friend Elena Redmond, founded Bimbo Rhetoric, a Publishing House and Book Club. Bimbo Rhetoric published Martin’s debut poetry collection in August of 2024. Martin is currently in development with Bimbo Rhetoric on her second book, a work of fiction.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryan_noel18/
