earnestfeeling

[earnestfeeling]

a poem for Frances Farmer

FRANCES

Glamour beyond doom I like a woman broad the abuse Western chaos control singing at Mount Rainier National Park O you mistake my character and broken heart hospital threat I feel you folding laundry the fines performance of that life defy art violent ward I love the devil inside of me inside of you

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I walked through my great grandparent's barn. The light came through square windows. Gleam of blackberries, dust of apples. A cement floor to milk the cows and then the rest dirt. The boards would be called slats. I felt as thin as paper, thin as glass. The whisper from an empty space, the one I must carry, had stilled to peer through. And with those eyes I saw. And within that silence: paper over a window creases to a bend, bending in a leaning barn.

That this was the first time I had seen it, too, Angeline.

from Canby to Salem

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Published some personal writing about returning to Oregon, the legacy of eugenics on my family, how that all moves through me, why I am determined to hold and speak the grief and resilience it brings.

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Love like a nectarine!

I spent a year making this, I bought a real canvas. I've been thinking about safety and want, my particular experiences of terror. Love and what it asks of me is hard-won. My partner hung this on our wall because it matters and he likes it. Collect enough small glows and you'll have a future, on purpose.

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Going to send out something later today, feeling very serious and self indulgent. Long form personal writing here for when I have something to say. 

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Moments of complex and unimaginable good!

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Text reads: “You will change, and survive. Over and over. Life, dense, the gravity of past to lay a hand on the loom of future. Harsh breaks, soft sighs, I know how much you want to understand. On the train, on your way to pick up the keys, I can tell them you saw clearly their young, real faces. You were going home. They examined you without understanding and that is why you cried. Your desperate heart. You know you will never know. With this past we stay hungry. It does remain, everything you have ever been. Imagine yourself alive where love can be safe. We know, and we weep, that this was not always there for you. I express with pain that there we were companions. Your survival today, if it allows you, if you are here, I am here, please, this is the way it can be now.”

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Madness is so precious to me, so painful, and deeply deeply DEEPLY entwined with love :(

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quick & grateful & strange work

Text reads: "That morning at the bluff, the riverbank of wind moved my breath through. It felt as a funeral should. I knew love and freedom and was devastated alive. Precious heart, a whole miniature heart, of robins. You can cover the ground so beautiful and complete. I perceive your transformation in a way faster and more secret than an eye.

The voice I honed over years of the unimaginable can be steady and I know it is true. A pack of dogs, keen and wild, still roam. With a scream a love song comes on the radio at night. We will all meet in the meadow. It has been a good and bad dream. I am not lucky or evil, if those exist here. I maintain that though I may be destroyed, I am blessed.”

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I wrote this poem the summer of 2019, on the cusp. There are real pains that are not recognized as pain. One of those can be experiences labeled as psychosis. Another is moving through the world as someone assigned a related label. Clozapine devastated me, carrying its own pain, leaving me a complicated grief. Fuck shame & fuck eugenics: Mad people, I love you, I want us to have a good, good life.

Text under the cut:

Lab Work

In the hospital, they come to you. Take it out while you watch TV or the wall, glass to glass to glass. They want to leave the ward: they do not register your wince.

*

I read the prescription drug website. Glass, but not a mirror:

insect pricked by a pin insect stuck in amber 

*

I thought about giving the lab vials of my blood and how that meant I would be touched 

even if the phlebotomist knew this was for clozapine,

this was for clozapine.

*

There are hands that have held my hands and not wanted to let go. Remember this: 

I have not wanted to let go

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“In terrible strength I sometimes believe I could forgive the world”

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Love is safe & real & a good field to stand in. Here is another collage, pieced together warm and patient as a quilt, that I made in determination to live there. When you are weary from pain, may this be your careful place to rest. 

Image description: Two photographs of a paper collage that resembles a quilt with two nestling birds in the center surrounded by green fields and brush and colorful lines and rectangles on a cream background. The first photo is the collage against steps outdoors with angled sunlight and the shadows of leaves. The second photo is the collage resting flat on dry, golden grass.

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i have been on this website since I was twelve. I’ll be twenty two this year. I remember when the nosebleed club first came out. I was running an open mic in the drama room black out theatre during high school. I remember wanting to create some kind of space like that, somewhere I could write and share and others could share. I never read My Girl Romy until today and it rocked my world. All day I’ve kind of been sitting with the words letting them sink in the brain wrinkles. Going back and rereading again and I just couldn’t help but reach out and tell you how much it stirred me. After feeling like a dormant volcano for two years of not being able to write anything, suddenly I want to share. Thank you for writing. Thank you for putting it out there and I’m just so happy I logged in at the right time. It’s like swimming and glimpsing a sparkle in the sand. Thank you for the treasure. I am going to find my favorite pen and write again.

Thank you so, so much for sending me this, it really means the world! I definitely have those dormant volcano periods (love that image) and I understand how powerful the right words at the right time can be. I feel so lucky to be able to be a small part of that shift for you, but remember to give yourself credit for picking up that favorite pen again, it is YOU who are doing the real work here!! I am on the sidelines cheering you on with a stupid grin! I hope you are finding that vital creative community where you are now, and if you ever want to chat about writing I am here too. Thank you again <3

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MY GIRL ROMY

(Originally appeared in Nosebleed Club's Short Story Collection [2019].)

In the mad-dog heat of the summer, possibility opens like a window to let the breeze of time pass through. When autumn comes the window slides decisively shut, encasing behind it the surreal world of August light, sweat on skin, the long walk home. The summer was Romy, and the summer will be eternally hers. The August light was her tripped-up halo, the August sunsets from the river park the only real thing in the universe. We were girls once, and the only real thing in the universe to ourselves. I learned about the way a river can open and close and about time doing the same motion. After you see it once, you can never forget. No way will it let you go. 

* 

For two months out of the year Romy stayed with her aunt, who was my next-door neighbor. This had been going on for whispered reasons for as long as I could remember. And for as long as I could remember Romy and I were inseparable. Romy was my kind of company—loud, freckled. The twin I needed to my quiet, cautious. Romy was one year older, one year cleverer, full of one more years’ worth of dreams and sorrows. We discussed them intensely, intimately, the dreams and sorrows. We’d tell secrets wherever we went. You know me too well, she’d say, she’d laugh. No one knows me better, I thought. The fifteenth summer Romy is into painting. She has a real gift. This one was dancing swallows in a tense blue sky. This one was a barn owl with golden orb eyes. They followed me knowing around her room. We had begun our fifteenth summer with a secret: Romy had a bottle of prescription pills that she takes one day at a time. Romy wasn’t ashamed, Romy was happy, Romy was steady. Romy spent Tuesday afternoons in an office midtown with a woman named Barbara. Barbara encouraged Romy to paint more. I encouraged Romy to paint more, too. I took pictures for her the rest of the year and gave them to her that next summer. Look, a cat crouched across your aunt’s fence. Look, a dog vigilant by the mailbox. A cedar tree shrouded in snow. An ambulance sheathed in the fire station. Romy smiled her crooked smile. She was one year older. Her eyes looked in directions I couldn’t always see. But Romy’s paintings showed me. Romy’s paintings had pulled something out of my heart and now it sung. Mournful, mostly, but peaceful as a hidden lake. * Romy braided my hair and we went down to the river park. We brought my dog, who went wild happy. I brought my camera. I decided I liked taking pictures for Romy. I’d started an album of just the summer. I thought it would be important. We sat together on the log over the river, feet dangled into the water. Romy said that there was a lot that people wanted from her. She said don’t worry, it’s not about you. I felt relieved. I felt sad. I told Romy she could do whatever she wants, she was that good. Romy smiled her crooked smile. She tossed a stick for my dog to chase into the water. You know what, Romy said, someday I’ll be the river. Here and moving on. Follow your weird heart, Romy, I told her. What little I understand has grown in melancholy with time: there were people in Romy’s life who wanted something different for her, from her, of her. I wanted Romy to walk with me beside the river; Romy wanted to touch the bottom of the river, come up to me with a smooth stone. I arranged line after line of rocks speckled with muddy quartz across the landscape of my bedroom. Bed was an island. Romy spent the summer rowing towards me, I towards her, and by the time she left, I’d be all softened again. A riverbank tumbling down. * The summer of dancing swallows outside and in. The summer the room filled to the brim with sleep. The summer of my head on her shoulder, just once. I thought of her like she was a knife: bleached and whittled bone handle, fine silver blade of a mind. I thought about being careful. I thought about being split in half. It was joyous. It might have been the first time in my life. Romy, if it couldn’t be me— I thought of a black and white photograph I saw at an exhibition. Two hands extended and clasped with the background of a plain. How it struck me. How simple it was. How I felt hungry to take it, put in the frame Romy with a body that wasn’t mine, maybe one made entirely of quartz, of light. * The last day of the summer I was determined not to cry. I gave Romy copies of my photographs fresh from the drugstore; she gave me a box of smooth river stones. I had stories but I forgot them with the weight of the box placed in my hands. And I did cry, unexplainable sorrowful tears. Romy touched my face, wiped them off with her fingertips. Every night I went to the river, she said, and I picked up a stone. And I remembered you. I don’t think your life is easy. I think you pretend you are not a part of the world. I think you’re afraid to touch it. Me, I can’t stop holding on tight enough to kill it. Have a good year at school. I’m going home. I did see the world and I left it alone. The cruelest element of time is that it does not stop when you do. I dreamt that night in grief songs of a red rushed river and a cascade of snow— * Romy didn’t go missing, but Romy didn’t come back, either. That was the final summer. Her aunt moved away, Romy graduated, I don’t know where Romy went after that. And I wondered about her. The moments were quiet and full. In imaginary worlds Romy is free to go where she pleases. In imaginary worlds Romy is free to go. I was still taking photographs, sometimes I was in them. Romy, I will always show up for you. Did you have an easy time with words? I did not, but I am certainly learning, slowly. Time to time I heard the boxes in the closet rattling. Hot stones and photographs. I had nightmares of blank canvases or of my frantic hands having scrawled something desperate and ugly I couldn’t erase. Two swallows paused in dancing, swooped to pull at my hair. A summer alone can make a ghost of a girl. Romy, I told her, though she was not there, I’m falling apart, something inside me is falling down. I want to be so good. First for you, but I think for me too. The most forgiving song is playing in the next room. I’d rather be a pair of hands, a body of light. I am being patient. I tell myself I am waiting around for the real thing. * Romy, when one thing is on fire how much time until everything is on fire? I wanted to ask you, I thought you might know. It seems it does take some time. But it happens, inevitably. Why does this place sit there like a locked cube? It takes some time to form a softer shape. Why is everything about that blank-faced time? When I cry I create a new face in the water’s reflection, on me, rising in the air blotchy as a ghost. My face says it knows no hands but mine, baptized in the river. Are you lonesome Romy? We’ve got a sound like salt and honey licking the back of our brains. The sky didn’t make us, our parents did. How do you exist a block of wax, a liminal space, is there something, anything, no one is telling you Romy, it’s all itchy under my thin salt skin— I live here with the spit and the rivers and the rabbits and I’m still thinking about that dry gold grass and Hell all the time. * I moved out of town after I graduated. I kept going to school, and then in the summer, I returned home to work. I nanny for the family that bought Romy’s aunt’s house. I take them to the river park, I take them to the movies. I read to them, I hand them crayons. I give them disposable cameras and they capture their own summer with their own names. I needed something to do: I didn’t realize it would be so close. I have my own orange prescription bottles, narrow white pills. My own Barbara. I have a problem with complicated roots. I walk down to the river park and they simplify. I still do this. When the kids are asleep in their new home with my eyes I take pictures of the familiar place. I lie on the freshly installed carpet and the view of the ceiling looks the same as it ever did. I breathe in the old house. This is how a dream feels when it was once real. I am learning about nostalgia: how defenseless we are to its easy, merciless pains. And how much I cherish the color and depth it gives the world with memory, like an image adorned with strokes of paint. And of all that I am learning to love, what I love most is the hand that paints it. * In rough strokes I imagine grief like a razed field. A harshly reaped harvest. The crass trees lining the field struck by lightning, the encroaching fireline crackling at oxygen and static electricity, the darkness of the storm mimicking nightfall. We are far from August or we are deep at its heart. And I imagine her standing in the middle of the plain in a rain-soaked nightgown. Dark circled, gothic. Herself. Sometimes she screams, sometimes she weeps, sometimes she looks as if she is memorizing a spot distant on the horizon. A place for her to go. I imagine her in peace and in madness. I imagine us hand in hand. I feel the image release.

[earnestfeeling]

Lesion

[Paper collage consisting of images of: a person sat in a pew bent in prayer, a forest fire, a handwritten notecard that reads “tissue destruction” with two illustrations of a brain labeled “normal” and “bad”, and intersecting white, red, and yellow lines.]

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Threshold

[Paper collage consisting of images of: a field of blue flowers, a team of explorers crossing a golden field of grass, a foggy mountain reflected in water, a happy dog in a field of multicolored flowers with the caption “Swimming in flowers”, and a notecard handwritten with the word “Threshold”. Red, black, pink lines and yellow shapes. The collage is resting on moss sprinkled with cedar tree droppings.] 

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Hi this is Megan / formerly anexitlike / I have some art!