Polaroid Transfer

They say you ripple
into black dust before
your synapses can re-
connect their constellations,
trying to make up a word
that explains itself.
Fire burns through
your veins and your soft-
pounded skin—blue
turned ochre particles
falter in the sighing
light. Like you sighed
before you grasped
my cold arm in the dark.
They say you sift
through the screen before
the sky breathes white.
The mountains keep
their hands around our
staggered throats—
and you are out of here.
Neither here nor there—
who takes your postcards
when you're gone? Return
to sender, please. We have
no landscapes left to us.
They say a lot of things,
but I am left devoted.
When the sky does take
its breath, we watch
to keep your flicker
closer to our lungs.

I want to break into
the power of lightning
captured in photos.
You're the closest
I've ever gotten, and you
are just as intimately
seized into emulsion.

The cactus flowers
came more conveniently
than I thought. 227
miles isn't so far counted
in disc scratches.
You'd rather have counted
the times the road goes
black within the sky,
but we didn't have enough
disc scratches to count
so high. Pink, poked,
pressed into Encyclopaedia
porcelain pages, blossoms
just as crystalline as lemon-
drops on the rubber floor-mat.

I should have seen the cracks
clawing up your forearm.
Spread out with your veins
in the sing-song sunlight,
they took ahold with enduring
demand. Keeping up appearances—
you told me you'd eat up
the pleasantries of sunshine
for a little reality, a little raw rain.

They say your hair stands up
right on end, listening, just before
it strikes. I'll give them that.
My cells could predict thunder
before I could predict your voice
quieting our cotton T-shirts
at sunset. You'd have claimed
the smoke-filled skies
enough to singe your hair,
and they did, no red-
pen corrections to be had.
Graphite on the windowsill,
you drift without words before
the sky breathes white.
We watch to keep your flicker
closer to our lungs.  

I want to break into
the power of lightning
captured in photos.
You're the closest
I've ever gotten, and you
are just as intimately
seized into emulsion.
Return to sender, please.
We have no landscapes 
left to us. Nothing half-
way about voltaic distances.


My workshop piece! Shout out to Ms. Alexander and all my classmates, if they ever find this—because you're all wonderful. I feel like I get so much more out of hearing other people talk about my words than I can pry out of them on my own. You're all inspiring, and you're all amazing, diverse writers. Reading other writers makes me feel like I'm looking in on the physical progression of a person, in so many figurative and literal ways that I can't find words for. This class has offered me new ideas and opportunities to explore the unknown and my own work. Giving and taking what we need in our words. Thank you for all of that. Today was the sort of class that reminds me why I want to go into English. 

Making fun of my diminutives

Should I hang back and watch the clouds roll across the mountains, without going to the mountains to pull them myself. Everything stays in my echoic memory and I try not to attend to it. The buzz of the refrigerator when the power flickers back on; that summer stayed sunny. But repetition comes in every snap and drawback, carelessly drawing your thoughts up in your arms before falling to red sleep. Everything is as real as it lays across your convalescent skin. 5/16" needled-out nights. He was real as his God hates his dopaminergic neurotic insomnia. Requiring or claiming more than is generally felt by others to be due: The language of inquiry, pedagogy of poetry.* Girls line up in the hall, barefoot in white. The candles fade into their hands, in and out of heavenly tapping along the carpet. I told him angels watch over his shoulder anyway. Unable to bend or be penetrated under pressure; hard: When what happens is not intentional, one can't ascribe meaning to it, and unless what happens is necessary, one can't expect it to occur again.* I mean untroubled by the distortions.* I mean untroubled by voiced concerns without dimes lined up between them. I choked on a dime. Language R is parallel to Language E, perhaps they cannot touch, so we fall into a translation (description) trance.* My aunts said, "Don't worry, it's just like chewing gum." Superstitions lined up on their sons' palms jammed open on the rocks, white and wide maggoting up through their fortunes. And another thing: devious, and cotton, but with sweetly analytical hacking and hilarity (I have said, and meant, that I want people to "get" this, and yet, with expansive sensations, I hate to "lighten up").* Fishing line and the kitchen table gone out from under their flowing fats, gathering crowds to prod at their grimaces. They don't use emergency rooms; he, on their other hands, always made sure to hide his stitches. So I just watch the clouds press their wide bodies against the mountaintops and keep my hands to myself.

*Lines from Lyn Hejinian's My Life.
Also present, dictionary.reference.com definitions of demanding and unyielding

Little Miss

            Her ruby eyes shine out of her sweater hem, woven in with gold thread—I’d like to weave anything close to that treasure.
            She shuffled in the door to push off her boots against the floorboard and pull up another pair of socks. I like the repetition of her motion. Seven steps to the kitchen, the click of the lightswitch and soft pitter on the tiles. It moves me more than I would have liked a month ago. But here I sit and feel her sound, soft caresses across my legs. I can’t say it’s so different from the sound of car doors creaking and slamming out the window in the dark, but here I know it’s her. It’s always her here.
            She flashes and I jump in the mornings, turning herself over and over until she’s gone. I wish she’d stay longer.
             But she’s here now, always moving. She startled the wood with a dropped spoon, a quiet Crap. Her voice smooths over the air in arching waves. Imitation of her tongue-in-cheek phone calls is lain crooked behind me, cracked where I could never capture her imperfection in silk. Her hair shines like dewdrops in the morning. She runs her hand through the strands of sunshine and settles back in the red velvet chair, bowl propped on her knees, her feet on the ottoman and her breath in the air. Spirals of sweetness from her chilled lips.
            Maybe I’m too brave to poise myself above that breath. Silver lining of all my days hanging in the air. I rest on her shoulder. She doesn’t know. She couldn’t know or we’d never be so far apart. Wool and her hair across her neck. Her beautiful neck. I move to touch her.
            She’s screaming, and I’m on the floor, red in my eyes and heat in my legs. Don’t be frightened! I want to say, if only my jaw could wrap around the air like hers does! The chair is gigantic from down here. Her shrieks are larger than life. Scuttle into the bottom of the chair; the dark will return to quiet. I hope for another day where her sound stays soft beside me.

Sleep Text 3/20/14

Fearlessness cracked
into dihedral impossibilities,
in theory never touching
again but knowing
the gaze makes us whole,
takes us whole to gray
skies that wash
in dirty water down
the page, curling the edges
like they can't quite
touch the ground either.
I've never known
myself so fragmentedly,
found in paint
chips layered on bare-
back walls, our naked
arms pressed wide in hide-
away freedom. Keep
ourselves together, but
don't let me touch your
skin and blow away
your ashes. The frantic
weight of starlight creaks
in the windows.
Inches of dust pile across
our open eyes and light
the storm-door break-
away stardom we felt
in the early hours of sun,
left alone with furniture
that lazes around and
leaves none left for our
tiredness.

Habitual Fact

Raised head to stare at the sun
with closed eyes, the sky falls
in pockets of green glass.
We would not linger fixed
for so long. We would not
open our mouths to singe
our throats into submission.
I sat on the doorstep
for an hour, filling my jeans
with crushed yellow leaves.
I waited for you in the dawn,
filled up limb by limb
with stagnant blood. Fill
me up with sunlight and I would
see red for all of color, laid sliver
and cell on top of my veins.
I would sit until, god,
until we both stopped caring
for the individual geometries
of our eyelids. Blink
and be done with it.
Done with the waking hour.
You were done with color
seeping into the darkness without
your hands pushing it all in.
Palms against your eyes to push
the optic nerve to breaking
a little bit between us.
Zero, one, two, three, four.
We can't stand up so fast.

            We're making the transition from prose to narrative poetry in creative writing. I'm feeling much more in my enjoyable element already, so just a couple pieces I really like.
            "Loving the Hands" by Julie Suk (or anything else by Julie Suk, I love everything I've read)
            "Jet" by Tony Hoagland

(Also, it's amazing to me to see how far I've come. I started out five years ago with the roughest sense of meter and rhyme, writing poems with British accents. I may laugh at what I wrote between the times, but it's fun to be here. I appreciate any and all of the dedication of past Rachel to get me where I am now. I can't wait to see how I will have grown from now.)

Graphomania

            Close your eyes.

            The shittiest taco stand is on the corner of Bard and Stanford. I’m sure that’s why I go there so much. A few words on the subject: If I haven’t had a tortilla stuffed with spicy ground beef by 10 PM, it’s hopeless. A bad night can only get worse. Freezer-burned microwave burritos just don’t hold up. I could search the city and I’d still end there.
            I’d rather walk at night than day. The heat in my hand seems heavier in the dark. A reminder that if I can hold a shitty burrito in my hand and in my stomach, I can hold myself up. Plus, all the lights look nicer. Streetlights and stoplights flicker in the windows. Sunlight bears down on the sidewalks without pause, but I like the punctuation of darkness. I dunno.

            “In love with daylight’s horror, I walk to the sun on molten shoes.”
            I laugh.
            The hour tacks itself onto 8.5 x 11 college-ruled paper. It needs all those extra blue lines to stand itself up. Chicken scratch on paper, sold for one million dollars. Dr. Evil would be so proud. His pen, on the other hand, makes $5 artwork. Smooth lines and clean dots that children would marvel at hung up on a wall. I’d like to taste it on my skin.

            October 24th, that burrito was a killer. Steve had a lot more spice in his beef that day. I don’t know why I trust a guy named Steve to know anything about burritos, but I don’t think he would trust me to know what guys should know. Dumb. What guys should know. What should I know what I should know what guys should know? I walked by a wall with “YAWN” painted on it in rough strokes, smoothed out on the edges with a silver hand. I yawned. A good sign. I heard psychopaths don’t yawn by suggestion.
            I shook my head and said no under my breath, spitting it over my shoulder and leaving it for the sun to singe.

            He wrote just like I thought he would. Acrylic fingers and steaming ink flat and simple on the page. Beautiful, he would say, but I was scratching at it already, an itch that wouldn’t go away with an accidental spill of aloe or another kiss.
            But what a kiss. It did its job and was done.

            90 steps to a block, almost exactly. Sometimes it goes over too far, 94 steps and 34 cracks stepped on. My mother doesn’t worry much about me, though, I think. She kisses me on the head when it’s just what I need, but she doesn’t say much else. I obviously don’t worry much about her. I’m not careful enough with the steps I take. Stupid.

            Allow me to take away the loneliness, wails in my ears and the night is gaping. Its ugly mouth gnashes its lovely teeth and garishly spits out the stars. Something in the stars tonight, I feel their heartbeat by candlelight. I’d give a million to stare with you, but you take the moment to bite and chew. 
            He was really sweet up until that moment. He tried to be, I could tell. His words dripped with sugar, and I loved it. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t get it all off. Crazy, crazy, crazy for you… 

            My dad used to wrap me up like a “burrito”. I was 10 years old but he still swaddled me like a baby and pretended to squirt hot sauce on my head. He’d tell me stories before bed. Circle up my blankets like a nest for Big Bird and lay his “burrito” in the middle of the taco salad. I laughed and I laughed. I don’t know what happened. I thought he would have known everything. I thought he would have known enough. I thought I would have known enough. Walking is hard.
            On that Tuesday I walked home, like usual. Everything must have seemed fine. We had spaghetti for dinner. I thanked Dad for it and he said, “You’re welcome,” and that was that. Mom smiled and kissed me on the forehead. I went for a walk.

            “I’ve always loved your handwriting. Since 8th grade.”
            “That’s sweet.”
            I stared at his stomach as his breaths rose and fell.
            “I used to keep your papers.”
            He smiled and poked my side. “You’re crazy.”

            …for you. I’d give a million to stare with you, but you take the moment to bite and chew. 

            I want to stay on the road forever. Done with sidewalk cracks, done with the cracks on my knuckles. I want to melt into the asphalt like a crystalized snowflake unfurling. I want to be the graffiti dripping onto the curb, pink and white and black. I don’t know. Part of something bigger than me. Part of something smaller. Part of something instead of parts of me.

            Just one more hour, baby. No one will miss you for one more hour.
            I could miss myself for a lot more.

            Blue ballpoint pen.
            Red felt-tip marker.
            Yellow highlighter.
            Smooth and round like his shoulders in the sunlight, glistening against the window panes. Words on the paper are quiet. They lay themselves back and let themselves be. Part of the paper, leaking over the edges and bursting through Sharpie stains. The permanence is heavenly. Burned up in green fire, a Hell for heavy hearts.
            His fingers became sticky. Whiteout.

            A lot of people spend a lot of time looking for the right words to say, their songs say so. They found their words somewhere. They floated in the open curtains and sang sweetly on the sofa. They reclined in restful rows and they shattered in the sore silence.
            I’d take those words!

            He told me I was crazy for the second time. I don’t think he believed how much I loved his words, smooth and sparse and sweet. But in the end, it wasn’t him. It wasn’t him. It was me. It just always was. Just me and his words, pinned up on the wall like butterfly wings. My aunt bought a piece of art at Salvation Army. 100 blue butterfly wings in a vintage gold frame that she hung on an eastern wall to catch the sunset in their little stained scales.
            Of course I know that in ten years I will look back and feel like I was alive and kicking and flapping these lips like a toddler who just learned “no”. I’d look back like I know I was more than my fingers glued to cardboard, and I will almost forget that I ever felt reduced to that at all. But that doesn’t mean it just stops. I can imagine infinity, but I won’t go inside it. Eternity. Everyone talks about God when they talk about eternity. He is ETERNAL. He is IMMUTIBLE. Or something like that.
            Crazy; I did love the word. I just like pens more. I just like the words that come out of them. I just need to write it out and write him out. He wrote himself out, damn it, so all there is left to do is write.
            Making the best takes conviction.

            I never took you hostage like the graphite took me.
            I never took what I didn’t want to do, to do to me.
            Never have I ever in my long-legged life met a long-legged sailor with a long-legged wife. No, never have I ever in my long-legged life.

            All these co-catastrophes colliding creations – corridor color-coding dull daft during day. Every evening escalading, frozen-feeling frost-bite freezing frost. Galleries of everything! How it tunnels into your cortex! It’s beautiful! It’s

            something
                        isn’t it?


(My terrifying first draft piece for workshop. Gulp.)

Singularity

            A picture is worth no more than your right eye. $726 if it’s not over-worn, maybe a dozen more in it if it’s the one that led you by the ray to us. 7 AM on a Tuesday and we unroll the morning. Yellow and red settle at the mountaintops and run before us into gray. It’s a beautiful day to be alive, we say.
            You don’t even know we’re there. You stare into the mirror and mull your face over. Pull at the dark spots under your eyes. Heavy weights drag you down to sleep, but you fight your eyes to stare at the fluorescent bathroom bulbs. The light’s still there in the back of your blink. Everything again exists as you last saw it. Don’t worry about a thing.
             The problem with pictures—they deteriorate so quickly. On good paper they still take in sunspots. On a good mind they don’t survive past 71. We need your eyes. You’re not cornered in the dark—you could close your eyes and see infinity. But we need that from you. Please.
             I didn’t call myself a collective until I saw the edge. Nothingness can’t exist as you know it. I cried and became blind by the poison of my tears. And I saw again. We saw.
             Here. I hold my hands out to you; we watch and wait. You turn the paper over by the darkened edges. Sick on your shoes. It’s a shame you can’t appreciate it yet, but you will. We hold you in our arms. You don’t even feel it. $620 to your bank account a week later; not a remarkable specimen, but we’ll take it.
            There’s nothing quite like the mirror image of ourselves, poking at our sleepy faces. But no one really cares what there is to see without observers. So we watch you and make you worth something. Watch us watch you.
             It’s a beautiful day to be alive, we say. Say: A fine, bright day to be alive.

I have trouble finding the balance between giving my readers too much and too little (usually the latter). Anything to figure out what readers need to know to draw their own conclusions would be helpful! 
            (Another creative writing draft. Workshop on Wednesday, and I haven't written a thing! Writing is fun, but also stressful...)