femmuse

[femmuse]

“a revision”

one year ago today you sat across from me on that god awful edendale patio i had so painstakingly chosen for our first proper encounter. aperol turned into tequila turned into you pulling off of mohawk street and taking my face into your hands. it’s hard for me to forget the exact date, insignificant as it is now, because as we prepared to get into your car we got the news paul’s mom had passed and we both went cold. but still the night for me carried magic, a full moon lighting up the shadows of quiet echo park roads and even then i knew i was in over my head. but what a way to drown.

one year later i sit on the stoop of my new home in fort greene, half-moon invisible from here but the city much brighter. you had your way with me and it hurt to be so close yet so far from touching the silk of your being. but time passed and it got better, as it always does. on another full moon in april i found you at the bar of the airliner and told you i was leaving. after that day your spirit leaned toward me once more and i’d be lying if i said i didn’t want to seize it with both hands, but geography and experience taught me restraint.

these months swirled around us both in the chaos and swelter of our coasts. i would hear from you periodically, each time surprised but cool despite my sweat. even before i moved your late august trip east glowed like a star destined to burn itself out. but it came and it shone. i found you in the swell of a crowd in commodore park, all smiles and shifting eyes. your hair had grown long. when night fell you pulled me closer, hands around my ankles in the car and whole arms from behind in the bar. i didn’t want us to leave alone but we did and fell asleep interlocked to a bolero twinkle. 

i woke in the morning to an empty bed, not unusual in those days of your studio city king but here and now giving me irk. i pulled you back into slumber and you woke me hard and ready. our bodies were never lock and key and in the dry breath of a hungover morning they still stuck at the turn, though my door opened yet. we turned and you went soft inside of me, slipping out to trace fingers on each other’s skin as we talked of writing and songs and our dreams and slumbers. i stayed in your penthouse as you and two men worked on perfecting the grotesqueness of your film, eating breakfast sandwiches on your couch, to be remembered in crumbs. the day and its work would steal you so i left while it was still in grace. as i walked into one of your three elevators you came up from behind and pulled me near. it was the first time you told me you loved me and probably the last too. i was caught in a pause before returning it, soft and unsure but in a way true. the rest of your days here would pass without a reunion and that’s how it was supposed to go. a love misplaced, bodies carried up twenty floors and into each other’s flesh, circular in timing and in knowing we’re all wrong but i’m thankful for you proving me right.

[femmuse]

stevedraft

i had felt your presence before, whispered about in hushed and reverent tones in loud rooms long ago, but never seen your face in front of mine. when i finally did there was rose shading my eyes but still you filled them. you were broad, even broader than i knew you from the many photographs. though my fingers had already traced over your bloodlines they had not felt the gold which smoothly gilds you. when you looked at me i was small.

we flew back to LA and i thought the wonder had been left suspended in chicago’s summer, as it often is. but a few days later your name sat the same size and type as all the rest in my inbox yet somehow so much bolder. we both had busy augusts. when i would find wifi in argentina you’d often find me too. i was suspicious of the interest you took in me and acted accordingly, painstakingly wording check-ins that were eloquent but to the point. eventually you cooled off a bit and i sensed i had to act. after you gave me a ride home from the studio in your mess of a car and we met up for a drink at edendale and i talked a mile a minute through both instances to keep myself from staring at you too long, finally you pulled over to the quieter end of mohawk and i kissed you messily and it began.

our first date will go down in history as the best i’ve ever been on and you know it. now it bothers me a little bit but at the time it was divine. the intricacies of your thoughtfulness and energy would be spoiled by baring them here. you impressed me and aroused me and opened me like dawn does a new bloom. a sense of adventure permeated the subsequent weeks, both of our birthdays passing in decadent fashion, presenting each other with jewels and secrets and our bodies. you made music here and there and we ate and swam naked and watched movies and smoked weed and i knew i could not fool you with armor anymore. but anyway it seemed pointless. you were sometimes distant in a way i knew you would be, or moreover had to be - it was your essence to walk certain paths impassable by others - and our meetings were never constant, but still you felt near.

then a change started to grow in us and to this day i can’t trace its beginnings. our good mornings and technicolor hearts began to quiet. there was the time you played the carnival downtown last-minute and we fumbled until you walked on the stage but when you walked off you had eaten an eighth of mushrooms and drunk a bottle of patron and from there things spiraled off in every direction, as they would. all of us went to our respective weird places that night. you fell asleep with your fingers laced into mine and i knew i was happy but i also knew that things would not stay as they were, one way or another. and i was right.

you went to asia just before thanksgiving. we ate soul food at your place and i felt like you had already left. while you were away you called me once and it was enough to make me glow for a week. when you came back there were only a few days before i left until the new year but you didn’t seem to mind much. i searched for longing in you right before i left and threw myself into you with an urgency which embarrasses me now but i don’t regret it. when i came back from mexico it would never be the same. i saw you twice more.

the first time i brought over the maraca and pipe i’d carefully selected at the market, hoping for alchemy. iko rested her underbite on my thigh and you ordered dessert at pace and we slept in your bed with cartoons’ light dancing on our heavy heads. in the morning i slipped out of your room with you still fast asleep. never before had you stayed in bed after i’d woken early for work. i don’t know whether i’d grown quieter or you’d grown less rousable. the second time i found you in the shadows of the airliner, watching your ex-girlfriend sing and sway, neither of us wanting to see one another right there and right then for obvious reasons. you let me ride home in your car and made sure we kissed before i got out, though i’d already half-turned from you in more ways than one.

you were always busy. i edited your fucked up script and you called me beauty and told me you’d been thinking about me a lot. your ensuing silence became a burden and a week later i got the courage to ask whether i’d done something to wither your interest. you responded to me carelessly, cryptically. i requested a conversation that wasn’t made with thumbs and you never used yours to reply. shame burned in me for weeks and i guess still does. what a fool i was to let magical thinking blind me to your atrophy. there was always an excuse i made for you, for why we couldn’t mould our shifting shapes into something recognizable. you were at once formless and overwhelming, never mine to keep, always in sight but only rarely within reach. 

the only thing which pains me now is that you still come to me frequently in dreams, a sad riddle i do not solve. i wish instead you visited me as you did in indian summer, shyly smiling, dark and cosmic, but ultimately a bright light from which my skin still feels warm.

[femmuse]

23 january

I never was one much to ascribe to our astral circling but I’ll be damned if the past year didn’t make me feel a special kind of gravity. I rang in 2015 typing poems topless, wagering bets poorly, head a thousand balloons inflated to point burst. I deflated that first week, four days swallowing each other lazily on this dingy couch, and remember deciding something would be different but I didn’t know what yet.

I watched the stars with frozen toes and ate short stacks in the desert. I felt myself fall out of love and tried to break his heart gently. I traveled to San Francisco and felt sad for her flagging spirit. in April everything began to change. Coachella brought me all manner of faces and feelings, howling into the night with two dread heads from life’s different moments of surrender. from there the journey accelerated: there were festivals on Indian reservations in Nevada, in Chicago parks and LA expo complexes; there were three trips to New York ranging from ten hours to one week and all of them as mental and breathtaking as each other; there was the rain-soaked week in Buenos Aires, learning the visceral quality of sorrow, feeling for my grandmother both a pitiful ache and impossibly consuming love; there were chance encounters with two LA men in Chicago and only one of them materialized into anything but what a thing it was. I rang in my 24th birthday in a rosy-tinted dream which I didn’t wake from until winter had crested. I was challenged professionally in ways I’d never imagined but made it through them all with just a few cuts and bruises. my heart swelled and wilted. December was a blur of time zones and souls from eras past. at the end of it all I was drunk as a loon on the streets of Mexico City, ragged with luck and a sense that maybe it could not get better than this and that was okay with me.

[femmuse]

chidi’s portrait

you are still a boy. i know it when i guess you’re a scorpio and you guess i’m a cusp baby. i know it when you tell me you’re falling in love far too soon. i know it when you go back to her, a girl. she is wrong for you but at least in that respect she fits.

at first i take offense when you tell me, and it confuses me. i wasn’t looking for anything and didn’t find it either, but i still feel loss and a hot pang of envy which disgusts me. she wears more makeup on a daily basis than i think i ever have in my life but i know she is beautiful and will fuck you up. you don’t deserve it exactly, but you don’t know any better either.

two months later you text me drunk and tell me i’m perfect, that you need me, that you’ll show me eventually.

i hope you grow up someday. you would make a fine man.

[femmuse]

what a time to be alive.

the heat is unrelenting. each day i sweat in waking and in sleep but have grown accustomed to my own salt. 

today i lay in the living room, bed moved in a termite scare, fighting a chest infection in late september heat. i knew this was the right time to quit smoking and now my throat proves it.

i have fallen for him swiftly. i guess not wholly unexpectedly - my soul froze at his very sight when we met in chicago - but still i am surprised by the velocity and its blindness. 

what lacked in a sort of spiritual attraction to tim is now so strong towards steve that it swallows me whole. i find myself marvelling at my privilege each time he laughs and i’m the only one around to hear it.

my slow exploration of his spirit’s labyrinth challenges me. mostly in healthy ways, i think.

what is art’s role in my life? how can i better balance consumption and creation? do i pay enough attention to my mind’s flexibility and do i keep my heart truly earnest?

these questions never seemed so pertinent but at the same time have shroud my insecurities in fluorescent light. my depth becomes shallower, my knowledge less extensive, my beauty more fleeting when i think of him too much. 

so i am inspired but so too preoccupied, and for now can only take long walks, and write more, and try to keep my feet on the ground.

[femmuse]

1 february

the days fall into one another here. it is the first of february but still the sun drenches our hangovers the same way it did in november and august. kristi leaves for the weekend to climb peaks and cook over camp stoves and we fester here, in the still air of the house, until the early morning when we pass out on every available soft surface.

but this has not been so regretful, as far as heavy weekends go. yesterday was spent daydreaming of argentina and thanking my parents for their generosity and walking and smoking cigarettes and touring houses we’ll never be able to afford and watching films and giggling and listening to blues and reading poems. with the exception of friday night’s recklessness, it has all been relatively fruitful.

though the seasons aren’t felt so vividly here i still smell a sense of promise in today’s breeze. perhaps that is what rain’s usually rare but recently frequent presence does to the city. but i feel hunger- not the gnawing, desperate kind that renders me senseless but rather a driving, motivating instinct. january’s crushing gravity has made way for a grounded but steady entrance into this month. somehow, even if just for now, the year no longer fills me with dread.

[femmuse]

4 january

i could have seen it coming i guess. i spent nearly three weeks in london and became despondent as my departure neared, red-tipped nose running. being back there confirmed my nagging notion that it wasn’t perfect but certainly a hell of a lot better than los angeles. as we broke through the ceiling of smog and circled the city upon our landing, i cried. i spent three evenings sad and mostly alone. the nights surprised me with the chill that pressed through the walls of my unheated apartment. i struggled to stay up past midnight, as one often does this side of jetlag, and awoke early too. in those mornings i would rouse cheerlessly - the tepid late december sun did little to brighten my sullen mood at the reminder of my locale.

new year’s eve came and i decided with gabriella that we would be civil about the whole thing. in the interest of calendar-driven reinvention, we would stay at my house, drink a bottle or two of prosecco and likely fall into giggly sleep before the letdown of a balldrop. twelve hours later we were grinding our teeth in an old church on skid row, gabriella losing her wig and me stumbling around aimlessly. well into the hours of the morning we remained manic, with my night culminating in the penning of a haiku on a typewriter - topless, in front of a small audience - as punishment for a lost ping pong wager with johnny.

the subsequent four days happened to us. in speaking for myself i can admit that i exerted no power over them - i merely carried on, burnt out from our drug intake, but also unwilling to face my loneliness here once more. we took xanax bars and muscle relaxers and smoked through nearly a quarter ounce. gabriella cuddled with johnny’s friend from vegas. i blearily facetimed tim and wondered what the fuck i was doing with this all. we ate until it physically hurt us. we spent more money from the comfort of my living room couch than i often do in two weeks. we fell asleep hastily.

i awoke today with my bones on fire.

[femmuse]

23 january

in fitful morning sleep i dream of you, and her. i imagine you to be fierce lovers, vivid with all the devotion you wasted on me and tried to recoup for the next one. her hair is softer than mine and Rs roll off her tongue with far less effort. in dreams you bury yourself into her flesh and i feel like my head is under the sand.

when i wake it is less devastating than in slumber but the unrest remains. what a selfish thing, to mourn my privilege as your only conquest. that is what you argued in those last few months anyway; funny that only now, nearly three years after i left you on the floor on brick lane and once you have finally stood up, i realize it.

but i am foolish. it is not her that i envy but rather your steadfastness. my heart is lonely even when it belongs to another and i reach blindly for the nearest source of warmth. though we both grew up knowing the depth of winter, you are more comfortable in its starkness. so now, after thirty-three months of a bone-rattling breeze, you emerge bare-chested into spring, the very ground beneath you blooming at your feet even in chicagoan january.

she is shaped like an anjou pear and knows how to dress for it. she has more shades of lipstick than i have insecurities. she takes photographs of you on street corners and naked in the fur hat i once wore in your garage, tears streaming down my cheeks at the mercy of your lens. she is by every distant measure exactly what you had been waiting for.

so why now do i feel i lost at my own game?

[femmuse]

II

i meet you on my twenty-third birthday. you are another semi-famous friend of the semi-famous act whose record campaign we work on and who play a wholly unimpressive gig at the theater in hollywood that saturday night. you are just as stylish as i expect you to be but shorter too, in a deal breaker sort of way. i feel too large even in arms with a wingspan of 2 meters; vesseling a body smaller than mine gives me a feeling of shame.

but nevermind. you have kind eyes and a sheepish but full-toothed smile and some weed for us to smoke until my birthday ends with bleary-eyed sleep. we sit on the roof of the eyewear boutique nextdoor because my roommate is inside sleeping and at the end i kiss you a little bit. there is no reason for it besides a compulsion for indulgence. but then it stains the fabric that stretches the subsequent months darting in and out of each other’s existences. 

usually you come to my place. sometimes there are other people there, and it feels odd, somehow tiring bringing others into an already awkward exercise. there is always smoke. each time you come expectantly. most times i reward your wanton mouth without meaning. there is one incident when my roommate is out of town and you come over with lean and we sink into the couch together and there is fumbling and it is wrong and it takes a little more force than i would like to stop you. you leave with your head hung.

we cool off a bit. you promise to respect my wishes and don’t really. i know in a way my loneliness leads you on, because it is vulnerable and people see weakness as an entrance sign. finally, on a rainy day in late december, i make us papaya salad that you hardly eat and we watch a sci-fi short film and i tell you that i cannot pander to your lips anymore. you retreat. when you leave there is a stiffly maneuvered hug good-bye and you tell me you need space. when i lock the door, i laugh.

[femmuse]

19 september

i write with dirty feet and a backache. i write with a full heart and a greasy face. i write with little money and scattered plans and, in 2 minutes, another year added to the number that quantifies my age.

yes, this spin around the sun has been a good one. i was offered my first real job at a company whose name still sounds like a dream when i say it out loud. i threw myself back into schoolwork, completed my longest and most consuming piece of prose to date, researched dissertation material for six months and wrote it all in a day. i graduated with first honors distinction, to my disbelief (and probably yours too). i saw my abuelita for the first time in six years. i saw the madness of the markets in marrakech and felt the silence of christmas in london. i danced to the sounds of dj hell on a mother fucking rave boat. i learned how to love a city that wouldn't love me back, and i learned to leave it. i started over. and here i am.

in truth, i am not eager to leave this period of richness. i hope, of course, that the tide will continue its eager stream upwards. but i have a feeling that this was something incredibly special. like a solar eclipse or a snow day - a relatively short-lived phenomenon that nonetheless fills you with more wonder than the average passage of time.

so for that, i say thank you to this year of 22. you kicked ass.

yours.

[femmuse]

16 september

tim's last day in LA.

we spent the last three weeks sweating and pressing ourselves into one another and recalibrating. and eating. oh, how we ate. banana pancakes, spicy tuna rolls, peanut butter donuts, fried pork neck, cucumber chilli popsicles, chocolate milkshakes, sweet potato enchiladas, so many fucking tacos. we ate well.

we let our bodies be carried by riptides and we held lone fingers when whole hands were too heavy and hot. we climaxed. we cried. we were both reminded that sometimes, time is merely meant to be enjoyed. and so it was.

[femmuse]

a portrait of the man you'll never love

when i met you i was breathless and flush with booze. you were 26 that day in the cafe downstairs, not that you'd show it. you possessed a kind of ruthless energy & lack of self-awareness that would better suit someone two decades your junior. the appetite of one, too. steak and chips with half a bottle of ketchup, apple crumble with an extra scoop of ice cream and a glass of whole milk to wash it all down. i stuck to my pinot grigio and admired you.

upstairs you had not yet ground the weed for our joint before you started kissing me with your whole mouth. to say merely "on the lips" would be an injustice to the harmony with which our faces meet. now, i am normally a girl of poor balance. my feet get lost underneath me and the sway often knocks me out of grace. but somehow your grasp was firm enough -- earthly and true -- that we circled your living room twice without me opening my eyes or losing the order of my limbs.

we both agreed -- this was an occasion for which we should shut the bedroom door. sebastian had seen us once before, next to the dining table -- my black skirt hitched up at the mercy of your curious hands, the locks of your hair which curl at the tips seized from the nape of your neck into my fingertips. we had both been unfazed. but this was not like before. the fierceness with which we sought each other was the same as that from which i imagine constellations are born. explosive, unwavering, prickling the skin with heat.

my clothes never made it all the way off. i envy men with their uncomplicated garments. even more so i envy the eagerness and lack of concern with which they bare themselves to another. your body was as i imagined it -- young, glowing with that same inexplicable golden as mine, lean and hungry. as you laid me back and peeled off my socks and tights i traced the light pink split in your chest, which ran from where your ribs met down to your navel. you said they took your spleen out, i said they made you irresistible.

if i am honest, your size did not impress me. even before i saw, i knew. its end so raw to the world is admired by many western women but among them i am not. all the better then that i didn't let you fuck me -- and anyway you came so quickly that i doubt you even would have made it in. you leaned forward, your seed dripping down my hand to the soft middle of my body, and you shook. trembled with release for what seemed like an eternity. your heart beat through your scarred chest, into mine, and back again.

you took the shirt which five minutes prior you had torn off your back, wiped me clean and then leaned back into the space between my legs, still spread for you. we lay and i traced the ridges of your ribs, your collarbone and your boyishly cut hair until we both remembered the unfinished joint.

___________

[femmuse]

junot exercise in bcn

You rise before London's Saturday night parties have finished and arrive eight hours later, before Barcelona has even gone to sleep.

You struggle to quiet your mind on the airport shuttle but sleep with your mouth agape in the air.

You spend the first afternoon as you always do -- stoned and sleepy but filled with a sense of inexplicable belonging.

You meet up with your ex-boyfriend who finally after two years of bitterness can laugh with you and not just at you. You manage to reminisce on your intimacy only briefly and without the pathetic air of vulnerable nostalgia.

You smoke lots of cigarettes and drink lots of coffee. You drink even more red wine and commiserate on how much cheaper it is here. You wander around the Gotico the only way one can -- slowly, aimlessly. You stay up late, but only as late as your stoned eyes will allow.

You are still mystified by how much fiercer the sun feels than elsewhere and even more gobsmacked by how quickly everything else falls away, leaving you swiftly and blessedly with only what's left here -- balconies, a crumbling city illuminated by the sun, and a grin.

[femmuse]

15 july

lately i have felt very much a victim of my own body.

i recall my behaviour -- erratic and irrational and reckless -- and how it burst forth from me when i was 14 and 15,

gone from a beanpole of vigour and streaking independence to an uncomfortable, inconsolable little woman,

signalling the chemical changes inside me would dictate the rest of my young life.

i know of course i am at the helm of my own destiny, in that ultimately [with a sound enough spirit] i control my perception and therefore the interpretation of my triumphs and tragedies.

but it stuns me how terribly i fall under the spell of plummeting hormones, 

feeling myself grow larger and shrinking within, all at once

bringing poor tim to the end of his tether for a week straight --

only to practically wrap my legs around him and refuse to let go

the next day when the biological spike makes me manic.

the trouble is how desperate i am to make amends with my body,

to nurture it until my stomach never growls with pain [or hunger],

to never resent the sight of my shape in the mirror,

to trust it to carry me this whole way...

to know it to be capable of life

and to rest it well at my time's end.

i want so badly to ride the tides of my cycles as gracefully as the moon,

knowing even as a sliver of its perfect, whole self

it is beautiful

and absolutely fine.

[femmuse]

18 march

i don't know whether it is a trait of femininity to follow your smitten thoughts down the shady path of potential months & years & decades & lifetimes your lover's fingers will weave themselves into yours

but there is one gentle daydream i hold especially near as the flag of my surrender.

it's only happened twice, i suppose, for the two loves in my short life to this blessed day-

[thank you for having me] -

and it was inevitable-

the gravity

of the maybes

of the infinite

of all the things our passion could grow

in our fits of alchemy

splitting cells

& making them bloom

in the fire of my belly

[i am the vessel].

with him it was never questioned-

a single boy would be the fruit that grew from our hardy tree.

he would be blonde, like we were as babies

our big brown eyes & full lips gracing the face

of a little man

who would never be

volatile as his father

or headstrong as me.

oh, but with you

it was not so easy

we are not cut from the same cloth but rather stitched together, double-knotting as we go, not duplicating a being but multiplying.

and so the shelter for our little babes may not have been sturdy from the ground up,

but here are the moments

i am filled with glee at this little haphazard hut we've built ourselves.

sometimes when you give me pleasure - when i am escalating towards climax, with your face as the target - 

i imagine squeezing your hand in the same way 

when again our love manifests itself

in a great push

outward

& upward.

i don't dream of any one thing with you-

nor do i imagine our lineage would be singular-

a boy to steal your freckles and blue eyes

but so too a girl to wear her mama's darkness & fervour.

we both come from families of threes, so maybe we would also have an afterthought - an accident, even - we couldn't bear losing.

though we've played with the letters that we'd string together to give our littles names, 

i dare not know them yet.

i've still got many ships to sink

& can't trust myself not to go overboard

not until i feel my womb

afloat.

[femmuse]

15 january

i must remember that in this olive skin i have stored many days of magic & misadventure under forgotten rays

& i'm still warm to the touch.

[femmuse]

2 february

it has only been one day but already this month feels different to the last.

january chilled me to the bone,

homesickness - or rather, unsteadiness - making me queasy, 

thoughts drifting to future anxieties looming like the expanse of grey that wrapped up the sky,

testing the patience & heart of the one i love for lack of better to do but dwell in my negativity,

living in the same irreverence & recklessness as the season

as this side of the globe tilts towards darkness.

february feels altogether closer to the warmth

and today,

my fingers entwined with those of him-

who i can say, with certainty & fullness, i love truly in an entirely new way -

i spotted the telltale lilies of the valley

poking their white veils of spring above the soil for the first time.

yes, i too will be alive

emerge from hibernation

come forward with hands & heart wide open

ready for the sun.