His hands are soft,
almost translucent
up to his crescent-
moon cuticles.
He pulls his jacket sleeve
over healing cloudy calluses
to wrap his fingers around
a newly-pink cactus flower.
Jerusalem in his eyes,
psalms drip
from his closed lips
in the afternoon sun.
How could I ask
when the bones dried
over his still-beating
dismembered wings?
You just need to be gentle
with the small ones, he says
showing me the flower
in his open palm.
Monday, September 29, 2014
To Defend
Her hands look dead,
blue slender fingers
curving toward each other.
She’s bent over the sidewalk,
arm extended to a black
cat with matted fur.
The bones of her spine
protrude into the rain
like Yellow Mountains
emerge from the mist.
I’d like to ask how she feels
never seeing sun.
Hands working through knots,
she tilts her head and says
she doesn’t mind the rain.
blue slender fingers
curving toward each other.
She’s bent over the sidewalk,
arm extended to a black
cat with matted fur.
The bones of her spine
protrude into the rain
like Yellow Mountains
emerge from the mist.
I’d like to ask how she feels
never seeing sun.
Hands working through knots,
she tilts her head and says
she doesn’t mind the rain.
Thursday, September 25, 2014
Recognition (second draft and still ugh)
1.
I am five years old, in a green or blue dress
—velvet, with white tights and black-strap shoes.
I am in a funeral home and everything is green.
The carpet is green and maroon—flowers curl
and leaves grow over and under our feet.
My eyes meet everyone’s crotch.
Black and brown slacks, mostly pleated.
Skirts past the knees and stockings just slightly
darker than women’s white skin. There’s a coffin
somewhere, but I can’t see inside. I can see
its dark wood. Its green velvet skirt.
Maybe we match. The dead man’s skirt and mine.
I lose myself in the crowd of legs, but find
my father’s hand with my right. I look up at a laugh,
but not my father’s. I don't know this face,
with gray hair instead of brown, sideburns
cut in line with his cheekbones. I tug away—desperate
—two, three steps toward the dead man.
2.
I hold my parents' hands outside. The green is bright,
no velveteen heaviness. Bronze plaques name
the bones behind them. My dad once heard of a boy
trapped overnight in a mortuary.
3.
Just after Christmas, my grandma tells us
she wants to die. She tells good memories
about dead men and women. She is happy
in a floral print shirt and compression socks
that day. We listen patiently in metal folding-
chairs and the dry, heated air. She has a cabinet
like her eyes, filled with small figures of porcelain
women and angels draped in white. A blue vase.
She always looks like herself, in every photo.
I imagine she smiles when her daughters catch her
talking to ghosts between sleeping and waking.
Her medications sit in a green plastic organizer
on a tiny metal table. We promise to visit soon.
4.
January. She was singularly ready to die.
I can see in the coffin now, her curled hair plastered
to her scalp and pulled away from her green dress.
She doesn’t look like her, is more herself in photos
and typewritten letters from the president.
No smile. She is more herself in stories
of dead people she somehow recognizes.
I am five years old, in a green or blue dress
—velvet, with white tights and black-strap shoes.
I am in a funeral home and everything is green.
The carpet is green and maroon—flowers curl
and leaves grow over and under our feet.
My eyes meet everyone’s crotch.
Black and brown slacks, mostly pleated.
Skirts past the knees and stockings just slightly
darker than women’s white skin. There’s a coffin
somewhere, but I can’t see inside. I can see
its dark wood. Its green velvet skirt.
Maybe we match. The dead man’s skirt and mine.
I lose myself in the crowd of legs, but find
my father’s hand with my right. I look up at a laugh,
but not my father’s. I don't know this face,
with gray hair instead of brown, sideburns
cut in line with his cheekbones. I tug away—desperate
—two, three steps toward the dead man.
2.
I hold my parents' hands outside. The green is bright,
no velveteen heaviness. Bronze plaques name
the bones behind them. My dad once heard of a boy
trapped overnight in a mortuary.
3.
Just after Christmas, my grandma tells us
she wants to die. She tells good memories
about dead men and women. She is happy
in a floral print shirt and compression socks
that day. We listen patiently in metal folding-
chairs and the dry, heated air. She has a cabinet
like her eyes, filled with small figures of porcelain
women and angels draped in white. A blue vase.
She always looks like herself, in every photo.
I imagine she smiles when her daughters catch her
talking to ghosts between sleeping and waking.
Her medications sit in a green plastic organizer
on a tiny metal table. We promise to visit soon.
4.
January. She was singularly ready to die.
I can see in the coffin now, her curled hair plastered
to her scalp and pulled away from her green dress.
She doesn’t look like her, is more herself in photos
and typewritten letters from the president.
No smile. She is more herself in stories
of dead people she somehow recognizes.
Tuesday, September 23, 2014
Uranography
1. Suppose I were to say I was crushed by the sky. That I was Atlas and my hands cracked into the stars. Stars made of fire and burning flesh rumbled down my arms, and it was ugly. The blanket of sky fell black over me and I fell with it down to Earth at a 7.0 magnitude.
2. Nowadays Atlas is shown instead holding up our little sphere, back bent and muscles flexed. But that’s the point of it—what would he be standing on to keep the oceans in his hands?
3. Maybe it was momentary deconstruction and reconstruction, layering himself across universes—until the sky was his feet as much as it was the sky.
4. The ocean floor is about 5-7% explored. The ocean itself only .5% explored. Despite the vastness of water, at least in the oceans there’s a conceivable “whole.” An end containing itself. Some of the deep-sea creatures that never see sunlight look terrifying, but I don’t think anywhere near as terrifying as the idea that we might be alone in the universe. Observable or otherwise.
5. I wonder sometimes if I’m preoccupied with the slow destruction of myself anyway. With tweezers pulling hair only to feel the tiny things slide out of my skin, not honestly to get rid of them. To experience a forceful coming-apart. To see the red spots left on my legs.
6. Books are known to fade and become weaker in the sunlight. Wedding clothes too. Paintings. For precious objects, find instead a cool, dark space.
7. My oldest books rest against a blue wall in my room, where the setting sun-rays hit just right to fade and weaken their binding. Thrift store Shakespeare collections. A copy of Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, published 1882, owned by my great-great-aunt or -uncle on my father’s side. I want to move them, but they’ve been there so long. I don’t know where I could put them.
8. When I was little my brother and I thought we could find anything in our garage. There were old boxes of cookbooks, clearance silver necklaces. Easter baskets and dusty computer drives. Garbage cans full of not-quite-garbage. We never knew what we were going to find! But eventually we grew up, and cleaned up, and realized nothing useful ended up in the cool, dark spaces.
9. Things are supposed to fall apart, we say.
10. Once I visited a Catholic church in San Diego. Sunlight weaseled through the stained glass, speckling itself over the opposite pews. Maybe the wood would fade in a few years. The reds and oranges felt like fire in the heart of the chapel. I lit a prayer candle under the outstretched hands of some saint (Mary?) for the death of my friend’s father. All of the tea lights flickered down and sighed back up in a little remembrance. A remembrance of—something, I hope.
11. Horses can run through fire if provoked. Mothers can run through fire if provoked too. Self-help seminars say you, Insignificant, can become magnificent—a fire-walker!—with only the power of your mind.
12. Black takes so much ink. In theory blackness is an absence, but a starry sky in a window of plain white paper is dense, its vastness collected in the stillness of the page. Its vastness concealed in congealed wood fragments, made into comic books. “I’m significant!” writes the author, in black lines on white. A little creation, a segment of the universe.
13. Segment: one of the parts into which something naturally separates or is divided; a division, portion, or section: “a segment of an orange.” (dictionary.com)
14. Photographic paper exposed too long on purpose. Burning, it’s called. I like to cut circles out of cardboard to lay in the middle of the pictures, blackening the whole piece but that one shape and whatever it contains. More light, more darkness.
15. That’s why we go blind staring at the sun! We see too much! Maybe some neo-futurist religious white woman thought that for a moment. Maybe I thought it. The point is, we both thought it, but I can’t be sure we thought it the same way.
16. My friend’s couches, brightly colored, smelled like some sweet sickness. The cigarette smoke only drifted in a mist through the window, but it found its way into the cotton. To him it was just smoke. I had to be okay with it then, but occasionally I smell a smoker’s clothes on the train. It smells like static build-up strong enough to burn hair and skin.
17. I feel like maybe he started to embrace dying as a side-effect of smoking.
18. The leaves didn’t turn until first snow one year. Even then, the yellow bones were stuck ringing with ice to the branches.
19. The skies were like ice that year too. They crackled and solidified beneath me—in appropriate Atlas fashion—and I was trapped between 43 shades of blue water and black space.
20. We are so much emptiness. Our atoms are more space than proton and electron.
21. This would lead one to wonder about the molecular mechanisms of touch, since it is obviously not just gears tugging our nerves toward each other.
22. I feel like I am so close, I say to myself, and I am. I feel like I can be protected in a loved one’s arms. But that emptiness drifts into my mind and I want to force my electrons into their atomic space instead of merely holding “close enough”. All of our emptiness together. It’s a stronger distance than my closeness can really be. It terrifies me.
23. But I want to think about things called “beautiful.” I don’t want my fears to be all I see. All you know.
24. All I know.
25. “Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way?” (Thoreau)
26. Still, fearing one touch is all it would take, I try not to imagine reaching into the void of the sky. I reach for an arm’s length, not for the distant stars.
27. If our physical bodies are supposed to be silver mist, erased by a northward breeze, they are at least beautiful diluted by the morning sun. By tea light candles. By small somethings within our atomic space. Small somethings within the space of memory.
28. One summer my boyfriend and I went to see a movie in his dumpy truck. It was our first time going (we both forgot the address of the theater). He took a wrong turn past a copper field of grain, the sun just above the Oquirrhs. On that day the sky actually felt like freedom. A good openness, for once. I moved my hand against the whipping air and slid right through it. No sensation of it slipping through me. Just hot air, new streets, and a laugh.
29. Even if the comfort of our touch is an illusion, it’s still a comfort. And some sort of touch.
My first workshop piece for my fiction class, based on the format of Bluets by Maggie Nelson.
2. Nowadays Atlas is shown instead holding up our little sphere, back bent and muscles flexed. But that’s the point of it—what would he be standing on to keep the oceans in his hands?
3. Maybe it was momentary deconstruction and reconstruction, layering himself across universes—until the sky was his feet as much as it was the sky.
4. The ocean floor is about 5-7% explored. The ocean itself only .5% explored. Despite the vastness of water, at least in the oceans there’s a conceivable “whole.” An end containing itself. Some of the deep-sea creatures that never see sunlight look terrifying, but I don’t think anywhere near as terrifying as the idea that we might be alone in the universe. Observable or otherwise.
5. I wonder sometimes if I’m preoccupied with the slow destruction of myself anyway. With tweezers pulling hair only to feel the tiny things slide out of my skin, not honestly to get rid of them. To experience a forceful coming-apart. To see the red spots left on my legs.
6. Books are known to fade and become weaker in the sunlight. Wedding clothes too. Paintings. For precious objects, find instead a cool, dark space.
7. My oldest books rest against a blue wall in my room, where the setting sun-rays hit just right to fade and weaken their binding. Thrift store Shakespeare collections. A copy of Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, published 1882, owned by my great-great-aunt or -uncle on my father’s side. I want to move them, but they’ve been there so long. I don’t know where I could put them.
8. When I was little my brother and I thought we could find anything in our garage. There were old boxes of cookbooks, clearance silver necklaces. Easter baskets and dusty computer drives. Garbage cans full of not-quite-garbage. We never knew what we were going to find! But eventually we grew up, and cleaned up, and realized nothing useful ended up in the cool, dark spaces.
9. Things are supposed to fall apart, we say.
10. Once I visited a Catholic church in San Diego. Sunlight weaseled through the stained glass, speckling itself over the opposite pews. Maybe the wood would fade in a few years. The reds and oranges felt like fire in the heart of the chapel. I lit a prayer candle under the outstretched hands of some saint (Mary?) for the death of my friend’s father. All of the tea lights flickered down and sighed back up in a little remembrance. A remembrance of—something, I hope.
11. Horses can run through fire if provoked. Mothers can run through fire if provoked too. Self-help seminars say you, Insignificant, can become magnificent—a fire-walker!—with only the power of your mind.
12. Black takes so much ink. In theory blackness is an absence, but a starry sky in a window of plain white paper is dense, its vastness collected in the stillness of the page. Its vastness concealed in congealed wood fragments, made into comic books. “I’m significant!” writes the author, in black lines on white. A little creation, a segment of the universe.
13. Segment: one of the parts into which something naturally separates or is divided; a division, portion, or section: “a segment of an orange.” (dictionary.com)
14. Photographic paper exposed too long on purpose. Burning, it’s called. I like to cut circles out of cardboard to lay in the middle of the pictures, blackening the whole piece but that one shape and whatever it contains. More light, more darkness.
15. That’s why we go blind staring at the sun! We see too much! Maybe some neo-futurist religious white woman thought that for a moment. Maybe I thought it. The point is, we both thought it, but I can’t be sure we thought it the same way.
16. My friend’s couches, brightly colored, smelled like some sweet sickness. The cigarette smoke only drifted in a mist through the window, but it found its way into the cotton. To him it was just smoke. I had to be okay with it then, but occasionally I smell a smoker’s clothes on the train. It smells like static build-up strong enough to burn hair and skin.
17. I feel like maybe he started to embrace dying as a side-effect of smoking.
18. The leaves didn’t turn until first snow one year. Even then, the yellow bones were stuck ringing with ice to the branches.
19. The skies were like ice that year too. They crackled and solidified beneath me—in appropriate Atlas fashion—and I was trapped between 43 shades of blue water and black space.
20. We are so much emptiness. Our atoms are more space than proton and electron.
21. This would lead one to wonder about the molecular mechanisms of touch, since it is obviously not just gears tugging our nerves toward each other.
22. I feel like I am so close, I say to myself, and I am. I feel like I can be protected in a loved one’s arms. But that emptiness drifts into my mind and I want to force my electrons into their atomic space instead of merely holding “close enough”. All of our emptiness together. It’s a stronger distance than my closeness can really be. It terrifies me.
23. But I want to think about things called “beautiful.” I don’t want my fears to be all I see. All you know.
24. All I know.
25. “Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way?” (Thoreau)
26. Still, fearing one touch is all it would take, I try not to imagine reaching into the void of the sky. I reach for an arm’s length, not for the distant stars.
27. If our physical bodies are supposed to be silver mist, erased by a northward breeze, they are at least beautiful diluted by the morning sun. By tea light candles. By small somethings within our atomic space. Small somethings within the space of memory.
28. One summer my boyfriend and I went to see a movie in his dumpy truck. It was our first time going (we both forgot the address of the theater). He took a wrong turn past a copper field of grain, the sun just above the Oquirrhs. On that day the sky actually felt like freedom. A good openness, for once. I moved my hand against the whipping air and slid right through it. No sensation of it slipping through me. Just hot air, new streets, and a laugh.
29. Even if the comfort of our touch is an illusion, it’s still a comfort. And some sort of touch.
My first workshop piece for my fiction class, based on the format of Bluets by Maggie Nelson.
Monday, September 15, 2014
Recognition
I am five years old, in a green or blue dress
—velvet, with white tights and black-strap shoes.
I am in a funeral home and everything is green.
The carpet is green and maroon—flowers curl
and leaves grow over and under our feet.
My eyes meet about everyone’s crotch.
Black and brown slacks, mostly pleated.
Skirts past the knees and stockings just slightly
darker than women’s white skin. There’s a coffin
somewhere, but I can’t see inside. I can see
its dark wood. Its green velvet skirt.
Maybe we match. The dead man’s skirt and mine.
I lose myself in the crowd of legs, but find
my father’s hand with my right. I look up at a laugh,
but not my father’s. I don’t know the man,
with gray hair instead of brown, sideburns
cut in line with his cheekbones. Well hello there!
Did you think I was someone else? I tug—desperate
—two, three steps toward the dead man.
I found my parents outside. The green was bright,
no velveteen heaviness. Bronze plaques named
the bones behind them. My dad once heard of a boy
trapped overnight in a mortuary.
Just after Christmas, with chocolates separated
in clear glass bowls, my grandma told us
she wanted to die. Not in words—in memories.
She missed her family. She told good stories
about dead men and women. She was happy,
in a floral print shirt and compression socks
that day. We listened patiently in metal folding-
chairs and on the quilted gold couch. She had a cabinet
like her eyes, filled with small figures of porcelain
women and angels draped in white. A blue vase.
She always looked like herself, in every photo.
Always the same smile. I imagine she smiled
when her daughters caught her talking to ghosts
between sleep and awakening some days.
My family felt guilty for knowing we knew
she would die soon. Her medications sat
in a green plastic organizer on a tiny metal table.
The silver shone with small yellow and green
painted flowers. We promised we’d visit again soon.
She died a few weeks later, January.
We knew. She was singularly ready to die.
I can see in the coffin now, her gray hair plastered
to her scalp and her waxy, paper-thin face. Green dress.
She doesn’t look like her. They never do. Never smile.
She is more herself captured in photos and letters
from the president. She is more herself in stories
of dead people she somehow recognizes.
Second workshop assignment in my poetry class. A much more simple narrative, compared to my sleep-writing. (Probably for the best.)
—velvet, with white tights and black-strap shoes.
I am in a funeral home and everything is green.
The carpet is green and maroon—flowers curl
and leaves grow over and under our feet.
My eyes meet about everyone’s crotch.
Black and brown slacks, mostly pleated.
Skirts past the knees and stockings just slightly
darker than women’s white skin. There’s a coffin
somewhere, but I can’t see inside. I can see
its dark wood. Its green velvet skirt.
Maybe we match. The dead man’s skirt and mine.
I lose myself in the crowd of legs, but find
my father’s hand with my right. I look up at a laugh,
but not my father’s. I don’t know the man,
with gray hair instead of brown, sideburns
cut in line with his cheekbones. Well hello there!
Did you think I was someone else? I tug—desperate
—two, three steps toward the dead man.
I found my parents outside. The green was bright,
no velveteen heaviness. Bronze plaques named
the bones behind them. My dad once heard of a boy
trapped overnight in a mortuary.
Just after Christmas, with chocolates separated
in clear glass bowls, my grandma told us
she wanted to die. Not in words—in memories.
She missed her family. She told good stories
about dead men and women. She was happy,
in a floral print shirt and compression socks
that day. We listened patiently in metal folding-
chairs and on the quilted gold couch. She had a cabinet
like her eyes, filled with small figures of porcelain
women and angels draped in white. A blue vase.
She always looked like herself, in every photo.
Always the same smile. I imagine she smiled
when her daughters caught her talking to ghosts
between sleep and awakening some days.
My family felt guilty for knowing we knew
she would die soon. Her medications sat
in a green plastic organizer on a tiny metal table.
The silver shone with small yellow and green
painted flowers. We promised we’d visit again soon.
She died a few weeks later, January.
We knew. She was singularly ready to die.
I can see in the coffin now, her gray hair plastered
to her scalp and her waxy, paper-thin face. Green dress.
She doesn’t look like her. They never do. Never smile.
She is more herself captured in photos and letters
from the president. She is more herself in stories
of dead people she somehow recognizes.
Second workshop assignment in my poetry class. A much more simple narrative, compared to my sleep-writing. (Probably for the best.)
Tuesday, September 9, 2014
Signatures
Fifteen hundred square miles of sidewalk
between fastened buttons, collar to navel.
A hand drawn up the outline of a neck
and seventy-six hours drawn up
on graph paper. No meticulous speckle
of freckles bleeds through, but unaccepted—
heat eats up the paper to save its soiled
underside, veins and blush sifting iron
through the ink-blots. Masterpiece in spider's pose.
Too severe to turn away, the stencil veered
to the moonlit snow and threw herself
into pieces. Forty perfect necks craned
toward the dark; Sistine hesitancies so sure.
Taken against her last breath to veer
three internal inches to the left—
the stars looked nearly ultra-violet
from these eyes, pinpricks strung over her body—
shards cast about the numbered blue margins.
A formal constraints poem for my poetry class. That class is the best. Passed this out for workshop today! XX
between fastened buttons, collar to navel.
A hand drawn up the outline of a neck
and seventy-six hours drawn up
on graph paper. No meticulous speckle
of freckles bleeds through, but unaccepted—
heat eats up the paper to save its soiled
underside, veins and blush sifting iron
through the ink-blots. Masterpiece in spider's pose.
Too severe to turn away, the stencil veered
to the moonlit snow and threw herself
into pieces. Forty perfect necks craned
toward the dark; Sistine hesitancies so sure.
Taken against her last breath to veer
three internal inches to the left—
the stars looked nearly ultra-violet
from these eyes, pinpricks strung over her body—
shards cast about the numbered blue margins.
A formal constraints poem for my poetry class. That class is the best. Passed this out for workshop today! XX
Sunday, September 7, 2014
Sweet Alyssum
She filled her living room with flowers
like they would give her new air to breathe.
I kicked the dirt like it would sing to me
if I tugged hard enough at the roots of soul
or of dandelions or morning glory impersonators
or, I don't know, maybe at my own feet buried
in the mud. We really never met. I knew her,
she didn't know me, and that's the way she liked it.
Alone in her house, I imagine she let bees
amble in and out the holes in the window-screens,
taking the scent of roses and sweet peas
on their soft bellies in their circular paths.
Something about the smell outside ate at me,
like I could almost touch the flowers, tangible,
but buried in the withered smell of fresh funeral
wreaths—left for the week after the green ground
forgives the emptiness and starts to creep in.
Suddenly with her and never with her; never touched
and never told that sunshine isn't just the here and now.
A semi-stream-of-consciousness piece from a few nights ago—they always seem a little better after leaving them alone.
like they would give her new air to breathe.
I kicked the dirt like it would sing to me
if I tugged hard enough at the roots of soul
or of dandelions or morning glory impersonators
or, I don't know, maybe at my own feet buried
in the mud. We really never met. I knew her,
she didn't know me, and that's the way she liked it.
Alone in her house, I imagine she let bees
amble in and out the holes in the window-screens,
taking the scent of roses and sweet peas
on their soft bellies in their circular paths.
Something about the smell outside ate at me,
like I could almost touch the flowers, tangible,
but buried in the withered smell of fresh funeral
wreaths—left for the week after the green ground
forgives the emptiness and starts to creep in.
Suddenly with her and never with her; never touched
and never told that sunshine isn't just the here and now.
A semi-stream-of-consciousness piece from a few nights ago—they always seem a little better after leaving them alone.
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