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\ndrawer. A mirror above a row of pipes reflects disorder\u2019s emptiness.
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\nIdeal Music, the shop next door, has electricity.
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\nSometimes late at night they can get inside, turn on lights, play records.
\n
\nOnce in a fit of drunken nostalgia for childhood,
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\nfor bottomless night and stars, Reggie busted out
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\na window over the enclosed alley between stores,
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\nwhile Goose, weeping in Spanish for the cuts on Reggie\u2019s hands,
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\nleaned against the rain-soaked wall eaten with black mold,
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\na man in love. He pisses into empty beer bottles, sets
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\nhis good boots in a corner, still brushes his teeth. For him, their abandoned beauty
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\nshop is World Navel, Jerusalem, their threesome a Sartre play \u2013 book
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\nshe\u2019s never read \u2013 and the rooms are drawers. His mother lay him down
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\nto sleep in a drawer, he\u2019d told her once.
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\nWhen she was a little girl she imagined a found life in household drawers,
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\ntheir low ceilings, landscapes within them shut. She conquers her fear,
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\nnow, by opening, emptying. Reggie and Goose make cushions
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\nfrom the contents: shreds of wallpaper, palm- size flecks of lead paint, leaking color bottles,
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\nStyrofoam crusted with dried Chinese take-out, clothes or a lone shoe
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\ndiscovered in the streets and carried back. On rainy nights they rip up these beds
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\nfor toilet paper, or shit out that broken window. Reggie\u2019s vomit
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\nstinks and then dries like a jack-less
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\ntelephone. These are toxins of particularity, poisons within the self.
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\nBeyond these walls, it\u2019s a nightmare staying alive, toxins of survival.
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\nGoose is next door playing records. Music leaches through the walls:
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\nPartridge Family\u2019s Greatest Hits, Jerusalem of Gold.<\/em><\/strong>
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![\"Jacobs](\"http:\/\/artvilla.com\/plt\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/Jacobs-recent-head.jpg\")
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\nMIRIAM C. JACOBS is a alumnus of the University of Chicago and teaches college writing, literature and humanities. Jacobs is the editor of Eyedrum Periodically<\/a>, the art\/literature journal of Eyedrum Art & Music Gallery, Atlanta. Her poetry has appeared in Jewish Literary Journal, The East Coast Literary Review, Record Magazine, The Camel Saloon, Bluestem: the Art and Literary Journal of Eastern Illinois University, The King\u2019s English, and Oklahoma Today,<\/em> among other publications. Her chapbook of poetry, The Naked Prince,<\/em> was published by Fort!\/Da? Books in September 2013.<\/strong>
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