Southern Comfort

Once I went cow tipping in Upstate New York with a few crazy
friends during a road trip across the country
towards the west through the North while it was hot,
then back home through the South
in a Winnebago full of clothes, liquor, and shit
owned by four testosterone-searching women.

Being adventurous and spontaneous women,
we decided to do something really crazy,
so we got high off some good shit
that Lulu Liza had supplied and traveled to Country
Ridge, Maine to head south
off a cliff overlooking a bunch of rocks and the very tip of the Atlantic Ocean
with nothing to protect us except a rubber cord about as strong as a condom attached to our dangling ankles to slice through the wind, which was
surprisingly hot.

Then when our trip wore off, we decided to go white-water rafting in Hot Springs, Minnesota, a town dominated by eighty-year old senile women
who probably hadn't had any one go south
on them in years because they couldn't find anyone crazy
enough in this pious part of the country
to search through the cobwebs and shit.

Afterwards we headed to Montana where we only stopped to take a shit
in a gas station that was run by a few hot
boys who were raised in the country
and hadn't ever seen city women
before, let alone been allowed to enter their south,
and the opportunity must have driven their prepubescent hormones crazy.

We para-glided in California, finished off four bottles of Cuervo in Cancun,
rode mules through the Grand Canyon, devoured almost sixty ribs in San Antonio,
then finally, after a month of traveling, hit New Orleans, where everyone is crazy, every night is Mardi Gras and everyone can dress like shit
and get away with it because in the South
it was just too damn hot
to care and the men didn't want women
wearing that much anyway-such hospitality made it our type of country.

By far the South was the most entertaining part of the country.
The guys were hot and wore our Bible belts, the number of women
was minimal, it was okay to be crazy, and Southern Comfort is some good shit.

 

Turnpike

New Jersey is the asshole of America,
Staten Island its armpit,
Right next to each other like that of a graceful gymnast
Who has just snapped her spine after fucking up her dismount.

I walk down the side of the New Jersey Turnpike
towards a south shore filled with medical waste, tiger sharks,
and Italian gumbas from Hoboken,
causing in me the same anxiety that stems from my jockey panties
crawling up the crack of my ass like my asshole is some sort of magnet
all the while huffing and puffing out the smoke of the oil stacks
near Newark Airport & Elizabeth, the oil tanker queen,
in the hopes of hitching with a good-looking Mexican
wearing a funky, colorful sombrero and carrying a bottle of tequila gold,
as purposeful and goal-oriented as,
in the suggestion of Tom Robbins,
having phone sex with a deaf nun,

But that's the only kind of meat priests eat nowadays
with mad cow disease and E.coli.
The ministers of the world can't take too many chances,
and prayers will only get them so far.
At least they know where the meats been
(in the habit of vegetating and incubating nothing but dust and sinful thoughts,
only performed on in the privacy of the rectory,
behind closed doors and with the intimacy of stain glass).

I step off the shoulder, into stop and go traffic,
the floor crumbling beneath my feet as if God was taunting Satan.

 

4:23 am

Insignificant banter fills my
raging mind with the
evening and the infinite journey. As rapidly blinking lampposts merge into a never ending blaze at such a high speed, we are
eager for a resolution to our
incessant debate that
sequesters the feeling we have been withstanding for months
all because I am a Catholic girl who is more afraid of my parents than God. (God will forgive me; my parents will kill me.)
Jabbering through the pros and cons, we
endure my indecisiveness concerning my virginity for yet another night
right up until the very end,
kicking and screaming.

 

AMY ZARKOS graduated with Honors from Pace University, earning a B.A. in English Literature (though she rarely gets any use out of it). Her work has been published in anthologies such as Aphros, ep;phany, and Wall Paper. In between writing and editing and serving as a Production Editor at Fairchild Books, Amy spends her free time counting the days till other aspiring writers get paid to edit her work.