Suicide Underground - Air

Everyone dated the demise of our neighborhood

From the suicides of the Lisbon girls

People saw their clairvoyance in the wiped out elms

And the harsh sunlight

Some thought the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls

Pointed to a simple refusal to accept the world

As it was handed down to them

So full of flaws

But the only thing we are certain of

After all these years

Is the insufficiency of explanation

(Obviously, doctor, you’ve never been a 13 year old girl)

The Lisbon girls were

Thirteen, Cecilia

Fourteen, Lux

Fifteen, Bonnie

Sixteen, Mary

And seventeen, Therese

No one could understand how

Mrs. Lisbon and Mr. Lisbon

Our math teacher

Had produced such beautiful creatures

From that time on

The Lisbon house began to change

Almost everyday

And even when she wasn’t keeping an eye on Cecilia

Lux would suntan on a towel

Wearing a swimsuit that caused the knife sharpener

To give her a 15 minute demonstration for free

The only reliable boy who got to know Lux

Was Trip Fontaine

Who only 18 months before the suicides

Had emerged from baby fat

To the delight of girls and mothers alike

But few anticipated it would be so drastic

The girls were pulled out of school

And Mrs Lisbon shut the house in maximum security isolation

The girls' only contact with the outside world

Was through the catalogs they ordered

That started to fill the Lisbon’s mailbox

With pictures of high-end fashions and brochures for exotic vacations

Unable to go anywhere

The girls traveled in their imaginations

To gold tipped Siamese temples, or past an old man with a leaf broom

Tiding a moss-carpeted speck of Japan

And Cecilia hadn’t died

She was a bride in Calcutta

Collecting everything we could of theirs

We couldn’t get the Lisbon girls out of our minds

But they were slipping away

The colours of their eyes were fading

Along with exact locations of moles and dimples

From five they had become four

And they were all living in the dead

Becoming shadows

We would have lost them completely

If the girls hadn’t contacted us

Lux was the last to go

Fleeing from the house we had forgot to stop at the garage

After the suicide free-for-all

Mr and Mrs. Lisbon gave up any attempt to lead a normal life

They had Mr Hedly pack up the house

Selling what furniture he could in a garage sale

Everyone went just to look

Our parents did not buy used furniture

And they certainly didn’t buy furniture tainted by death

We, of course, took the family photos that were put out with the trash

Mr. Lisbon put the house on the market

And it was sold to a young couple from Boston

It didn’t matter in the end how old they had been

Or that they were girls

But only that we had loved them

And they hadn’t heard us calling.

still do not hear us

Calling them out of those rooms

Where they went to be alone for all time

Alone in suicide

Which is deeper then death

And where we will never find the pieces

To put them back together