How Heavy By How Far

No need to cry

2008-07-17T00:30:00.000-04:00

Doll-face. I'm just right here.

Feel a thing left

2008-07-16T02:26:00.000-04:00

As the bird wouldn't stop fretting outside the window. The whole time I was putting pieces of the wall inside a plastic bag, testing the ceiling for holes. I know you'd like me to go now. This child's toy, thick with dirt. Don't look at me. I was not the one to leave it.

Now where I did get to

2008-07-14T21:40:00.000-04:00

Call it, “Room of tormented light”
And let a bee-sting’s persistence substitute for sex.

The way this wall buckles. I mean the way it crumbles.
Makes room for plants to grow, like the way I call for you

At night when I’m thirsty and there is no one
Must wear an oxygen mask, Mama, to handle this plaster

Lavender, cream, and rose colors of childhood
All split in seams and faded, I gather into a plastic bag

Sit on the top dusty step with my bare white legs
And look down through cracked glass, unafraid here—

Later grazing on frozen raspberries in my underwear.
Gold seeds wedged in graves between my teeth.

Haven't been there for so long

2008-07-07T19:49:00.000-04:00

Here means this, means his, means hers. So here is where a heart and how the arms cross. Here is hands on hips. Hello and welcome. I’d like to challenge. Take from me, I take from you. Balance toward giving. That mother’s muscles were beyond belief. That girl just starting breasts. I put my arms above my head. I aimed a camera in the dark. I cannot find it all here. Such as, goats tied with ragged sisal. One alone wore a bell, like a tongue making hollow. Charcoal of closed fires. Inelegant snorts of hippopotamus’ on the night shore. A palm-sized spider crawled across the wall in the same room in which I had to sleep and made the lake an ocean. Everything does come back to be about the body. Because we cannot not imagine what it means to be touched: to be told here, to ask for here. How many things will I try. Someone or something gave me here. Now everyday, how don’t I drop it.

Hard to know the difference

2008-07-06T14:35:00.000-04:00

One is an eye, its scrunched up lashes, the other, between-the-legs. It’s all about not seeing: utilize the frame. Such as, these screens look casual against the bedroom wall, their flimsy metal imagining where else a window could be. Don’t bother to fit them. Don’t block the breezes. The ceiling gets hot to the touch. Ice cube melted on a clavicle. I write a poem about a specific, small town cemetery I traveled to with a friend. The horse-fly that touched my bare stomach there. Memory weight of its glitzy body, stitched into the scene. I drink a little too much when we get to the bottom. Ferns like sea foam an exterior. Clash against my third-hand, rose-dust, oriental rug. I mean I live with. Always taking off her shirt. Whose shirt? My own. The screen is good for a hot day. Used to push my tongue against before supper. And an uneven grid on my cheek. I traced it like a scar the skin would briefly accept. Fingered its fade. Waited for someone to call my name.

Everyone still alive say "Aye"

2008-07-04T14:19:00.000-04:00

Jesse’s pony ran off during the uncles’ early firework’s display. Promise he’ll come back. I picked up the hot end of the sparkler, the darker end, thinking the part that shined would be the burn, though I’d repeatedly been told otherwise. Betsy cut a leaf off her aloe and I quit my crying. Held its milky gel to my palm-sear. Got another can of red pop, still sniffling, refusing to join my sister and the cousins. “Always making yourself the outsider. You can go play.” I wanted to sit on somebody’s lap. For Betsy to put her sharp drink down and carry me under the clothesline, singing “Ba-by An-na.” I couldn’t quit keeping away from the others, though it made me sad. Like an invisible string I couldn’t explain or cross, but I knew it was there. How long the sky stayed light then, but gradually like our faded sheets, wash after wash, in reverse came the darkness. So sparklers and cigarette ends could more fiercely glow, and voices louder, ice in the bucket, everyone I knew still accounted for, save Jesses’s pony, far out to neighboring pastures, where he was trained never to go. A few more drinks and everyone forgot, watched the sky, swatted mosquitoes, made love, or fell asleep or threw fists. So I came to see that in time, even he would be forgiven.

Old fashioned communication

2008-07-03T20:09:00.000-04:00

I practice my handwriting at the window, but only one line, and on shreds of tape: One of the things he did for me One of the things he did for me One of the things— At some point, the earliest lip of exhaustion, hand or heart alters: …he did to me the new, finishing thought. I’m layering the tape to the seat of the three-spoke chair. I’m piling it with years’ old apple cores. Some bear my teeth marks and some bear yours, but so shriveled you’d never know. It is hard work. I drink a lot of water. I want to rest, when suddenly, two things happen: outside the screen a blue balloon, just out of reach. When it dips below the roof I run downstairs, catch the string that’s tangled in the flowering tree. The end’s weighed with a firecracker like a little scroll, a message without a message, which in a sense is more. I tug the balloon behind me, stop to check the mail and find an envelope you’ve marked, $47. It’s out of my hands. Almost laugh. The balloon is covered with rain, and shy like a strange animal. Inside it feels its way along the ceiling, creeping to the farthest slanted corner, and stops. We sit regarding one another. At which point I realize, I haven’t said a word all day. I think of Bennet in Mbita who writes, consistently, Why so quiet friend? I don’t know how to begin. It’s getting dark. The balloon string and its firecracker nuzzle the chair’s remaining spokes.

Later, it would be raining from a perfectly clear sky

2008-07-02T14:52:00.000-04:00

The second time I woke in lavender. The danger passed, although all morning I dreamed uneasy, their heavy flashlights, the early pounding at my door. I held very still. Maybe someone crept inside our basement even now, toppling cardboard boxes, even the ones that held my oldest poems. I wanted to tell you about this. You would wrap your hands around both my wrists as if to lift me from a pile. Fidgety kittens. You would say, It will be okay okay okay okay okay. The outside danger means no longer punished. Mother would allow it.

Add to the list, "Tuesday's Gone"

2008-07-01T13:39:00.000-04:00

This is the season of the clay-rose barrette. Also wear a hive in my chest, vividly acknowledging itself with over-accelerated, gold-black sewing. Coming home from dinner with friends, I walked under the flowering tree of the front yard and the smell nearly drove me to my knees. I thought that part had passed, but no: here were the lavender buds freshly twisted, wet crepe and crumpled like ballerinas. The evening’s discussion—what are the songs that make you cry. Some options: “Heal the World,” “Asleep,” “Crimson and Clover....” though undecided if the song is just the agent for crying that needed to happen, or if the song holds the crying already inside it. Either way, touch it and you change. The way a rock could weep was how I’ve been feeling. The landlord asks to come by and I think about dust. The many outlines where I’ve stood have evidence. Sucking a nectarine over the kitchen sink, trying to match my face up in the mirror. The strangers will walk by my bed. He will tell them, “Of course you can arrange things to your own,” and, “It looks like she finally put in some screens.” Between visitors I also devoured melted carob like a little pig. I mean funny, not self-deragatory. Sometimes you are really that down! or is it hungry, or both maybe. Then I think the word heart and it glows, of a torn piece of Sappho: “absolutely I can,” and it finger pokes the frustration. A hole in the hive for a bee to fly through. Turn up the radio, some kids want to cry. Some kids want to dance. “We need you,” said the drooping banner across the brick high school. I let the latest spider in my bedroom live.

Trifles

2008-06-29T21:23:00.000-04:00

What's Wrong With This Picture

1. Walking through cemetery feels abstract.
2. Girl’s foot going through the floorboard of the train depot.
3. Baby bottle filled with vodka.
4. Clock hands spinning wildly.
5. Bats hanging from bedroom curtains.
6. Dust cloud on top of cake and no forks to eat it.
7. Green dress with tear up central seam shows slip.
8. Crowds in tie-dye won’t stop walking by the window.
9. Man’s wristwatch on top of apple crate.
10. Bookshelf missing books.
11. Girl has hives on her neck and on part of her back.
12. Girl is hungry even though she just ate.
13. Necklace tangled at throat.
14. Wishbone.
15. Ants crawling in basin of sink.
16. Clay rose-barrette missing rose.
17. Money on table pretend.
18. Teeth in test tube, and are weeping.
19. One blue eye.
20. Fireworks going off every ten seconds.
21. Pillows without pillowcases.
22. Photocopies too dark.
23. Girl has sharpie rings around her neck.
24. Helicopter flying upside down over the house.
25. Strawberries covered with slugs and chair missing three spokes.
26. Mattress pushed on floor.
27. Name spoken by someone we can’t see.
28. Pilots’ blue leaking.
29. Hands clutching red lamp shade.
30. 4 a.m., 5 a.m., 6 a.m.
31. Telephone left off its hook.
32. Pearl spit in blue bowl.

Dissolve

2008-06-28T21:41:00.001-04:00

Only part unfamiliar

2008-06-27T21:29:00.000-04:00

Consider: we only lose what we care about. Everything else we forget. I stood in the century-old kiln struck deaf. All of the birds outside, all of the forklifts, and the men tugging wire through columns. In an instant: did not exist. The white brick bathed pistachio. Then walking down a tunnel in dishwater light. Cooler and cooler, like a place on the back of the tongue you can never quite reach. The tour guide explaining what the holes were for. Answering my grasping: “What does each pipe mean? Is the color for air universal?" Blue, yellow, danger, a feeling. In the small town outside the factory three sisters in the churchyard wearing nighties as proper clothes. My childhood dream! My mother said yes once and once only, and buckled me in the backseat to be taken to the movies. Where the whole time, I couldn’t pay attention because of what I had on. Those girls’ mama said “Get in the car” and drove them five houses down to their own. To drink hugs at their kitchen table. Old Maid scattered on the rug. The box fan propped in the second story window. If the thing you love most you lose, then you draw it in some manner for rest of your life. Rebirth rebirthing. We were nothing alike and yet there was a longing I could recognize. The way that they moaned nothing to do. Super balls fading in the sun.

Loosens like the shaking of bells

2008-06-26T21:09:00.000-04:00

Her confession after so many years: “In the hospital I didn’t want him to come and see me.” I sit in the darkening window to think about this. Remember I kept picking out the wrong baby, exasperating everyone. Personal histories could fit inside matchbooks: I would like to make a collection, one story per book, an organized set like encyclopedias. It feels good to be alone. Lightning keeps happening, draws itself in white-gold writing on the back of my skull. Eyes inward to see it says the thing all night I’ve been practicing: One of the things he did for me. How many cursive handwritings I tried, and all of them childish no matter how I held the pencil. I tape some purple flowers in the book, press it clear around loose pollen. It’s the kind of act that allows you for a moment, to imagine yourself dead. But I just learned the origin of here and it means so much. What isn’t I love too, because it means it is. Because let me remember his shoulders through the cloth. Let me my brother who never and my mother mourned. All the bats, all the bats like lashes flutter at my screen. I lean on my blue-flowered horse, recall I dragged it all around the yard like a living thing. The way he picked it up and held it—I can't tell you what that means to me.

Darling, they are most things have got me down

2008-06-25T16:22:00.000-04:00

Disappears the afternoon
Storm pouting out its lower lip like it has every right
well, it does
and I’m still wearing what, for convenience’s sake,
let’s call pajamas
half a piece of rice toast, salt
mama’s lilac panting all over the bedroom oh heavenly match
to thunderclouds
you who like to fly, unlike I do, like to name the kinds of clouds
sweet Midwest
the broken chains and sticky babies
and my stray dead dog ghosting herself into hysterics on the corner
as I’m walking home from the dentist,
reassured my teeth aren’t falling out though I continue
to dream about them, littering the mantle or spit into my palm

"get going while it's cool," she says, "put everything in boxes, label them,
I always wish
I labeled things better"
one thing’s for sure
we’re going to need the daily check-ins soon
it’s not just the fans making noise up there

one flash was, I saw you climbing down the coral
into the cave, your blue shirt, sleeves rolled
the ocean was coming on coming on
but you wanted to see the bats,
as promised, the water did not rise so fast to drown you
and they did not fly out either
to bury your face

Dusk portrait of a single day

2008-06-23T22:09:00.001-04:00

I washed the sheets. My shirt’s off. I’m typing up poems. So I made it, in a sense, at least to here which is a time marker that will continue to fail itself. Infinities of here, here, here, could become small victories, if I made emotion out of at least one. Everything wants to shift though. Suddenly, the banister’s worn-yellow light recalls the dilapidated motels along the highway driving south, though we never stayed in any of them. Parking lots busy with lawn-chair pow-wows and shirtless babies, that amused us with their bleary authenticity. However mildly inviting the scene, we wished no physical part of it. Is it safe to say you loved me then, as we passed through towns yearning for, but eager to leave them behind? Last night I dreamed of high-thread-count bedding, soaked with loss, and woke to find myself not in fancy hotel, nor run-down, but in my own bed, alone--at the very least, no blood to be found.

Feeling feeling

2008-06-22T22:37:00.000-04:00

I wrapped the rubber band around my ring finger until it purpled, and then I wrapped the other. Such power in the tiny throbbing. In an instant, I saw things clearly: a simple relocation of the heart into the hands. For the rest of the day, everything I picked up meant love, even though it hurt.

Stay

2008-06-21T22:05:00.000-04:00

Cleave

2008-06-20T22:35:00.000-04:00

“The ones who danced after that woman had danced…interested me the most (awon ti o to seyin irawon lo wu mi ninu ijoye) because they brought so much pleasure (nitoripe o ni faji pipo)….there was a pleasurable quality to the gestures that could not be performed by someone whose body was not cool and whole (ajijona pelu ilarar bee nitori idaraya bi osi bee arawa etutu)” Ojuda Arebiyi, Takon, Dahomey, Gelede cult.

Here we are or were. The day hot for sure. I leaned over the boat’s edge, both for ease in vomiting, and to keep an eye on you, loose in such rough waters. Our Kenyan guide, drying at the prow in his underwear, flexing muscular thighs, said, Sister, sister, don’t you want to get in? I tried to smile. He was very beautiful, “glittering,” you might say. To be called so closely by a stranger, whose customs bred love, made me a believer of something. I wanted it to include you. Your flesh in the clear, green waters, interspersed with electric fish. The way the sun subsumed your freckles. The sky a heady blue. I kept my damp head to the rocking rib of the boat. And oh, those German children we later cursed! Brother and sister, who wouldn’t stop diving—to swim away and rise again, repeatedly, at such distance—before turning back to wave, victoriously, at the very thing they’d left.

Love in the wings

2008-06-19T19:30:00.000-04:00

A milkshake stain on the sidewalk looks like a circus lion: that is, a lion wearing a frilly clown collar, and with an extra long tail. I made the stain last night when I kicked the cup over in the dark, an old anger newly driving me. Now I see the stain from my third story window, where I’ve calmed some, in work to realign my heart: yanks on the thick rubber pulleys where it’s slipped. “I don’t know if I can do this!” shouts a young woman in flip-flops, riding on a bicycle. “Go up it!” a male voice shouts back. With a certain, gentle wobble she makes it over the curb and continues on out of sight. In the part I can’t see, I will that he embrace her for bravery.

Here and not

2008-06-18T14:24:00.000-04:00

I wake in a bed the size of childhood and sense the room’s three bookshelves empty, the gather of my body, shoulders dense like bit ice. I think of A. in Florida, zipping up her drawings, laying out her dress. She will make the day, with coffee and the cobwebs from a bulldozed house. How long until I meet my friends again, and some already here. I mean to love, not nausea, not the homemade packets always, of ginger or mint. Simplicity like the night before, the child’s half-whisper, “What is made out of metal, smaller than that cup, and sometimes part of a blanket?” so as not to disturb the actors under pine trees. Mosquitoes like a halo around the baby. His mother stops her violin to breastfeed while the men describe the clouds. Shakespearily. I try to pinpoint the exact moment we’d call “dark” but the sinking’s so gradual I forget. Look down and my hands are blurred on the flannel; back up, and the stage suddenly empty, its blue ribbons loosened from the boards like streamers at a party’s end. Everyone moved inside hungry. The kitchen lights thrown on the lawn belong to anyone who’s grown up in the Midwest anywhere, the feeling both ominous and comforting. To hear the voices just behind the screen, while the cold, blue summer’s what you’re standing in, unseen.

Here is time and here is time, too

2008-06-17T14:30:00.000-04:00

We were driving by the Wonder Bread Factory in the snow, I in my periwinkle tights, the knee you accidentally. All things begin, all things end, but so do all things “go on forever.” So the image is many faces sideways on the pillow, with a blurry morning look, one pair of eyes made clearer by the moment. And whose, when waking alone, at 10:30 on a Tuesday, in a sudden summer cold. I arise. I go. A little Yeats into the country. My camera and a blanket and a bundle of mint. “I put a spell on you” on stereo. Be careful of the children and that the light’s quite right, and dingy swans and straw hats and the way we’ll peel an apple there with pocket-knives. Fold them up carefully in the dark. How many stars are. What kind of constellations are. “You want to see them swimming in the moonlight, well lean over.” I do, I do.

We deal in millions

2008-06-16T19:31:00.000-04:00

My father sends an article about the town burning uncontrollably underground, as early on no one tried to stop it. Easy metaphors abound. At the newspaper’s edge he writes, “Isn’t this the place you always ask about?” So ferns grow in winter in abandoned backyards, and no one’s there to love their long green look, waving inside bitterness. I don’t call him up on Father’s Day. Instead, discover dust six inches deep beneath my ancient radiator where I lay on the floorboards to keep cool. I try to keep my estimations accurate, as we lack so much in simple saying that the emotion behind everything’s constantly distorted. Mother: “It’s not like I don’t have nine-million things to do!” Father: “There are ten-thousand boxes in that attic!” The number always larger than one could fathom. I like thinking of how infinity can become concrete: my friend A. sanding a deer skull in moments of uncertainty. A delicate mountain of skull-dust rose in the bottom of a bucket. Death becomes something when the eye socket distorts. I clacked a horse’s tooth against my own and thought, let the feeling. I’ve always wanted a brother, thus a space I live along’s my mother’s stillborn child. The day I’m too depressed to answer the phone I don’t turn on the bathroom light either. All’s to hell the feeling, then: a bleary rainbow glows above the faucet, impossible its source.

Sometimes it is too much to share

2008-06-15T19:05:00.000-04:00

No, no, I would not do at all.

Wake up, don't recognize

2008-06-14T16:03:00.000-04:00

Embarassed I got caught on the landing by my neighbors in my underwear and t-shirt, I said, by way of explanation, "They aren’t really my pajamas. Just what I put on when I wake up." Who am I disappointing that I don’t own negligees, lingerie? Though I still have a musty drawer full of slips, laced and mostly oversized, the color of frosted sorbets. At the playground, the mother whose child kept lifting up her skirt said, “Marybelle, not everyone wants to see your behind,” and I felt I could better relate to the child, feeling, acting, not wanting to think. In a recent exchange my friend declared, “The best transportation for love is a bicycle,” and I agreed, the same day I realized my stomach pains were not for love, but because I was taking too many vitamins. I have a photograph of said friend from three stories above, as he lay sprawled on the sidewalk beneath an antique bike, clutching a striped box like the man in Dali’s “Un Chien Andalou,” which both drove and broke our hearts through high school. Recall the slow motion headshake of the man in rising Wagner, just before he gets shot. Falls down gently from room to field before getting dragged away. Is that some kind of hope? To die in grass so green it’s an all encompassing ocean. Late shadows on a sleeper. I miss my friend. The tall skinny man with enormous grin and nowhere to be, says, “Ladies first, you, you,” when I pass him on the sidewalk, and the kindness of his voice about makes me crack. A feeling for which I will not apologize. I wrote, “I owe you 90 cents. Next time,” on the back of the envelope and put it in the mail.

Anniversaries, Unexpected

2008-06-13T15:40:00.000-04:00

For the Occasion

2008-06-13T02:03:00.001-04:00

States of undress

2008-06-11T12:58:00.000-04:00

Summer stutters on the lip of the sill where the bat slipped in, night I woke alone, second after I dreamed I wasn’t. Outside, bush of green from antique gold, brave and fuzzy like shook out young swans. Beside the river where two snapping turtles startled me in their apartness. Well, you asked for a sign, and you got it. What if I refuse, send it back to the gods unopened? Question: How have my desires changed since I let go the collar of my mother? Answer: In the gone light only can I be entirely blonde. Perhaps, look backwards, the glint of sun in your mirror as you are exiting for home. Not that I want it that way, the creosote streaked in my palms its own kind of dear. I’m collecting all the clothes I can’t fit, and fall in love with, and die to. Tied together, they begin to make sense if “Detachment of human vitality, involving masks, headdresses, staffs, raiment…” African for what substance of our spirits the object holds. Two rifles in crossed posture will arrest the still image, the clothing arranged like limbs, the beads of gentle voodoo in burgundy and blue. Of the long guns x’d to hold the spirit: I mean to uncross them. As when kissing, I kiss with positive for, just as I kiss against: the heave in a room whose door we keep closed. The heave in the afternoon, of the dead horse I held on my lap in an empty house, way back before the beginning.

How much as a child did you think about time

2008-06-09T15:58:00.000-04:00

Before all this there was nothing. But nothing is not nothing. Nothing was all black. Or sometimes nothing was all white. You went back and forth about it. Black and white are something! In the end, that wasn't possible either.

So we asked our fathers about it. How could there be nothing if nothing needed to be invented by something?

We came up with new measurements for time. How long is one minute? As long as it takes

for you to brush your teeth before the mirror
write your name sixteen times
finish that glass of water

cross the room

but that could take ten years, she said
what about a lifetime

mayfly wings, dried bees
the rooms that are left to rot
we glimpse, are inspired from the street

As a child, you had the blue wool blanket to hold in your bed.
How I might've known you,
did your family not plant apples
near the dark lot of my own.

Some things to do in the country

2008-06-08T00:14:00.000-04:00

Put a dress on
or don't put a dress on
all's I'm saying is
that's the orange-lace spectacle again, following me
in a room where argument's chewed like rind then morning and I'm out
the road suddenly gravel under me, and a bend
spooked two horses, the white one
death's breath
come back it's a room full of women, the men's t-shirts
in piles
a pool glowing in the dark other voices, the party lifted
sheet of tracing paper and simply moved
so conversation doesn't have to end, just goes quiet in the grain some
until she says, "let me get out your baby plate" to the grown boy,
says "let me cut your meat in little pieces for you," to the man
I danced on the table with the child in my high shoes
beside the pool where I learned
the same child says "don't get in here you might drown"
the kind of thing you'd see if--
that dresser of your mother's in early evening
sun on the knobs
so you don't have to open the drawer to know what's inside
the torn photograph of the one in curlers,
two heavy crosses glinting at her throat
your blood
the smallest town that bore you
until you try to swim back
under its legs

When we get home

2008-06-06T22:54:00.000-04:00

Fish and mango pickle

2008-06-06T22:46:00.000-04:00

Click To Play

One finally flew

2008-06-05T12:30:00.000-04:00

You want to know, Which one is the baby dresser? I point and say That one: it’s the color of algae or peas. You’ll know it’s for a baby if you see how shallow the closet inside, just enough hanging space for the longest item a baby would own, its baptism gown, which I do have, proof that once I was saved. Though the gown’s gone yellow, lost in a box somewhere, and I stopped praying. I try to love wholly and purely regardless. In the apartment for instance, I let the moths go, but I smashed a spider at the top of the stairs. Its crumpled body stays above a light gold stain. That was its last. Whoever—forgive me—it looked poison. The same night I wake to the sound of the window banging and rise confused to no wind—at the light, a bat whirls out and swoops my hair like a cartoon, only I live here. Pale but don’t scream. All night it flaps around and I sleep with the sheet over my head, recalling truth of what creeps in the dark is not always better in the morning. I turbulent dream, all said we could not undo. And the toads the summer the ocean flooded behind our cheap hotel. I got getting carried out of there, ill, ill, ill. A child really, no more or less, afraid to step for what she could not see: did blink its strange wet eyes and breathe.

...you get that attitude?!

2008-06-04T17:57:00.000-04:00

A craving for salt so strong it opens the wound. I want to be on my back, dazing, because suddenly, looking at the tiny calendar in the artificial coolness and darkness at the bank, I realized: summer. Must’ve had my head down so long. This season I’m different. Wear a long-sleeved shirt unbuttoned to eat dinner, the whole time slightly embarrassed at myself, and wondering why I won’t button it—then realize—it’s my father, who used to eat in his undershirt when it got “too hot to breathe” we said, and remained the only family on the block without air conditioning. My baby sister and I fought over the fan in the upstairs hall between our bedrooms. The cord not long enough to reach either. A water balloon fight only the reverse, and the anger was thick, real, why we won’t say love for years. No one was owed more than the other. And no one was owed at all. Now her baby reaches for the prescription pill bottle but won’t give up the rubber duck. My father leaves a message, A fox ran by the side of the house, if you can believe it. I feel: fifteen. I feel: my mosquito bite scars. The abandoned house where I would take some photographs. The sun in the blue window with something spilled on it, the last of something I notice only now, where it’s flickering in whole shapes, that won’t hold still enough.

Remember what you were wearing

2008-06-03T14:46:00.001-04:00

Think thigh and blush

2008-06-02T08:00:00.000-04:00

My grandmother collected owls, and her youngest daughter, unicorns. There’s something to carry you through the night: hoot and horn. I traced their porcelain hooves with a fingertip. Now I have the very blue veins of her hands, the long fingers looking like they were made to pick dust out of the cake batter though my general appearance speaks otherwise. We are trying to figure out something about the body. Why I might boy myself to girl bed, but No, he said, you will always be such a girl, for he was not a girl either. Or a way to try and keep me in zone of his desire. She was he, was she? The poet wished for “meaningless” legs. I read this in a magazine one summer, plain as an advertisement for a grocery store product, except for the suggestion of impending death. White flash on a Sunday: don’t interpret it as God. The ceiling fan keeps the air from stale and also relieves the flesh its reflections. Rib section of sandbars, how goes the sweat. As we are naturally coming around to the subject, you should know that my own collections are varied, but most prominently include a family of deer, lost you might say, in their trio on the vanity. Yet they watch over my bed like old friends, while sleep or not sleep, and I do too, see their eyes in the dark, as they are recording the warming parts herein.

One pendulum per person

2008-06-01T22:14:00.000-04:00

There is something in that—
stillness at the top of the stairs.

Because I wrote to you
and you were not there.

And, but, not

2008-05-31T14:19:00.000-04:00

Outside-in, so windy, my unfinished poems fly and I’m forced to acknowledge “eternity in the past” is the present. The echo of the bell going on in the air— but also, it’s not going anywhere. This morning, when I call my mother early to tell her my problem, the echo is guns, firing, and won’t stop. I tell her, I can’t hear you over that noise. And she, But I can hear you. Speaking into the tunnel, words get lost. I know that much. I only want to say one thing: peonies, ravaged by ants. But then so easily what a conjunction can do, of my desire for things to spill: peonies, ravaged by ants and you tearing the band-aid with your teeth in the car. I was present at both, and separate. I still have the scab, which matches my shirt of yesterday. Almost my skin color, the color of the grimy comb I found for my hair. I feel its teeth—bone cased in skin, with a message to get out—brain swarm. Where’s the heart in it? But. It is its own hornet’s nest, locking the red center.

Lucky to get a seat, now stand

2008-05-30T15:45:00.000-04:00

The chair I use the kitchen chair made by my great-grandfather, and might better be described as the chair I grew up in, even as I was flouncing off to school in my father’s pajamas. I’m sitting in my underwear to write you because the apartment’s too hot. After eating the popsicle, tap-water tasted like “young coconut.” Recall the quiet inside the hairy shell when I tilted for a drink on the road leading to Mombasa—for a moment, was being back in America, waking up in a still, white room beside you, on a morning neither of us had a place to be. After drinking I got back into the freshly-repaired matatu that blasted Bob Marley seaward through the trees with an intensity like the word of God. If a feeling could have a name like a color of paint, but not a color, what was mine when I let go of all control, on the deepest continent, flying through the trees and couldn’t speak the language? If a feeling could have a name, what was yours when you washed your face in a clean sink, and thought of me? I wasn’t there, when I couldn’t be. Why I save a little bit of my sandwich for later. Everyday don’t trust love’s returns, nor should I. The language of its reverses—what might drive a person so far from embrace the landscape’s changed. Elephant skulls along the road more massive even than the real thing, though I glimpsed one once in red distance, a body too strange for the mind to conceive. Heart, mountain, hyena, believe: I tried.

Sometimes forget (a glimpse would be good)

2008-05-30T00:57:00.000-04:00

How to make waiting
the object/the object
of waiting--

the theater
(of course!)--
it's dark.

Figuring out waiting

2008-05-28T18:34:00.000-04:00

I forget the thought you told me to write down. A sliver holds everything already inside it? Like the moon, whose romance I ruined the night of the eclipse by comparison to my bloody toe. How could or cold that night, and the white cat jumped out of the bushes a filthy long-haired mess, to deliver me a message from my dead. Tragic queen. I paint my awful toes pastel to appease my mother who visits, and tries to re-align my appearance. “I don’t think anyone wears a bathing suit with tights,” and so on, until, “I guess it looks nice,” so we can get in the car. It is night and I am terrified of space. The feeling between stars is the empty dressing room in the off-season, the backstage draft under lightly drifting velour, the metal lockers pushed back on their hinges. The season empty of dancers. Kids home, birds flown. Who paces the braided edge of her rug waiting for the mail to arrive. Who decides rubber gloves a “good idea” for doing dishes, but lasts in them one day. Is this what one meant when she said, Art somewhere between the image and the word-- And the tool my hand. I practice rap songs and sort the homemade doll clothes bought for fifty-cents from the mothball bin. I long for the weird fabrics to fit.

Not quite fugue

2008-05-27T20:52:00.000-04:00

I leave the city for the first time in weeks and in the country I do not throw up on the winding roads past all the newborn animals (Meg loves the trippy legs of the lambs you wrote, how many years ago). In the tiny college costume shop, A. asks, “What do you think a grave digger would wear? What about modern Ophelia?” I pick the stretchy butterfly shirt for her, knowing she’s going to drown. She’s going to shave her head before. She’s going to need some purple cut-off tights and a pair of boots that will turn anchors. The gravedigger will wear a mechanic’s suit. The priest a priest’s. I climb the high ladder and disappear inside white dresses. Men’s clothes harder. Nothing on any rack smells like you. And nothing smells like you, or I don’t know how you. I open Tupperwares full of 1950’s bathing suits. A kind of circus aesthetic. I want to look ridiculous. Anger you with what I’d wear. And then I’m going to go outside in that insane outfit. The kind of private play I’m famous for: you keep on waiting for me to come back. But no matter how bright or foolish my clothes, I don’t make contact: window after window stalking, farther from the house. Farther and quieter I go, and I, and my, and my, my, the sky is getting stormy, the fields disappeared, and my throat, you darling, know you, your favorite play, it's ice.

Sensory dislocate

2008-05-26T20:00:00.000-04:00

My neighbors tend the yard all hours of the weekend. I’d like that job: when anyone passes, stand up, breathless, and dangle a trowel in such a posture that suggests: Life is good! while wiping your brow with an honest smudge. By July, tomatoes rotting faster than any person could consume, will cover kitchen tables. The attempting storm slams me with about-to sensation. In Mbita, one orange cost two shillings and I ate them as I walked, tossing the peels in the bicycle grooves, until Bennett asked me, of the oranges, “How can you make it last if you walk?” Suddenly, the possibility occurred: everything doesn’t have to overlap, even if the mind. Could be rather, single activities ringed around single trees. I’d forgotten what it was to suck one bite, maybe looking at the sun shed on the lake, and beyond that, just a continuation of what you can already see. Gold-white, water, to infinity. Dangerous to think outside the current weather, where I will go, if I will shut down, which I did anyway, afternoons I offered kissing but I forgot I had to eat. I begin a list in pencil on the apartment wall to help remind myself the children’s names. Each day practice, and then look at their faces. It was a party, the day we all ate groundnuts instead of porridge, and drank a kind of Kool-aid mixed with lake. Jacob’s daughter hunched behind the house licking sugar from the packets until her mouth was dizzy orange. The sense of her wrists, streaked and sticky, and how she didn’t stop—I thought I understood that. Though who can say? My long journey out of there began by morning.

Holiday Entertainment

2008-05-25T21:13:00.001-04:00

Dear You: I've started a sculpture on the black steps of everything I pick up outside: matchbook, marble, milk- top, blue, all the way up to the attic where a video monitor sits inside an empty child's dresser. I had a conversation with a sock. Starred in a private play. Cheek-soft the red velour. Questioned: is this an icon or a fetish? Questioned: how much do I invite versus pretend to? Is there anything else you need to know? I: search new measurements with my braid. Do magic with my fist. Listen to voices at a picnic I'm not part of. The baby birds that hatched in the bedroom wall have flown, but the helicopters still circle my roof daily.

Everything is simple in a room except time

2008-05-23T09:04:00.000-04:00

My father singing to the record, He said ooh-ee-ooh-ah-ah the night I peed on fake bricks.

Pineapple rings, heavy, sugared, forethought of hunger since dried. Still gone after eaten. As even the sturdiest winter boots will wear thin, and anyone on the death march could have told you that.

So it is the twist-tie makes me sad.

“There is a reason you can remember exactly what you were wearing.”

What subconscious thought I made a palette: blue velour, red velvet, yellow magazines.

I thought tying a fishnet around a pillow would make it more welcoming, until it was pointed out to me otherwise. Still, turn on all the monitors and you’ll hear birds.

Heat through nylon and the deep creases of sleep.

A little spoiling’s always good now and then like terrible fun that hardly knows how to begin before—

I sucked a hundred paper fingers to make casts. One way of nursing evident in the saliva that’s now dried, and keeps their forms.

“But the way you’re talking,” he said, “that’s not even proper English!”

Something about me is tactile.

Deliberate trying to hold yourself
to something in the world—as awkward, as tenuous—
as some scotch-tape from your elbow to the tree bark,
on a tree you choose because it stands.

A little moves besides color

2008-05-22T10:17:00.000-04:00

1. Stand in front of the yellow one and see if it makes you cry.

The guard in his stiff gray turned to me, with an odd smile, and said, "Let me know if there's anything you'd like to take. I'll see what I can do."

2. Of glossy plane threatening to leak onto the clean wall: to turn from such bright pink, and look out the high windows, at gray sky.

What it means that two people do not do together.

3. This was supposed to be a landscape. A tableaux. Landscape.
The fan is always moving, even when no one has pulled its cord.

4. A little moves besides color: the chisels hung upside down on the pegged wall are swans, with just their heads under the water, only more practical and, perhaps, less violent.

5. "The day full of drilled holes." Or like the parts eaten out of a peach.
Several times a day I slip from the skin, into ragged, black bites.

6. The pit remains: the child is trying to grow something out of it.

7. Small brain dipped into a hole along the woods.
The fuzz will dry like a newborn’s hair.
By spring, she'll forget it was ever buried.

Assessment

2008-05-21T15:20:00.000-04:00

All of my bowls are chipped, otherwise beautiful for sherbets. Elegance of paper hats, ginger ale in jelly jars, guests on wooden chairs. I’m no good at host. The grocery store above all, overwhelms me, like the need to be proper. I’m learning to use food from my only plant. If I cared more, I’d envy the neighbor’s garden and the child who stands in it bare footed, with a good dress on. Instead I marry the sun to the floor by seeing. I accept piano can play from a computer. Muse on repetition’s tricks, how it obscures: one feeling way down is always the same, only glimpses of it rare. Was it Mount Blanc, I believe. Then you wake up and the stamp from the night before has become a blurry color on your wrist. Crossing the room accumulates to a whole life. Never think that from the question’s mouth. My grandfather, in his last days, turned his head on the pillow and said to me, “I can’t believe this is happening.” Dying so long. Still have the shoes I wore for my first birthday, when he lifted me out of the car seat in Oregon, and I baaaed at everything that moved.

There's no room for the morbid in our lives

2008-05-20T21:07:00.000-04:00

But did you forget? In the taxidermy/porn shop in the Ozarks, I set off the hollow hoof wind-chimes with my shoulders, a surface of near clacks dragging up something deeper. Wet wood pounded in forest dusk when no one should be out there. Lower the binoculars in the dark. A sculpture of mixed dead to hang from the deck? I don’t know how you’d choose, but let’s, carefully. Even some animals must try to come back angry. I lay my hand in a pile of fur faces whose mouths are cut to keep them from crying. Look at me through the snow-white one, neck for teeth and my eyes for a fox blinking in the leather-lined holes. If you won’t hand over my change-purse— then what about a raccoon jaw to hold your glasses on the bedside? Something’s broken spine on-sale, to dangle necklaces from, vertebrae by brae? I want the bat in a vintage jar for our birdcage, its prune-squashed face we’ll never have to feed, its fluid dome refracting sun in waves we can play, insert ourselves in shadows of tiny bat ears, wingtips, razor marks we can wear on our skin. The wooden shelves are heavy with remnants that will only be waste. The naked men and women watch us from their oversized, fluorescent covers to see what we’ll choose. At least we have the lake to listen to in pauses outside our dumpy window. The bedspread keeps damp the whole time we stay. The birds still sing. They flit at the pale stones by the screen door, trying to make off with our shoes—heavier than they’d think from a lace.

Theater of the inward

2008-05-19T20:17:00.000-04:00

How an airplane sounds when I make my hands into shells. J’s on an island in the Caribbean, but I call anyway : “Twenty-five-cents machine at Kroger says ‘Necklace Explosion!’” And not that I lay two nights ago in the dark, listening, so certain it wouldn’t rain I argued “plane” against your “thunder.” The undersides of leaves flipped up like giraffes’ tongues, more vulnerable because less seen. The first time I saw my father, then you, with all the hair shaved off it was terrifying, and even worse when you each smiled. A cartoon animal without pants. Scrawny puppet legs, not quite real inside felt trousers. So the windows rattled and I had to admit it: rain. Remind me to water my basil plant, whose life on me alone. I’ve already failed the strange seaweed flowers my father gave—“I thought artistic”— lasted one whole week without care, then promptly shriveled. I’ll not have a baby, though I continue to collect small things, a tin mug from Kenya like a baby would drink from with help, with two hands. The children’s laughter ruffled my dress is what I’m thinking as I cross the parking lot in strong wind. How glittering asphalt fills a shape a pothole’s already made. The seam obvious though the surface flush. I mean fresh in tired. “Zones of silence, zones of shadow” being the things, he said, “we agree not to talk about.” Meaning, my arduously slow blinking, and less seen, and more, the roots out of which my eyes. Make fragile on the skull’s curved wall, as lights on a night boat slowly passing might catch a woman frozen in reeds, sans expression, lifting up her skirt.

Of Sundays (inside)

2008-05-18T17:22:00.001-04:00

Click to Play

To put on my outdated,
stiff pink pants and get the knees damp.
Wrap the dolls up like bad patients
and hang them from the tree—

Offers to fix

2008-05-17T21:30:00.000-04:00

I will be left—with tiny fingernails like white eyelashes indenting my wrist. Falling for someone always so physical—makes sense, since to fall is to break the plane of the body. Falling out’s no different. First, you whirled me off of you onto the dirt volleyball court after karaoke, so I woke with a soft plum for a shoulder. Kissed lovingly. Years ago let out of their container. Crumpled my duvet. Here’s the gum I chewed last winter. The gauze I saved from my elbow’s crook in an emergency before I knew you. I washed the sheets so you can’t smell old love. You don’t know who you are. As confusing to me. I’m trying to look at the grass or the wall while practice saying, “That is just grass” or “That is just a wall.” As it’s tiring when everything’s always about something else. Sometimes you want someone to pull your socks off carefully, one at a time, and that be all. Others, it’s the “more and more and more of it,” perched on the closet shelf like the dress that hasn’t been unfolded a long time, because of a small hole in its blue polka-dot seam you haven’t had the energy to stitch. Crossing the blocked intersection last week, the music blasting from a car stereo made my eyes tear. For who I was walking to meet, combined with the unfurling gray-green air before a storm, that eventually stripped the newly minted leaves off the trees as promised. That’s the slaking of two hands down a ribcage. The streetlight revealing rain’s traces, its undulations, dark to light asphalt, when I come back out of the bar. And doll-sized petals wildly strewn, stamped to their see-through skins.

To or not to

2008-05-16T21:16:00.000-04:00

Who comes to,
when other fails—
in what clear terms
is something gained,
in what,
lost—

Goes, remains

2008-05-15T22:11:00.000-04:00

Baby birds in the bedroom wall sing like scratches, an overlapping heart monitor on my chest or the white paint. The song won’t stop until it’s dark. For now, day-warm but I can’t sleep. In this hour I don’t believe in anything. My H.D., my new black pearl, my drawer-deep in letters. Sister’s left a wake of tissues and a warning: You choose loss over devotion. The line I think by Hass, ringing me in and out of days: “We want more and then more and then more of it—" the it hovering somewhere just out of reach. And J says to me, “You were more in than out,” after an evening I spent shared at the table. She saw me laugh. We sat on the bench like waiting for a school bus, except we weren’t quite children now, and the problems too large to fit a one-sentence book. The new years I cried at midnight, and walked out through the dancers to the year’s most popular song, I wore a red dress and purple tights, I let my shoulders slam drunk jubilance. Why I cried then I know now. Downstairs in the bar J sat in sweatpants cheering, despite the recent death shook her. Lived out. Radiant, and other words reserved for such. I could see it in the way she tilted her glass in the smoky air. Upstairs the floor shook with the dancers. Neither of us knew that the other was there, until she turned to me, lightly: I’m glad you could be. Sweaty faces and white streamers from the rafters, the song under the song.

Come distance, run, and love’s reverses

2008-05-14T16:45:00.000-04:00

On this day of constant rain I found a pink cocktail umbrella crumpled on the sidewalk. A miniature scale’s giving-up, evinced in wet paper and light wooden spokes. A man hunched under awning asks where’s my horse and I tell him without stopping, “All tied up,” umbrella scraps clutched loose in my fingers. The way wind makes everything more difficult, my skirt surly, rain brow, but I’m distracted, thinking about Florence, whose name I said in the television interview, real presence I tried to conjure all the way from Lake Victoria when the reporter asked, “What is most important here?” Her hands on her hips in the room with me. His question might have been, “Who is in charge?” A dusty alley vivid-drops like a curtain, F. squints and finest muscle-lines around her eyes to show me she needs glasses. My love started leaving the morning I first washed my hair in the lake—my reflection in slate water—the first I saw myself in weeks. Couldn’t believe I was a stranger. Outside I could see clearly what I felt: not love, suddenly: not you. I couldn’t help it anymore than the villagers could keep from night fishing, even at risk of arrest. Hunger in reversal fed. Want not to fail anyone, but: the hair I lost when I came home, collected in a jar—rub it between your fingers. It is real.

Blink

2008-05-13T20:31:00.000-04:00

Click To Play

Ordinary appearances

2008-05-12T15:13:00.000-04:00

Big woman on stage in her sparkly, tiger jump suit, sings like a clear long drink from the faucet. Even her sweat I want to hug me. She so pure, she so gone, she don’t care who la-ughs. I get choked up, which is run-off, diversion possibly from the you I can’t feel. Language chest-trapped, but finally I almost cry when my friend texts: “I get teary eyed about you,” and she means how I can’t or I don’t. Think of that big beautiful lady on stage. Think of my own sister’s narrow shoulders, the “wild bird” of her. I am neither but somewhere taking up “x” amount of space, standing in between. The black-painted wall, and the lit stage. Last thing we possibly did together still trying, the night I coughed my way home. Life since then: a bruise on my hip’s broken blood vessels shape a sail. Stood up wrong in the department store dressing room. Cried out in a dress I did not own. Walked through the parking lot in the sun. I’m binding a book without trying, on an intimacy no one could ever possibly inhabit, including myself. Remember how the older man would meet me, and we’d walk around the playground like something to do. Later he fed me in grimy diners I loved: I’d eat a pancake in five seconds then kiss. Open all the butters. Ask for more water. Believe it was fine.

Everything deep-flip

2008-05-11T21:42:00.000-04:00

The risk I feel akin to going out all day and leaving the back door open. Any animal could enter, slink along walls, wash its face in my dirty laundry. Bat around my toast crumbs, wait. I’d pull the long light chain, say his name accidentally. Tongue muscle. Before memory could catch its. Slipped in or on, long silver. Kept waiting for the storm to land but it didn’t, stayed tossed up green in the trees, cinematic in its effect, so less real in a way. Less the outside when I’m trying to realize. That is, I danced so long my shoes came off. The wooden railing curving above the heads of the diners. Listen: “my you keeps shifting” has become a song. All the extra letters for a name I invent so the page keeps on going. And I can’t remember him at all, and I can’t, and intimacy, and I. Light through my bangs in the mirror above the bar. Your bad hand reflected just before it reaches. Apparition wants a piece of ice. Tiny diamonds from mother, your fingers close on my double first-birthday-scars.

Impossible tasks

2008-05-09T21:49:00.000-04:00

If you want to feel how small you are and celebrate it: trace the landscape of waves on a piece of glass. Except all I could do was keep tugging at my shirt. My videos, he said, provided, “an intimacy un-asked for.” Different from my bad manners that left you waiting at the bottom of the steps. I clung around your neck lightly at first—“On another planet,” my mother would say—but then my nails in your shoulder like drowning. It wasn’t even your birthday. Wasn’t mine either, though I lied and asked for the circle-cake, heavy with roses. Also I said My name is Anna, may I be your antidote. My father won’t stay in the hotel by the train tracks because “apple pickers attract hookers.” I waited in the car while he checked out the room. Ironically, a train passed. I listened for the spaces where, silence for a moment, gliding, then the metal clattered back. In my video, I’m not washing my hair which is often the perception. Spill then gather whatever strands are there. I love the light to torment. It says welcome back with a face rising out of the corner or the page ripped out of a book. Your tiredness kept using you to tell a story reserved for more intimate moments. As a child I chewed up paper to make a pulpy cast for my finger; this finger I tap on your collar. This—just this—in a huge room—alone. Meant the image. Each little tooth a knot of paper. Un-crumple, un-ball: sweep inside cheeks for the voice.

My friend, tells it like it is all day

2008-05-08T22:42:00.000-04:00

is it shaped like a piece of paper?
my lack of eyes and extra mouths
strange bedfellows
my dear friend says
"search: barrel summer meg greenpoint grocery store used to"
we'll make it harder for us to find
that is, to have
"the little pink trousers"
sat out on the fire escape
"I'm a beautiful person"
"You're a beautiful person"
in the snow
hard to--
spring--
hard to

the path to the island
covered when the tide
was just a river doesn't matter
don't walk out there alone
don't
where broken columns the size of deer bones

a picture of how i live
my bags unpacked for days
the different sheets
the sword you draw on strange hair

if you want the best photograph
step back inside

oedipal-medusan
don't both we love
a sad-erotic
a funny looking latch,
"foxy lady"
rotten windowsill

Even if you don't believe it

2008-05-07T20:01:00.000-04:00

What made me stranger: I thought to give the mollusk an earring, or I thought ginger ale spilled all over my ivory horse? Jenny’s turtles tied to the fence with strings, the summer we spent an entire day looking for one runaway. The early that makes us. Now I am an apple among angle-grinders. The woodshop manager, looking over his glasses at me: You just keep on doing what you’re doing. Made with his fingers the motion of typing, little wavelets. Sawdust on the windowsill, golden room, janitor’s wheels. I swivel on my stool, head bent, forgiving Ted Hughes finally after reading: “Because of the huge / Loose emptiness of light / Wheeling through everything.” That meant the way death felt, to know it before the phone call one morning. That which you couldn’t believe could ever happen, happens. Admitting you knew it all along-- well, that means nothing. So I was in the park among dogs, braiding the stems of dandelions. Sun half gone over the flowers. When suddenly, the whole goddamn lawn up and shoved itself down my throat. Grass-sprout through rib cage and the walkers’ drowned voices, but earth was where you’re supposed to breathe. Someone said, Don’t humor me, or You aren't trying. I don’t know how long that took, but. The dandelion stems shriveled, green-flushed in my pocket, sticky. And my braid? Ruined.

Afternoon in the apartment

2008-05-06T21:41:00.000-04:00

Little animals (don't leave)

2008-05-05T20:22:00.000-04:00

Plaster coating the girl’s fingers and her black-painted nails look frightening—Medusan, tube worms. The part I can’t say aloud, as she dips back into the milky bucket, tipped ends watching me. Why I leap at a frog or toad—the flood at Ocean City behind our hotel, 83’, when I froze in a courtyard, ankle-deep in blank-eyed, melding amphibians, and cried. My father had to come and carry me back to the porch. He laughing. His arms peeling in thin scrolls I furthered with my writhing. Bits of him that landed in the flood would go out to sea. Inside, to quiet, my mother gave me orange juice even though it wasn’t morning. I slept for the first time in air conditioning, beneath a strange blanket. Falling asleep and the yellow curtains I can recall. But waking up, forgetting where. I pick my wrist scab again at its bone-white stage, so it will never heal. A baby thing to do. Maybe someone will come and pick me up. In the air. But the original argument stands: I’m really not very elegant. I wrote this poem: “Because I’d rather talk / than touch your cock / come over and have some ginger ale.” A new t-shirt saying for love—any takers?— could solve everything.

Mouth cotton, pink, forgotten

2008-05-04T20:55:00.000-04:00

Water was guide. Then we ran out or didn’t drown. The faucet-stopped trickling in my mouth in the abandoned house where the horsehide in overturned trash can. Newspapers over the floor, throat dust. I turned to apples—cut thin enough so as see-through. So water. White shirt under the surface and ripples with that frightening breeze; I guess you could say, life saved us. So I’m sucking a drink from an apple, my back on a concrete table in May. The tree overhanging is behind in leaves, buds still tender-bright and eager, though I fear for it. Allowance of sky. A boy I know says, “What does it means you always talk about trees?” It makes me thirsty. Like I’ve been kissing a lot but I haven’t. A whole dim glass I drink without breathing, then set it empty on the dresser. The way it meets in the dark behind the hanging clothes, and the pressure through the glass on my leaving palm, the sound glass makes settling—renders me child. With less than child hips, but wrist braceleted in turquoise found in the schoolyard. In the anatomy illustration, each vertebrae a different color crayon, but under someone else’s fingers, specific bones feel like ice-cubes in varying states of melt. Don’t ever assume what’s good now will last. What I’d like to argue about. I leave my bedroom window open, flung, floor to ceiling, screenless. Always think a bird will fly in, but one never does. Though I dream the sound they make, their high pitch whistle, dip and scare. In half gray, sometimes it is the same sound wakes me.

In the morning, you'll be well

2008-05-03T16:32:00.000-04:00

Sometimes the self
part someone else.

The language of fault

2008-05-02T19:23:00.000-04:00

“You stood in the room and said yes”—how a friend put it, attempting to render me brave. But the lamp blazing without its shade, and your legs in a whorl of blue blanket—horrified, in my 4 a.m. daze, I missed all the words. I believed you’d been severed at the waist—and yet you waved your arms, continued to be alive, like a head cut off will feel one last second before dying. The only time you ever cursed me. I leaned against the table, searching for your legs, certain it was a mistake, at the same time, convinced. Recall our first night in Mombasa, after 22 hours on the train. You had us follow two men down an alley that grew narrower, until I halted suddenly, on high alert, and said, No. And turned and started walking out, the men’s voices nervous, rising behind us. We fell just short of running. Shaken at what could’ve, you took me to the most expensive hotel in the city, back through the mazes of street fires and dogs, glazed children dipping into our pockets, all of it so much more terrible in the dark. By the time we reached the late glossy lobby, I didn’t care. Behind our locked door, I dropped my filthy dress on the carpet, fell straight into bed. I’m sorry you said. I was halfway asleep already, my face toward the window. Hard to feel. Strange stars trickled through the curtains to nurse my intuition, my breath on the pillow a baby’s.

What don't move, do

2008-05-01T21:35:00.000-04:00

Little picture frame, gold beads come unglued. Oval holding no face, no hair, no one, propped beside my nightstand, year-long years. The larger truth. I roll over on a stuffed rabbit. In New York my bed only the wall away from the apartment elevator. All night I’d listen to the creak and pull, the faint bell and glide, until I learned to live that movement to sleep, a weird mechanical breathing. Sliding under. And false comfort like floorfuls of fathers coming home, ties loosed, tired, spilling into burnt linoleum halls, fumbles for keys. Bakery bags in clutched hands, unclutched, set out for their sleeping children. I want to be one of those, who go to bed disappointed, but wakes to fancy sweets, water already running. Whatever I do, I can’t clean, and I don’t have to. Beneath the open window, tissues I cried in stay crumpled like notes. I thought I’d die and then. I did a headstand in bed. The ceiling became the floor, the plugs you unplugged, last touch, afraid I’d forget and catch fire. What’s strong is “to manage”—but what?—the problems never are new. Still, what’s old, is so little left too.

Eight years after not drowning

2008-04-30T20:34:00.001-04:00

Of new ways to keep track of time: as simple as, parenthesis, around how long to drink the entire glass. Or what’s the measure for sun erasing from my best friend’s shoulder, as she sits on the park bench in overwhelming spring, dividing a grass blade until nothing remains to divide. Before she even goes I worry if “moment love” can break the frame. No one wants left with just a remnant nightgown, the shattered end of ice cream cone, a collar gasp that fades. A ballpoint letter whose corner lifts, until one day you dare yourself to move it. I mean the way her hands live in this present. I want them knitting air so long. But I carry myself back by myself, as water about to run over a counter, and stop outside my house. I love the robin egg’s arrival on the sidewalk, its shell in evidence-sized chips. Simply press my fingertip to make them stick. Then somehow, suddenly, my mother. Sewn-eyes of my flowered horse. My almost drowning friends. A mouth that rested once above my navel, the heating patch rested once below. In a voice that was not my voice, a throat I can’t recall, I shouted, Float. The words sucked out across the lone lake’s icy ribbons. Whether or not to shore was a question, we are. To the degree we can be certain, my friends came afterward to stand beside my bed. Back inside my apartment, blue shell bits don’t want to leave my fingers; I use a match-head to tap the remnants free, assure myself they’re safe inside a paper box.

bb

2008-04-29T22:44:00.000-04:00

Bippy, gun, and bye-bye. Baby. When I need it to be, to be called gently. Whoever says that. In the final seconds before take-off. Blue landing lights along the tarmac. I’m stalk still in the middle of the street mid- afternoon. Comfort’s only on return, and even that keeps moving. Suck my fingers. Tired of slicing apple paper thin, but crossing the long attic when airplanes rattle the windows, I can feel my calves like packed sand. Dresses wrinkled, smashed up next to each other. Though I step up, and I’m less than yesterday, I step up, I can’t see my face, I step up and suddenly the featherless baby bird smashed on the sidewalk, its skin the skin between my fingers. Put them back in my mouth. Each tooth more certain in the dark, open mouth it, could light up a room.

Now open them

2008-04-28T18:34:00.000-04:00

Early morning in the woodshop, lights out, sawdust piles, something like: the need to spin straw into gold. I swallow more ginger from the foil. Lake-sense my stomach, and shake my knees. It’s quiet, utterly. Enough I picture the apartment dust, memorized suspended, like a slowly disintegrating mobile on the morning I bent over blue velour. Bare and stretched, gathered my hair. The last day I wore it down. Jacob who touched it when the too crowded bus to Mbita got stuck uphill in the dark, in bandit country, and I cried. He said, “Beautiful hair, just beautiful,” stroked me like a child till I calmed while everyone stared. A moment later, “You can’t get out here!” my eyes rolled back to the metal ceiling, heart bucked. Back home, one month, touching stopped completely when I disappeared behind the blue chair. The sliding glass door closed with its umph, though I wouldn’t have expected you to hear it, nor recognize its sign. This afternoon when I came home, cherry juice leaked in the place you broke the white bowls. The second time in three days, startled me that place. Because I want of myself “the capacity to be the one who waits to tell.” Pile on distinctions until the “it” grows narrower, while at the same time unfurling, vast, i.e., my mother never loved my father, i.e., only recently has the shaking infected my hands. Still I love to stand where the table’s gone and watch the air. Anyone could be in it.

However dimmer the staircase sounds

2008-04-27T19:07:00.000-04:00

A cane-back chair in the middle of the room makes it more like an attic. Table gone where picture frames lean, their photos fallen, slid across the larger ice. It’s a place too treacherous to reach, though it’s the ceiling too, not water beneath, but rooms. Only become an attic since I’ve lived alone: the temptation now is to shrink down postage-sized, fit in the angles like a moth. A moth, or a note so tight it won’t open. Who flutters a shoulder blade if someone looks at it. The implied being I’ll lose, because I write more than I can speak, and some hands get tired of searching. Pull back empty out of my clothes. Speaking of—the zipper-idea for a body should go on the throat, not the lips. Should go on the chest where, for two days, a rusted construction beam pins my breastplate. I did all the simple things they say: held my breath and counted backwards, opened a window, took a walk. Then straying, plucked a flower cluster off a tree and let the whole branch snap. I didn’t want to stop. One bud still swollen in my palm like a newborn’s eye. I would be that. And gave it to myself for not wanting. By the afternoon, the bird head I kept three weeks in a plastic bag revealed its rot. Pink flowers could not conceal. In heat rising. Each odor reached out separately to me, demanding to be embraced.

Goodbye.

2008-04-26T20:30:00.001-04:00

Click to Play

Won't clean itself up

2008-04-25T16:10:00.000-04:00

Okay a word I cling to, though its meaning morphs hourly. The boy’s song like something light and silvery falling down the stairs. A let go, following a night of no sleep. Bent closer to the floor to hear better, sun pawed at my eye sockets, wept on the irises its enlarged gold. I leave the house in the still damp morning. Think how condensed dandelions compelled a woman to pour water on the famous floor piece. I couldn’t blame her: passing under the crab apples the flowering’s so heavy I have to sit. I call my mother who doesn’t know, but she holds her phone in the air to try and transmit the sound of morning bells on the ancient campus near her house. You hear them? and I squint to listen but fail to catch even static, birds, a passing voice—least of all, bells. Still, a nice try, then she has to go, the tiny speaker taken out of the air, put back into her purse. I daze around awhile in the grassy strip outside the library. You come home and go again to miss me. When I return, your own song’s a floor full of broken bowls. I step around the larger fragments and forget the rest. Some are fingers, knee caps, slivers of collar. How our bones don’t meet under. I tie some shards to my thigh with a dishtowel for the day’s third song. Where it’s jagged in my skin is first teeth cutting through: I thigh, eye thigh, you thigh, until literalness drains to feeling. I undo the towel the place it throbs; its knot-bloom a furious rose inside my knee.

You call me

2008-04-24T19:42:00.000-04:00

Over-the-wire advice, “It will melt before it burns.” Fail to move away from the open window. One thin strip keeps two rotten boards from— . Under the gold, white, impossible to imagine the whole thing that way, still that is how I want. Paint chips the size of clouds reflected off my fingernails. I put the safety pin through my shirt and now the curtains fall. Because my you keeps shifting, a touch can turn into someone else. No sudden taps on my shoulder, but when I unwrapped the cloth from the Kenya bottle cap it said “Keep Trying” and I squeezed the scissors until someone shook a piece of paper in my face. Sometimes I forget I am in public, not the same as sometimes I forget I am alone. Because you are always shifting. Nicknames I’ve collected include Misty, Cloudy and Baby as adjectives. Cereal can be dinner. Cracked ice a snack. Likely it’s the month when someone says I give up on you. Has anyone ever said I give up on you. In my video, everyone thought the floor was a bed, thought my rolling over an offering. Not for anyone. You are at the gas station leaning on the car, and you are lifting a box down from the shelf, and you are scuffing your shoes over my face, still hard to see. Yes, the sun is there, makes it very difficult, tree-glare, city street, white sky, tumbled sheet. Baby. Coil back down to the bottom. It was always start again, you don't believe. Has anyone ever said I give up on you. Hard to see my face. Forsythia blooms late in the yard. That which you could never believe until afterwards. Anyways. A stranger taps me on the shoulder and says Boo. The perfect apple. The one whose painting I loved best. The books I saved on the bookshelf. Rest my head on the ledge because it's happened. Always the first of something’s being made: when does waiting become quitting. A breeze draws a line above my lip light as thread.

Less than half

2008-04-23T08:52:00.000-04:00

Something’s keeping me awake like

Look at my wrists hinged on the counter

Before he put the thermometer in my mouth, he asked me

pissing underneath the porch impression of small stones

mint is out of season so I ask for cherry

“Father’s Colored Light Therapy” written in all caps

when he sat up in the sheets I couldn’t see his legs

terrified so I missed half the words

different than the song “I’m going to drink your blood “

don’t do romance

the petals in the trees

he took a record out, we put on our new Baltimore bikinis and jumped around

her medicine cabinet not hers

she never would’ve picked that wallpaper

a confession would be: I can look at the ocean without feeling

a hawk lands in the bushes and shakes off the snow

it’s summer in the attic already, and another season outside

apples the only fruit that don’t attract flies

two a day my teeth marks in envelopes

hair held in torn fishnet

where did your legs go in the lamp burning

couldn't fall out of bed blue velour already standing

give me something to play with, soap or a string

a problem I can solve just by being

Broken frame

2008-04-21T18:44:00.000-04:00

April grass scratches ice from my waist up, and not the usual numb reversal that ends somewhere in the knees. Look, roundness, like the jar-tops holding all the silver dollars I sold. Impatience continues to get me somewhere, despite your marveling. Despite I waste, ruin, have to start again. So far one time always strikes good and I won’t even drown. Then practice pouring faith into the opposite: if holding one’s head might stay the moment. In the exchange between mouth/milk, fingerprint/page, wallpaper/floor. Or lung and sun, and moon between, but an apparition-sea’s just the neighbor’s swimming pool lighting the siding in slow motion while someone’s mouth gets muffled below. Chlorine’s slow lapse around the eye. Hip cracking pavement . Back to the restaurant where I couldn’t breathe, watched a whole glass of ice water pitch, when the hand in torn-lace sleeve I couldn’t recognize was my own. Trying to write one sentence of feeling is the hardest thing. The voice caught on branches trying to birth green. Push the real away in place of the real. That is, a little spoiling can’t be so bad: so pick every color streamer for binding myself in the black and white projection of waves. Or how all the antlers gnarled under rotten eaves, catch and burn. By some night recess voices I do: happen me without happen to.

My middle name's Elizabeth

2008-04-20T23:07:00.001-04:00

My mom’s sister called me Baby Anna and carried me around the yard like a little bundle of wood. I was only three but already torn between wanting to appear older and wanting to stay baby, and mostly feeling neither. So I liked to be held, as though not touching the ground for a while would keep me from having to make any decisions, especially in summer, passing under the clothesline, some sheets or underwear hung, some folded, just as it was getting too dark to see. I reached out and twirled a clothespin. Ba-by Annnn-a sung aunt. By thirteen the whole family would call me boy, carrying me far from that feminine name that wasn't mine to begin with. This week I was called “Son,” and a few days later, “Boo,” as in, “Where’s your boyfriend at Boo?” which has startled me to my ability to still confuse. Sometimes I have to think before I get dressed. It’s more about how I feel than anything, what kind of emotions can be played out in the particulars. The floor is a mess but I still can leave the house. I don’t always say goodbye to you. That kind of day it’s the unraveling horse-head dress and a red hood. Subtle dis-invitation: strings pulled around my head not hurting anyone.

Try to be more specific

2008-04-19T19:48:00.000-04:00

Some wrist skin becomes an uglier scab the more I won’t leave it alone. Of the same hand I extend, bleeding-without-thinking, to the famous art collector. My apology’s worse: At the doctor’s last week I took the thermometer in my mouth with mint gum! You’re allergic to bee stings, only not for sure. I won’t give you the dried-up ones I gathered out of the back window of my mother’s car. The over-fifty crowd loves your dancing, so I sit in the folding chair perimeter, amused at first, then tired, after three or four songs. The point at which party streamers become emblems of sadness is mostly different for everyone. Peach napkin twisted like the head and neck of a swan. I’m ready to go the night my baby sister fights the cops for lifting her over the guardrail swearing drunk. Smoke from motel curtains clung to our hair the whole ride. Where were you, if not falling asleep beside me in the backseat? And suddenly, the dragging-around sensation of my blue-flowered horse. Where were you when I found the pornography stash in a place I can’t say? The things you can never believe until afterward. Then you want to rest with your head upside-down to the window, to watch power lines and leaves write sky in the feeling of speech. It is this “here-and-now” to which I might return if everything didn’t keep moving: my forehead, your knee, some kind of weather, some moon.

Not asleep.

2008-04-19T01:43:00.000-04:00

It is brave work.

Bed, else

2008-04-18T10:22:00.000-04:00

Empty apartment, still something’s keeping me from sleep like a horny stepbrother in the next room. Jerk at each creak and shush until I forget: if I’m in Kenya, then I can’t feel the ropes under my body, or hear the radio’s silver tongues floating over concrete walls. So I know: here now, not there, but not absolutely, since I wouldn’t let you touch me under the mosquito net full of holes, night the dogs wouldn’t stop barking at the lake. What parts un-acted, ached and un. The month I only took fist-sized mangoes and tea, and wiped the blood from the child’s ear though the pamphlets strictly forbid it. “Boy” I thought, until she stopped crying and looked at me steady. Some days I want to have a face that accepting. That willing to be happened to. But I was the one: fumbled the gauze in the dirt room, held the ointment to the light, didn’t have a clue.

Per minute

2008-04-16T22:18:00.000-04:00

Hand over hand, the braid never flourishes. Leads back to our original metaphor: a thin railing in slow ascent, coil toward a window with a view. I’m awaiting the first, thin scalp of sky, so I can let go. A girl who carves clouds out of pine fails to comprehend: no matter what, the weight will always be too much. The hair I lost and collected in a jar wasn’t me in the way a moth forgets the sensation of crawl. How then, can I hold your failure to recognize me against you? Celan proposes, make “already-no-more” into “still-here.” How about love/love. I believed start again from old beginnings meant burnt jump-rope ends already unraveling. So I let the cool-faced doctor finger-massage my shoulder while he listened to my heart. Breathing through my mouth while holding my breath. Picture all the crevices inside a minute: eyelash size, flood filtered, fluorescent light. Profile in summer leaves when the cool metal glides—if you ask me the color of the room, I’ll lie.

Necessary/unnecessary adornments

2008-04-15T09:55:00.000-04:00

In the office supply store the clerk calls me “son” and extends the bucket of lollipops. My heart flutters strange joy. It’s this quilted vest: hides my tits to let my face reveal its boy. I pick the Guess! flavor—if he saw the birthmark on my left hip or heard it referenced last night in the bar before a crowd, how would he call me then? You spoke of me when the whisky worked. Remember to both of us, I was touched like that before, both hips held like hard apples spaced evenly on either end of a board. Lately, I’m trouble: want to put everything around my neck. Tonight I cut the cloth jump-rope and tried to burn its ends for an African necklace: a fire in the sink, and safety-pin buried directly in my bone. Fingertip drained pure while I held the faucet, saw moths. The second time this week you used your old voice on me. Okay, I said, I said “okay.” Between our voices, lakes of rippleless distortion. Hard to see where air begins. Jump-rope makes a dirty ring around my throat: just the kind of thing you don’t feel passion for; not that I ask you. I just wear it. I just wore.

Mild Accidents

2008-04-14T16:06:00.000-04:00

When I trip taking off my pants, your voice through the door sounds like it used to. I keep on the floor a little to respect the bruise. Muffle to the surface. In Cambridge we lay in the fen without any money, but were happy because grass was hip-high and for once it wasn’t raining. Looking up was long. The day made a tent of listlessness. I showed you the teeth marks from the awful baby I looked after and you tested yours beside. How much were you not a child? Black ants trailed my throat. You whistled weeds. We named the drinks we wished brought to us by outdoor waiters, and I added a lemon. The grass to our left began to move. The three stray horses had come within reach, not even cautious, so I could feel the way a hoof would sink my ribs, satisfying almost, but they only blinked and kept eating. Uncertain if we were found. It got cool fast. The hour to go. After we stood. The horses moved over our bed with their loud breathing.

Goes one gray one

2008-04-13T21:30:00.000-04:00

Still like me if a bruise. If duct-tape-band-aids, pot-hole option, TV tied to a chair. For supper, sea-weed, and carrots cut like pipe-cleaner hair. Our options are out. We’re strangely more elegant, but more bedraggled. Like the sheets are faded is only evident in the afternoon. Sun will not allow a lie, as in my profile un-composing when you asked How old, when you did that? In the tape from 1985, made behind blue curtains, We were so small we couldn’t reach the table! But to answer your question, nineteen. Mothballs cuddled like mints in the metal window ledge. I flicked them out through a rip in the screen. Fell heavier than I thought, for then the moths could enter. Bright thread taken inside faint bodies. Scrape of wing like a butter knife, or like your thumb, on my cheek, as I turn, practice tonguing,____________, practice, Enough.

If I'm not a contestant

2008-04-12T18:31:00.000-04:00

The marathon runners Saturday morning suddenly make me want to cry. Set faces and endlessness, so little space between bodies a young couple pushing a stroller can’t find a place to cross. If exhaustion’s easier to bear when direction is certain it means just keep moving and you’ll earn applause. If you’re lucky, a cone of roses and a hug from a stranger. Different for the observer. A kind of jealousy seeps. I take cough medicine when I’m not sick as a way to feel cared for. Clear red-rings sticky the counter. Start to cough just by moving toward the bed. Pocket, lung, song. What the children sang in a dusty circle in Kenya sounded like, Mmm-bay-uhm-bay, in images I don’t know. Ah-ti-ch-chama. If you can’t understand the words, you memorize sound, but not language. Then what of meaning? The corresponding dance looked like Duck, Duck, Goose, but such birds don’t live in that country so I wondered how it traveled and in which direction pertaining to the equator. Crocodile, Crocodile, Hippopotamus. I didn’t need to understand the tongue to feel our mutual pleasing wish. I is for Iron Box in the cardboard drawing hung from a string. M is for Mango. If everyone shares missed dinner it’s easier to lay down in the dark. My friend in a bad season writes, Still we are all okay. All is all until someone goes. Can two be. Can one.

My name is a long time coming

2008-04-11T17:04:00.000-04:00

The oddness of saying someone’s name unabbreviated for the first time. Formal becomes more intimate, the name putting on disguise. The burnt-cork mustache that turns dear Sonya sexual, three quarters through War and Peace, just a smudge, like a syllable to make one reconsider. Coil toward a view. That way you keep seeing what came before but from a different level: I fell asleep, book sliding, until headlights grazed the window. Once I realized I was alone, I picked his cup, despite my dislike for plastic. Teeth marks burred under my lip felt tiny in the dark. This morning I saw a bird fly into a window and recover itself, only to swoop the courtyard and crash again. The second time seemed not okay. Some of its feathers stuck out funny like my hair always surprises when I get up from crying. These details that are unimportant. Who says. When the pillow’s been bunched and how many spoons are used. A bird hit the window so I hid my face, and for punishment turned to see a man down the street, vomiting gold. He gripped the paper bag like a hand on a collar in love.

How can I be good.

Offerings

2008-04-10T13:35:00.000-04:00

Uncertain if the shoe-house I visited in childhood is the one now decaying in the film. The birches backgrounding look right: thin arms, long arms, severed at the wrists. Like Lavinia's, arteries frozen upward, the branches black twists. Less imagination means only that it's winter. But what of the look of a wrapped tongue too, that won't stop seeping. How ink longs to pour in place of the voice. A void. Sometimes all you can manage is a stick, point it over there at emotion. When does cloth become a bandage. What's inappropriate school attire. Sometimes how I feel. All my mother's old slips spilling out of the drawer with one sleeping bee inside. The stinger still stings if that's not how it died, so I don't touch it. Only move the silk around gently then accept: it's spring, really. Un-layer. That my underwear showed was pointed out to me by a cheerful woman outside the Dollar General. I revealed only slight embarrassment since she seemed to believe the perception helpful, and I didn't want to rob her good feeling. I gauged if I could make it through the day and decided yes although "The interstice between promise and consequence," sometimes causes me to shut down. When you stand inside certain brief light do you wonder if you'll remember it later precisely for its brevity. I mean the sun on my knees and my underwear showing made me wish someone would hold my hand. Walk me to grass. I would peel an orange for him. Say, do you know that feeling? I stood on the spiral staircase of a house now leaking fog where its plaster seams split. He’d cover my eyes and say Over. I’d leave one orange slice on his knee like a tiny boat.

Spit & Paper Casts

2008-04-09T17:16:00.000-04:00

I fashioned my fingers lame inside the desk, then cradled them at recess while the other children played horse. I wanted to claim a home where a doorway was allowed for penciling off your height and age each year, an event you excelled at without trying. In high school I crawled out on the roof to read Antigone and my father yelled at me from the front yard for ruining the shingles. My, I have bare feet, irrelevant. My, Give me back my photographs un-shouted. Nude prints the janitor dug out of the trash led to guidance counselor frowns at my evasiveness. Then one afternoon, all men became the same. Pounding shook the sliding-glass door we propped with a stick. We had invented ways for ignoring things. My sister mixed celery into her yogurt. I put on the dead fox mantle for a photograph. A bleached, cartoon bed-sheet hung across the kitchen window where my sister, an hour before, put down her spoon, but continued to sit. It might have been the time when people start to come home. What are you doing? she asked, already not listening. I buttoned my shirt and stood up.

Romance test

2008-04-08T10:43:00.000-04:00

The romance test was how long we wanted to keep exchanging letters. Gradually the envelopes got lighter, until one day what I opened contained only pine needles, the color of dried blood. Brushed against them inside my desk drawer while looking for the basement key. The brittle tips broke on my fingers. I shivered as beneath the tree’s blocked light. Degree in grains altered, moving toward the place I need my sweater even though it’s April, late. You’ve idled years. I've been to France, gathering sea debris, and practicing my avecs. So many hours spent waiting for the tide to rise and cover up the dark hulls of the fishing boats, to save them from embarrassment / death.

Lift

2008-04-07T20:52:00.000-04:00

If the sky’s a cavity blown open for sound, maybe it’s all air. But we still want to point to clarify this is air, that sky, sky begins there. I strained to hear my dead dog’s bark. Looked for solid-blue and came up with the size of a hole-punched hole. Practiced the kind of breathing mentioned in a magazine. Everything failed. Now I picture my senses as different tools, known things like a wrench or a hammer, strapped inside a box I can carry. When you tap under my chin without saying, what tool best relates to such gesture? What, when you hold out the paper bag that means go? The first warm day, I don’t care what happens anymore, which is the toolbox falling to the ground and breaking. Which is the runner in my junior-high tights ripping faster. When I pass by I get a lot of attention outside the Plasma Donation Center. Reason someone there can sense inside my blood, sniffs at it like I sniff the spring. Why I almost lake-drowned myself fully clothed one April. In the ambulance the paramedic stuck a heating patch below my navel. He said, I’m not being fresh— he meant, I needed it. He meant, I needed it there. I imagined myself back outside on the stretcher, lifted straight up,
as-a-board, as-a-feather, in the absence of clouds.

You know its brighter rim?

2008-04-06T15:15:00.000-04:00

My friends in love held their breaths the whole way through the tunnel, but I closed my eyes in the backseat and failed. So city lights greeted us differently, and dark hillsides, or who we each thought traveled home singing and who aimless in despair. Even though—“Too easy to put meaning to—” and “you better stop this—” reached out to slap both my cheeks. A blush slowly burying itself, outward-in. Is this like he meant when he said, “I go to others first so I can come back and feel myself.” Am I the sprouting opposite. An ache already existing, and then I look: suddenly a false rainbow means all the world. Blur between indigo/violet: I stand so the gentler colors wash my face till I hear him opening the door. Open: moth light, spiral stairs, butter on the wall. We live only part of the list out loud, the other part inside. Such as thinking, not speaking: when it’s warm enough to open the window, I’ll dangle from the sill with my skirt bunched above my waist. A hoot to think the floor is something to hold on to, but I do. Otherwise— . Otherwise, we don’t complete that. Many years after I stopped praying I tried again to pray. Fingers’ messy cluster, a flower de-petaled in the chest. Nothing to do with God, but. May the hands learn again to see. Let them fail not miserably.

This day a dirty charm

2008-04-05T17:22:00.000-04:00

A rainbow appearing on the slanted wall above my desk. But there are no prisms here. Almost said no "prisons" here. That couldn’t be right. I’m trying to work my way out of something. Even this shirt gets stuck. “Tangled child” you won’t call me anymore, or give my hair a swat. I can do push-ups on the wall with my skinny arms without even getting up from the chair. See that? The wall slants. So it’s kind of a ceiling. Put your hands on it, the roof heat soaks through. You know the bottom crush of a wave where everything’s so close it goes inside. Same as red static behind your eyelids when you close them in bright sun. Wave rolls, minus the salt here, in this room. But the streaks you made on the pillow now that it’s dried. A shooting star: two, three, four. I couldn’t stop coughing at the bar and you offered me water, even though I was mean. Was it because people were starting to stare, or because you were afraid? I ran. An older woman holding a French fry by the door glared at me. She sat alone, angry. I fled, she wished? I don’t need lessons. Just ask my sister: cherry and strawberry chap-sticks may look the same, but they taste different. Whereas real rainbows and fake rainbows could trick you. The heart after running beats like the heart in love, beats like the heart afraid. Your hand way up there on the hot ceiling, can you feel it? Darling, darling, darling: guess which I am when I can’t calm down.

2008-04-04T09:59:00.000-04:00

The woman to the audience, clicking slides: “In the settee, you will see I made a hand outlined on her seat.” I tongued back anger, but the wooden depressor broke through, held me to the chair in dark, steady diagonal. As if the chalk tracing a body makes the body. Or our silhouettes from childhood cast in projector light. The teachers were careful to follow our cowlicks, collarbones so our mothers would know us. Still, some paused, or touched the edge of the wrong paper. Cannot invent evidence. Can feeling grow from a thread or does the thread contain everything. Put it inside a vitrine and watch for it to pant. My friend cleans house with scraps from her dead love’s pajamas. He makes her picture frames shine, whisks the letters on the typewriter. I don’t ask her how hard she rubs, or how much the blue stripes were worn away first by his body, but I will not forget that softness, when she put it in my hand. Suddenly it struck me, my joke to another, “If I’m not okay I’ll to write you from the grave.” Recall recall: a minute in childhood where I couldn’t go on: “I twisted my ankle,” was met with unbelieving. My protester, “We’re in the middle of the bridge, you can’t just stop.” I was stopped and the grating impressed my hands. Later I’d want people to believe I had no arms, tucking them up in my sleeves for a trip to the grocery store. But that I couldn’t continue crossing the river was real. Water swifter than usual, taking up everything, relentless, and I clung to this. Everyone slowed in their leisurely night to watch what I made: a spectacle of sharpness I couldn’t convey. What else to do but let go? The warm summer drained down through the trusses like an old bath.

2008-04-03T23:04:00.000-04:00

If I show you,
This is not the place,
but if I tell you,
this is the time.

2008-04-02T14:21:00.000-04:00

The light through the jar of her old-fashioned candies. The first I understood the word “refraction,” marigold shadows on the counter while a throat cleared slow-motion from the bedroom. Sometimes I pretended I was her as a girl when I was a girl. Licking applesauce from spoons left on everyone else’s plates saved the family money. I wanted to hear the bull story again, how she and Beverly ran for the fence with shuddered breath behind. Her sunny knees hit by tall grass, the flowered heads right in the center, smack smack, delight trailed by raging. Later she modeled for the local department store, sensible sweaters, wool skirts cut tight, until a man would fall in love with the way she wore her hem. Brim of the knee’s work. One summer crossing the Susquehanna Bridge I couldn’t go on. The water swollen, shone through the grating. A man drowned in last night’s storm, she said, “I bet the one on his ski jet when it was getting too dark” and then I knew I saw some flesh or rubber floating. I said, “I twisted my ankle.” She kept tugging me forward, unbelieving. My parents had sent me for keeping for a while. How long is a while. Some kids grow up drinking pop like water and I got to try this out. Affecting “bottle pop” sounded like her name when the real bottles clacked together in their antique collection under the stairs. On the piano a glossy panther with diamond eyes and a plastic gold chain that dangled. I would spread my doll’s legs over its back and it would be sexual. Unclear yet how. Under her dress, plain skin that straddled awkwardly a muscular back. When she came to check on me I’d whip the doll off the panther and toss her in the empty aquarium. Doll eyes closed or opened, depending on how she landed. Sometimes it would be one eye closed and one half-open under the thick shade of lashes. That way it seemed most like she was thinking, in the language of something kept.

2008-04-01T10:41:00.000-04:00

My jaw hurt when I chewed. You said, “Stop eating so much candy then,” laughing. Small garish wrappers littered the couch, spilled onto the floor. Later the difference when I said, “Everything, everything hurts.” and didn’t unzip my jacket, and you, “I’m sorry you feel like you want to die,” and looked at me once, and stood up. The fluorescent-blue gum dyed my tongue darker at the back, so it looked like something trying to rise, like I was a mediaeval patient growing fur in my throat, which would explain all the choking. I stuck the wad on the plaster cast of pills, liked its cheerful rudeness. A popular girl in high school whose parents allowed her to stick gum on the light switch-plate, until a washed-out pastel mound grew so big you couldn’t turn off the light without touching it. Her pretty-ease first, later the vulgarity, is what made me want to keep lying on her bedroom carpet under the birthday-present skylights someone designed so the sun was the thing that woke her.

2008-03-31T12:23:00.000-04:00

"How heavy by how far" is an unofficial postal term for calculating mailing rates. It was written unconcernedly in magic marker in a post office in northern Florida, as if to say, "Listen, I know you care where that thing is going and what's inside it, but I don't necessarily: this formula is about all I can offer."

But I haven't stopped thinking of the phrase.
I think it has to do with personal bearing. The part where someone points to the sign, the all they can offer: you're own your own from here.

I'm interested in the weights of things by such invented measurements and calculations as in the post office. The weird systems and rules one creates for herself. For my own purposes: using tiny postal scales, or poems, or videos to try and establish a "known" about a weight unknown, a distance unknown, a bearing about to happen, already happening, happened. And the body: how much weight in a fingertip twisted up in rubber bands? Stand over the sink and listen. How many pieces of penny candy have you unwrapped? How much does green apple taffy taste like the inside of the bread drawer at your grandmother's? How much does it matter that it was white King loaf? Then suddenly you recall the bits of moth wing inside the old peanut butter preceding a long death.

Scales are emblems of either comfort or dread, depending on what you need to feel about yourself or your belongings. But a physical scale isn't necessarily so far in function from art or writing, scales for weighing the less tangible of a body.

This is about as explanatory as I can get. It's dull to do it, but I suppose, necessary, at least for establishing purposes.