UV

By Wendy Taylor Carlisle

Today I was going to write about love.

As in, suppose love was the color of fresh blood but not as thick as blood or suppose it was the shade of a lowering sky or yellow as ambition, purple as eggplant or a slap wound or perhaps the color of satin on a heart-shaped honeymoon bed in one of those hotels that don’t bear scrutiny with a UV light?

Remember when Mom sent us that travel UV, shaped like a dildo?

She claimed it would sterilize organic matter on sheets and chairs in the motels where we spent our nights. UV lights were all the rage when the country distrusted motels, before Motel 6 was branded by that guy with the soothing voice who said he’d, “Keep the light on” for us.

The dildo instructions promised it would find traces—shit, spunk, spit, snot—around stained hotel rooms, which we could then clean up at 2 in the morning, stoned and loaded down with amps and guitars.

And it did.

Love then was only your music, but suppose it became money-green and convinced us it was scarce and drove us through the night to strange undisinfected beds? Then suppose I found myself not thinking about love? Suppose the dildo disinfected memory?

Suppose I never thought again about your gun?

—

About Author

Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives and writes in the Arkansas Ozarks. In 2023, Belle Point Press reissued her first book, Reading Berryman to the Dog, and a chapbook-length selection of her work appears in Wild Muse: Ozarks Nature Poetry(Cornerpost Press, 2023.) Find her work in pacificREVIEW, Atlanta Review, Freshwater Review, Tab, Rattle and elsewhere. For more visit her website here.