letters-from-the-gaps

[letters-from-the-gaps]

@inbabylontheywept I have a big ass print of this!!!!

- Dog star, burning through a vast black sky -

In memory of Laika: a greater friend to mankind than mankind was to her.

[letters-from-the-gaps]

Patron Saint of Bloody Teeth

An attempt at getting a little less sanitized with my writing. Fair bit of gorey imagery coming up, so no hard feelings if that's not your jam!

They added a new Saint

Did you hear? And not a 

Mild one, either. Not one you could de-

Fang, de-claw, turn into something spineless 

And empty. Gilded and hollow. No, this Saint came

Barreling into Heaven riding a stolen car. Yes,

Riding, not driving. She had her entrails wrapped around its

Steering wheel, was holding her small intestine like reins. Like

She was driving a chariot. Heaven had forgotten that the 

Sun was pulled by chariots before He got 

Involved: she figured it was time to remind Him. Anyways,

After the terrible clamor of trumpets and horns and the 

Billion billion wings of ten million angels subsided, and 

After Saint Peter had gotten his wits back–snatched from the edge, 

Inches away from joining the sinners he had just sent downstairs–

They asked her who she was, with their many mouthed formalities. 

Word on the street is they asked her:

“WHO ARE YOU, INTERLOPER, TO SULLY THE GATES OF THE LORD YOUR GOD? WHO ARE YOU, VICIOUS LITTLE THING, TO LEAVE TIRE TRACKS ON THE HEAVENLY CLOUDS OF THE LORD YOUR GOD?”

A buddy of mine says they sounded like fog horns, like lighthouses, like 

Falling cities and burning stars. I think they sounded tired. And very

Afraid. 

She did not step off her smoldering chariot, and she certainly didn’t let

Go of her bloody reins. She looked at them, that heavenly host arrayed against

Her–seraphs and cherubs and towers and wheels aplenty–and she smiled 

With a hundred golden canines, and she said to them:

“MY NAME DOESN’T MATTER ANYMORE–IT DIED WHEN I DID, SMASHED AGAINST THE ROCKS OF A LIFE I WASN’T CUT OUT FOR. I’M THE PATRON SAINT OF BLOODY TEETH; PATRON SAINT OF BROKEN KNUCKLES; PATRON SAINT OF SIN-STAINED LOVERS AND SMOKE-TINGED FUCKBUDDIES AND EVERY MISBEGOTTEN FOOL ON THIS ROTTEN EARTH. YOU SHOULD GIVE ME YOUR GOD, SO I CAN EAT HIS HEART. I’LL SETTLE FOR A HALO.”

And lord, her voice was awesome. Not in the way that

I said it, before I ate shit skating. Not in the way that the movies would

Butcher it, turn it into spectacle for spectacle’s sake. I mean

Awesome the way they meant it in the Old Testament. It shook

The pearly gates, sent the residents of the great beyond scattering for 

Cover. For shelter. My buddy went with them–he told me, later, that her voice sounded

Like a train, like a riot, like a dying coyote and a roaring fire. I thought

She sounded like the kind of person I needed to hear

From when I was on Earth. She sounded like her voice hadn’t

Quite caught up with the hormones. She sounded like she could kick

My ass, and every ass in sight. She sounded like she loved me.

There wasn’t a whole lot they could do, that 

Heavenly host. When the Big Man–Hallowed be his 

Name, Blessed be his steps–came by to see what the 

Divine holy fuck had happened, he stopped right in his

Dvine holy tracks. He whispered something to an angel next to him,

And then he said something to the feral chariot rider who had

Smashed his fucking fence, and then she laughed.

She laughed long, and hard, till she was coughing up burning blood, 

Crying acid tears. She laughed till He had to ask if she was 

Alright. She told Him to go somewhere I won’t repeat,

And then she asked if her halo would

Hurt.

He told her it wouldn’t.

I think she was disappointed at that. It didn’t stop her though.

The Patron Saint of Bloody Teeth. Her name isn’t

Important–she said so herself. Her name is whatever

You need it to be. Alive, or dead, or a secret

Third thing. 

And, God as my witness, she wears her names like buckles and

Belts and straps and collars, like ladder laces and 

Torn off patches and flags of a million colors. 

Brighter than the sun.

Not as bright as her halo.

Or her 

Teeth.

[letters-from-the-gaps]

Gun Witch I

AKA "Letters tries to write a Western." Shoutout to @inbabylontheywept, who saw the first draft of this bad boy. Part 1 of ???, so stay tuned!

The thing about guns, Marigold has come to know, is that they are singular tools. They are skeleton keys that can only ever open a single kind of lock. They are hammers that, in the moment before they have completed their swing, transmute whatever lies at that swing's endpoint into a nail. They are levers by which the universe acts upon itself, levers that can only produce a single kind of reaction, a single kind of product. 

The thing about guns, Marigold has come to know, is that they can only do harm, the greatest harm, that singularly final harm that renders everything before it paltry. Temporary. They are tools which can only escalate a conflict; even the clearing of leather is an act that signals a terrible trajectory, a course that will not yield to even the soundest of rhetoric. 

The thing about guns, Marigold has come to know, is that many people still think of them as tools for preventing violence, for halting bloodshed. They think that you can use a gun to posture, to intimidate. The issue there, of course, is that an implied threat can only live in Schrodinger’s box for so long before people start itching to open it. The issue there, of course, is that a gun is no passive participant to a scene like that: nothing wants to see implication become action more than the gun.

Marigold’s first words in this broke down, backwater, dead-on-its-feet town were the single greatest kindness she was still capable of showing. 

“I have held a gun from the cradle: if any of you feel as though violence against me might get you anything worth getting, disregard those feelings as swiftly as you are able. I am a Gun Witch, and I have yet to find myself out-drawn.”

Her second words, uttered after a long pause in that silent, waiting bar, were far simpler.

“Barkeep,” she said. “What’s the closest thing you can make to a Mule?”

She had tucked herself into a corner booth–its occupants had swiftly vacated as they calculated her trajectory–with a drink that might’ve been able to call a Mule its distant ancestor. It had something like vodka, and something that might’ve been near ginger in some cabinet somewhere, and it had some sort of citrus. It certainly wasn’t good. Marigold didn’t really care. 

She sipped from the glass she had been given in slow, methodical pulls, a careful eye turned inward to watch for the first signs of creeping dull. She hoped desperately that this place would listen to her, would recognize the old and familiar violence in her voice, would mind their own fucking business and keep to their own fucking drinks. She had spent a long time out in the sands between towns and was more than happy to avail herself of the drink, the marginally cooler air, the sounds of people. The piano player wasn’t even half bad–she didn’t recognize the melody, and the keys were horribly out of tune, but they played with an easy smile and practiced hands, and it was remarkably easy to imagine that things were normal. 

She didn’t look up from her drink when they walked in. Four of them, rough looking, shabby dusters and boots that hadn’t seen polish in an age. She didn’t look up as the bar started to hush. She didn’t look up as the piano player started to falter, fingers stuttering over the ivories. She kept her head down, hat brought low over her eyes, and she thought, No, go! Go out! Go away! None of you have to do this! You can all still live! Go! She was half finished with her Mule (this startled her–she should’ve drained it all by now. How long had she been here?), watching the last few bits of ice slowly melt into the remainder when those four rough looking young men decided they wanted to die.

“Hey! You!” He was a little on the scrawny side, with a voice still figuring out its range. The four of them had started walking towards her table, and as they passed through the bar other patrons started to flee out into the evening. “You the one who announced herself earlier today?” The other three fanned out behind him, and Marigold guessed he was their leader. They were all around the same height, with a slightly malnourished edge to them; the one who fanned out to the right could’ve been a downright intimidating fellow with a few more years of good eating in him. 

Marigold didn’t say anything. Didn’t really look up from her glass, either. The ice had melted all the way. If anyone had been looking at her glass they’d have seen the condensation on it, thicker than it should’ve been in that air-conditioned room. Nobody was, though. At her silence he stepped up a little closer, his voice a little sharper.

“You deaf, woman? You hear what I asked you? Cause if you make me repeat myself, I swear to G-”

“You should watch yourself, throwing around names like that.” Marigold’s voice came out in a slow, scarred exhalation, the first crackling arms of some great inferno. “We should all be so thankful that He isn’t here.”

“Oh, so she can speak! And she can do it in riddles, can she?”

“Riddles? Lord have mercy if you think I’ve woven a riddle for you. See, if I had spoken to you in riddles,” she said, and now she tipped her head up just a fraction, “They might’ve frightened some sense into you four, and you’d have all gone scampering away.” The glass was running with sweat now, water soaking into the wood beneath it. “No. I’ve spoken plain, boy.”

The boy bristled at that, his eyes darkening. They were a deep, dirty green, and Marigold thought they must’ve been brilliant in the right light. He took another step forward and twitched his duster to the side: the plain, worn, poorly-kept handle of a revolver glinted meanly in the lamplight. The bar was empty by now, the piano player and the barkeep having fled together. The other three followed his lead, twitching aside ratty coats to reveal rattier looking holsters, housing guns that had clearly never known the touch of oil nor rag.

“Who you callin’ boy, eh? You? Some vagabond from out in the desert? Some crazy old bitch–” one of his posse, the bigger one to his right, flinched– “who thinks she’s hot shit?”

Marigold took one long, slow breath. The liquid in the glass was simmering  now, ever so slightly, the beginnings of a boil. She leaned back in her booth, and she tilted her head, and she fixed the four thugs before her with eyes that had seen the creation of countless ghosts. She had not looked at a mirror in a long time, but she knew what they were seeing: deep set, slightly bloodshot, dull yellow irises and coal black pupils peering out from a face lined by age and heat in equal measures. She watched all four of them look to the right side of her face, watched their leader try to wrench his eyes from the horrid river of scar tissue that ran from her right eye down below her collar. He didn’t do a very good job. She didn’t fault him for it. She knew that it was knotted and angry, and that when you looked at it for too long you could see a dull glow like embers beneath the skin. Her hat was still low over eyes, but she tilted her head back so they could get a good, long look at her. Then she spoke, and that inferno was starting to come closer now, and she said:

“I have already given you the greatest kindness I could when I warned you all earlier today, so I will give you the second greatest kindness I can: leave. All of you. Hide those shoddy things at your hips, and go out into the street, and see if you can’t correct the courses of your lives.” The one on the left of the pack finally looked down at the glass and started, for its contents were bubbling and hissing against Marigold’s naked palm. He looked back at her when she said, “I am Marigold Velfor; I am a Gun Witch; I do not particularly want to kill any of you. You can all still turn around.”

“You know…I ain’t never killed a Witch before, Marigold,” the boy in front hissed, and her heart sank at the naked violence on his face, “But I’ve always wondered what it must be l-”

In one liquid smooth motion, before the boy had finished his empty threat, Marigold drew her six shooter and put a single holy bullet directly between his eyes. It exited out the back of his head in a spatter of bone and brain and flew perfectly into the shoulder of the fellow behind him, where it lodged itself. Before their leader’s ghost had even figured out it needed to get the hell out of dodge, Marigold had pulled the hammer back with a terrible click and calmly fired again at the gentleman on the far left–this one took him in the heart, carving through skin and muscle and bone and organ like so many pieces of paper laid before a train. By the time this had resolved itself the boy was a corpse on the ground, and the man to his left was a corpse rapidly approaching the ground, and the man behind them both was a not-quite-corpse collapsed into a table, and Marigold’s cannon was pointed serenely at the man on the right. This had happened in seconds. This last man’s hand had managed to grab the handle of his piece but, seeing the smoking barrel now leveled at his head, had stopped. Marigold thanked the Lord for this, and said to him:

“The first and third are dead: the second will live, as long as you get him to a halfway decent doctor in the next couple of minutes. Neither of you will live if you draw. Do you understand?” He nodded, mutely, eyes never leaving the gun. “Good. I’m going to stand up now, and I’m going to find someone to pay for the damages I’ve left here, and then I’m going to leave. Before I do that, though, you’re going to take your friend, and you’re both going to go outside, and you’re going to tell whoever’s out there that anyone who draws on me will die. Ok?” He nodded again, and at a gesture from Marigold he set out to comply. As the bar door clanged shut behind their wild exit she sagged a little in her seat. Her cannon was displeased: it whispered that she still had four rounds in the chamber, that she could probably take this whole Podunk town before they got a shot off. She ignored it, pushed forward the hammer, slid the thing home in the holster on her hip. The Mule on the table was at a low simmer now; Marigold didn't flinch as she drained the thing in one pull on her way out.

[letters-from-the-gaps]

Pendulums and Headlights

A poem originally generated from one of those little poetry generators you find online. Additions ins (parenthesis) are mine!

I am a wildly swinging ornamental pendulum

(I rocket from extreme to extreme, uncaring of petty little things like drag, or gravity, or loss of momentum. I am beautiful, delicate and filigreed and shining in the light; hellbent on taking someone out with me, because even if I go down, I won’t do it alone)

fucking like a tide pool and fighting like a deer in headlights

(My energy comes in languid sweat-slick waves, surging towards arousal, drawing back into apathy. Consistency is foreign to me, here, panting and ragged on kelp-strewn divots in well-worn rock.)

(When a car hits a deer, it is mutually assured destruction–sure, the deer is paste, but so is your car. In the split second before violence breaks, before a fist lands or a word is let loose, I let the hollow bravado flee my eyes. Go on; hit me. Just look me in the eyes before you do. Who cares if we both lose? Haven’t you picked up on the pattern?)

chic, friendly, agreeable—I must be liked enough to matter

(I fill silences with an endless stream of babbling, a torrent of noise, a scattershot “volume over accuracy” barrage in an attempt to be remembered. Somewhere in my youth I picked up the idea that being remembered was the same as being someone who mattered, and that rotted little thought is still in my chest. Sorry, was that too morbid? Wait, come back.)

proposing marriage to pretty strangers

(If I can capture you here in this moment where all you are is beautiful and captivating and still a stranger, then maybe you’ll stay that way. Like a picture, or a painting–if I can keep you here, where the light catches your hair, then maybe you won’t look deeper than that. Maybe we won’t rip each other apart.)

I want to outwit the world before it outwits me

(Because it will try to outwit me. I am a rabbit, prince with a thousand enemies, and all the world’s a snare. Nevermind how gentle it is, how kind its words are. They must be lies. They must be lies. They must be.)

everything fits in its neat little box, unless (oh no) it doesn’t

(Everything has to fit somewhere. What will I do if it doesn’t? What will I do if [none of it fits at all]? Wait. No. What was [that]? What was)

[letters-from-the-gaps]

Dogs at Night

Based off a poetry prompt, taken from somewhere my bookmarks bar doesn't remember!

At the edge of the city, past even those most 

distant arms of the rolling suburbs, you can hear 

dogs barking. Not coyotes–though some are certainly 

out there, looking for outdoor cats–and not wolves–certainly not 

wolves, who have been echoes and memories since 

the gilded age–but dogs. Yipping, yapping, woofing; grumbling, cavorting, 

lamenting. Some people say they’re all the stray dogs of 

the city, that animal control just dumps them outside the suburbs. Some people 

say they’re all the lost pets, banded together. I like to think of them 

like canine Lost Boys, runaways and escapees who have found some 

modicum, some tiny measure of wilderness again. Jack 

London’s Call of the Wild explored that idea–how long does 

it take for a dog to remember it’s a wolf? Do they have to relearn 

how to howl, or is it somewhere in their 

genetic code, stashed away on the inside of a 

cell wall? 

[letters-from-the-gaps]

Icarus on a Canyon Road

AKA What does the Son of Daedalus and a Californian Coyote have in common? TW: Animal death, death, grief, brief mention of possible car crashes. It's a piece about Icarus: we know how that one ended, yeah?

There's a moment, near the end, where Icarus almost looks back. He almost looks back to his father, to screaming horror-stricken Daedalus. He doesn't. Icarus looks into the sun. She burns herself into Icarus's eyes, and so even as his wings melt and his body drops, and so even as Daedalus runs every ounce of arithmetic he can to see if he can maybe, just barely maybe reach his boy, Icarus can only see the sun. He sees her right until the sea slams his eyelids shut. He will never see her again. Not really

(Daedalus knows before he thinks anything that he won't be able to reach his boy. An impossible choice, a terrible dilemma: go back for him or continue on. If he goes back, they both die, and no one will ever remember Icarus and his beautiful golden laugh. So he doesn't go back. Daedalus pushes his wax wings as far as they will go, and when his sun-scorched legs touch the shoreline of some far off land he crumples to the sand and sobs till he's out of tears. He will always remember his son's beautiful, golden laugh.)

There's a moment, near the end, where I almost fuck the whole thing up. I almost jerk the wheel hard to the right, or harder to the left. I almost send the whole car careening into a true catastrophe. I don't. I slam on my breaks, knowing it will not be enough. The coyote does not move. It looks at me with molten eyes, with eye-shine that throws headlight back into my face like an insult. Like a question. "Why aren't you warm?" I don't stop enough. It's dead by the time I get out of the car, eyes open and vacant, ribs splayed out like a prayer. I cry over its body, careful not to touch it; I move it off of the road, let it slough into the icy grass and dying brush; I drape leaves over it, best I can. I do everything short of lighting a funeral pyre--I want to, though.

(The coyote does not know why it is cold in this light. The coyote knows only a few brief moments of pain, before all it knows is sleep. It dies with the memory of sun on its fur.)

[letters-from-the-gaps]

After Salvage, a response to Hedgie Choi's "Salvage"

Read the original poem here--it's absolutely incredible, and formative to how I approach my poetry to be honest.

TW: Animal death.

You’re right that some things happened to me

in my formative years.

There were a lot of them.

One could even say there were too many,

Entirely too fucking many;

A herd of events, split ‘neath the wheels of my 

runaway Honda.

A bat out of Golden Hell,

a coyote outrunning the sunrise.

But I’ve never looked at deer and thought those fuckers deserved it.

Soft and gentle, sure;

just look at them outside my window, 

Sitting in the yellow grass beneath a yellow moon.

The damn things don’t know much else, other than mischief and quiet.

But nothing really deserves to get split open on the side of the I-5 Northbound, if you ask me.

So take your formative secrets,

if you’d like to hold ‘em tight enough to bleed.

I’ll ask you kindly to keep your words out

of my mouth, though. No use in seeing what either of us might end up

deserving. 

[letters-from-the-gaps]

I Hope I can Still Hear the Music

A piece on death, and dying, and being carried into your room by a parent after a long day. Kept below the cut- take care of yourselves, my friends.

[letters-from-the-gaps]

Divinity in the Crook of Your Shoulder (Revised)

AKA Man that whole bible thing's a little homoerotic, innit? First two quotes taken from somewhere on here, likely from @caputvulpinum but I could be So Wrong!

TW: Religion, heavily alluded to sexual content, and cannibalism, not alluded to. Just straight up there!

[letters-from-the-gaps]

Theseus Leaves Crete

AKA Baby's first Sestina, AKA the Minotaur deserved better (or at least deserved different).

TW: Mention of and Allusion to Suicide. This is not a happy ending.

Theseus stands, unblinking figurehead at the prow of his ship

His hands are stained with blood, worn thin by tight-wound thread

His eyes look unseeing to the water before him, thinking;

What good are these hands of mine if all they do is take?

Behind him, in Crete, the labyrinth lies still and silent

The minotaur, misbegotten child that he was, is dead.

Weep does his heart at the thought of all the countless dead

The planks under his feet are older than he is; ancient is this ship

Gilded with bronze, stained with atrocities, there is no amount of golden thread

That can possibly seal the wound in his heart. He stands, thinking;

She must have been so scared, that daughter of Crete, to take.

To take his hand, his heart, to take thread and weave it silent

To have called the Minotaur quiet would’ve been a grave joke; he was never silent

His grief echoed through twisting passages; who was he, if not better off dead?

Delivered unto the soil by an uncaring God, his captor would come to Crete by ship

Just as his killer would. Curious are those tools of Fate. Who could see where that thread

Hath wound before? The Minotaur lies cold, Ariande hangs, and Theseus stands. Thinking

“Who am I if not a monster, a tyrant; If that is who I am, then it is all I can take!”

Ariadne had known from the moment her eyes beheld the Greek what he would take;

She had found it hard to care about death’s looming shadow, silent

Over her shoulder. He was beautiful and terrible and great and awful; his visage left her dead

From the moment he came to her. It ripped her apart as it glanced back from a fleeing ship

Ariadne had always been a master of weaving, of thread:

If nothing else, her final moments left her little time thinking

Theseus is not a scholar. He does not spend his days thinking:

Theseus is a hero, and heroes are taught only to take

Taught by the gods, taught by his father, taught by the echo that comes from a silent

Night’s breeze. Heroes are taught to take, to win, to leave monsters dead

They never ask where the monsters come from. Theseus certainly didn’t; he asked for a ship

Where has that gotten him? The fates are cruel masters, for only they can see the thread

Ariadne let Theseus out of a monster’s maze with a spool of thread

The minotaur spent his final, agonizing moments thinking

Theseus knows these things, and yet he cannot find it in him to do anything but take

That next step, that next turn, that next life; when he prays, his gods are silent.

They might as well be dead.

But at least he has a way to go home; at least he has a ship.

Ariadne is Dead. Her life an unspooled thread.

Her killer leaves aboard his ship. How much more can those boards take?

Above it all, Olympus lies silent. What could they be thinking?

[letters-from-the-gaps]

Heat Haze Tumor

One of the first poems I wrote for a poetry class in the fall of 2022, and a meditation on summers.

August bleeds through my fingers in

Sticky sweet rivers. It stains my palms

Bruise purple and cherry red as I pull my hands away

From the open wound of Summer in my 

Side. Maybe I will learn to

One day love the summer heat haze and

The acidic nostalgia that eats at the edges of thought and

Maybe. Just maybe I will call summer a

Friend. The way I did in elementary school 

On my way home from a half-there final day,

But I don’t know when this wound will close and

I can’t afford to give it the hope I afford

So much else. You can only touch a hot stove

So

Many

Times. 

I can only go through so many summers aching for people

Who do not ache for me

Before I have to 

Cut 

It 

Out 

From me. Excise the tumor;

Suture the wound, even as I feel August’s pulse

Slowing under my sticky fingers. Even as the

Heat haze clears. Even as I am myself

Again.

[letters-from-the-gaps]

Home and Hearth and Hunger

A lyrical essay on growing up in the suburbs of Southern Orange County, California, and the piece that I think really solidified my love for coyotes in my writing.

I think I was off the mark when I tried to describe home. I was right in places, of course, because home wouldn’t be home without the smell of smoke, but I can’t help but feel like I missed the bullseye, like I danced around the truth of it all. Home is fire, and home is hot, and home is the choked I-5, and home is hungry. Even for all the suburban trappings, even with the over-manicured muzzle we tried to put on her, home is hungry. 

Built right against the dead and dying foothills of southern California, my town has played stomping ground to coyotes my whole life. Bane of the small dog, scourge of the outdoor cat owner, I only ever saw one in my whole seventeen years there: standing in the middle of the canyon road, eyeshine brighter than any star, staring back at me. We held like that for a few seconds, its eyes finding mine even through the glass and steel of my dad’s car, before it limped back off into the brush. I didn’t get a sense for just how hungry home was until I got older, until I could take out my wanderlust on the well-paved asphalt that connected town to town to suburb. Some streets just end, I found out. 

They don’t loop around, they don’t somehow go further than the map says. They just end. For any number of reasons, of course, but for us it was because there was nowhere else for road to go. Antonio ran right up to the hills, spat you out at the foot of a neighborhood built at the edge of home’s bound jaws. The 241 North cut through a long stretch of wild, rolling hills covered in the golden dead of spring, eager kindling swaying in the wind. I wonder, often, if that’s where I got it from. Mom and Dad moved there, transplanted themselves in favor of an understandably desirable stillness, but home was in the delivery room with me, was on the drive home, was running alongside the car when I was little, bounding from streetlight to streetlight. I wonder if my teeth aren’t hers, if that pit in my stomach that I just can’t quite fill isn’t hers. I’ve always been hungry. 

Even as a kid, I had a bottomless stomach. An unending appetite for more than just food, I came to realize: I tore my way through school libraries in my youth, ripped through tomes several magnitudes above my “expected reading level.” I rent them apart time after time and still found myself desperate for more. 

Is that home? Even when reading was hard, when the words were slippery and hard to pin down and my mind whirled and spun and thrashed in my skull, I turned my ravenous gaze to television, to animation, to movies and short films and videos about who even cares. I devoured it all. 

That must be home, right? As time wore on and my teeth began to ache with a need for new things to sharpen themselves against I started to come up short. I started to drink from wells marked “poison,” “radiation,” “anguish.” I drank greedily of my friendships and when they started to dry I drank of my own self-loathing. 

This, I am sure, is home, because I am sure that home does not love me. Why would she? Home is wild, home is hills scorched by flame, home is coyotes cackling in the canyon, home is roadkill and circling hawks and snow far, far off on the saddlebacks. 

Far away from the streets I would roam there dreamt snow on the mountainsides. 

Home has been muzzled, her rolling jaws have been bound by toll road and service street, parkway and avenue. Even in the shadows of her teeth there lie houses built in the shape of each other, cookie cutter shades of beige and brown spiraling in their gated labyrinths. Why would she love me? Maybe she cares- I can almost believe that, almost did believe it as I growled through the canyon in the still early morning- but I doubt that she loves me. It's looking out at the Sound, here in this place so vibrant and green and lush that I am affirmed in my stance: wherever home feels for me is not love because love feels like this. And home has never felt like this. 

I still see coyotes, sometimes. They seem out of place, even if this is part of their habitat, so far flung from the broiling gold of home. Why are you here, I ask one as it scampers out of the road. It asks me if I’m not hungry as it bounds away, small and thin and with eyes like molten stars, and I don’t let me foot off the gas for the rest of my drive that night. Aren’t I? Aren’t I hungry? Is that a bad thing?

[letters-from-the-gaps]

Beowulf Liked His Mead with Spice

An essay I made while A. reading Beowulf for a class on Medieval literature and B. not backspacing as I wrote. It was wild!

I wonder how Beowulf felt when he died. Was he scared? He couldn’t have been, right? He was a proud warrior, a hero of mythical proportions. Bane of Grendel, ender of bloodlines, dragonslayer, king of the geats, and yet i cannot help but wonder what it must have been like to feel dragon’s poison stealing through his veins. Did it burn, like its progenitor did? Dragons in the west have existed as engines of calamity since their inception. Winged death, fire belched on wooden frames, the sweeping wrath of a long dead time come to burn the homes of men to a crisp.

It must have, right? Beowulf must’ve felt it scorch through him, singing his arteries and razing the capillaries that lay beneath his skin. How long did it take him to realize death had come creeping up behind him, dagger in hand? Even though the blow may have come through open battle, even if the jaws that filled the hero of the danes with venom and bile had glimmered in front of the man’s eyes before they struck, death still had to come creeping up behind him. I don’t really doubt that the only way to claim the great hero was under the cover of blinding pain. Death could not draw steel against him; Death had to creep through his veins and slow his heart from within, else the great king would have slain Death dead. Wouldn’t that have been something?

I know that Grendel was scared when he died. That’s not hard to guess. Bleeding out, bereft of an arm from fingernail to shoulder cap, fear must've run rampant over the monster’s heart as he limped back to his cave. The child of Cain, scorned of God, had gone in a single night from a terror amongst the fens to a corpse laid low. And he deserved it, to be fair. His nature was that of a petulant child, angry at the affection shown to a younger sibling. Man has faults- man is cruel, and loud, and brash, and far too skilled at violence- but man does not deserve the deaths Grendel delivered to them. 

So why do I pity him?

Imagine being in his skin; I wasn’t kidding when I called him “child of Cain, scorned of God.” His fate was written in his blood the moment his wicked feet touched soil. He was always going to end up where he did, cold and scared and empty in some cave amongst the marsh and fen. He was an animal, at the end. But do we blame the animal for what it does? We know that the great white does not enjoy the violence it occasionally and rarely inflicts upon “our”  kin, and we know that the wolf does not deserve to bleed out cold and alone and sickly because it had to eat. We know this, just as well as we know that Grendel was not an animal. He acted out of anger, out of wrath, spite and malice moved his hands as much as animal instinct. Yet we do not know if he could have understood the wrath he invited upon himself. Why do we judge him as if he were an animal yet celebrate his death the way we would a war criminal? Are those the same? Is that what I'm saying?

I guess I am. Maybe I'm saying that I agree with Grendel’s mother, nameless and monstrous as she was. Her kin lay slain and desiccated on the edge of the fens while his murderers drank and cheered in the hall, his arm mounted above the fire. Why were these danes, these men who lived by the weregild, by the idea of blood for blood, of an eye for an eye, surprised when she came in to exact her price? Grendel took many, one could argue, and so Beowulf had to avenge the singular death his Mother exacted. Did Beowulf not also take more than his share of lives, though? How much blood did the king of the geats spill? How many mothers found themselves without sons thanks to the hero of those spear-danes? If we want to be specific about how much of a blood price is to be exacted, we should apply that same eagle eye to the one holding the sword, the one who tracked a mother/monster to her home/lair to draw blood/exact justice. See? Easy to trip yourself up, isn’t it?

Why am I saying this? Why are you reading it? Why did Beowulf ask, in his dying moments, to gaze upon the wealth hoarded by his killer? Stolen wealth of stolen wealth, a treasure fit only to be scorched and entombed with their great murderer-king. So what was the point? Violence begets violence? Astute observation, said every anthropologist ever. Humans may have come into love as they figured out how to stand, but apes were born with the neural pathways required to kill each other. It’s in our blood. Your blood, I mean. Not a mistype. 

Who am I? 

Wrong question.

What am I?

Better!

Call me a shooting star. Call me Halley's comet. Call me Io, call me Titan, call me Jupiter and Phobos, call me Pluto and Siri, call me whatever you want. You won’t be close. I’m old, baby, older than old. Stardust and radiation skipping across the universe, lucky enough to lose enough speed to watch your little planet. It’s cool, up here. You might’ve seen my cousin, actually, up in the satellite wreckage, doing his little waltz with your orbital debris. Why am I here? Wrong question. You’re not going to get a right one, either, so I’ll ask one for you- why am I talking about Beowulf?

Cause it’s fun. Cause he’s the first human who looked at me and prayed to a god that’s out on vacation. Cause i looked down at him, small and bleeding and full of poison, surrounded by a thousand uncounted ghosts, and I saw someone who just needed a hug. Someone who had shouldered the immeasurable burden of being a hero without question, simply because that’s who he was. He was brave, Beowulf. Braver than brave– there’s a reason his story survived so long. Because as I watched his twelve kinsmen ride ‘round his barrow in grief and sorrow, I realized no one would ever remember Beowulf, the man who loved his mead with a little bit of spice. The only Beowulf to survive the ravages of time would be the Mythic, not the Man. 

I can see your brain working overtime to try and derive a point from all of this. Sorry to disappoint, but I don’t have one- not really. But you know what? Because you’ve been such a wonderful listener, such a captive audience, I’ll try my best to condense.

Anyone who tells you there is a universal rule for how to determine if someone deserves to die is a fucking liar, a snake, and a person with an agenda. They’re wrong. No one is born deserving to die; often, people who “deserve” to die are people who never knew how to lose momentum. Some people are seen as heroes before they’re seen as people who had favorite bedtime stories; most people who are seen as villains, as monsters, had a favorite way to order their coffee– neither of these facts change the people they became. It is important for you, sweet mortal thing that you are, to choose love, yes. A life lived in the shadow of love, in the cold of hatred or even just plain old apathy is a life lived by half measures. But you must never, ever let love leave you stepped on. Love fiercely and as often as you can; bite back by the same metrics. Know within your heart of hearts that every great hero and every reviled monster was a person before they were anything else: do not let the personhood of monsters shield them of consequences, and do not let the mythic status of heroes prevent you from showing them compassion. 

Live your life to the heights you wish to reach, little Beowulf. Die knowing that you lived it well. Go, now, back to your little blue dot. Remember this when you return: If nothing else will say it, I will love you from up here, drifting as I am. Take care, little Hominid. 

[letters-from-the-gaps]

Salt and Youth

The walls of the quarry tower above us

Though, you wouldn’t know from our behavior

We might as well have been giants, titans triumphantly towering above the stone and salt,

Our heads crowned with storm clouds

Our laughter peels and cracks off of the hollowed out earth,

Warm and unbidden and real and

Alive

We are so, so exuberantly

Alive

Picking up stones, sending them clattering down the old wells and vents of this place

Short staccato reports answering in sequence as we throw one after the other

Clambering up the old blocks of stone, scurrying up the sides of ancient pillars of salt

Heedless of the stinging under our fingernails

Heady with the rush of triumphant youth, of that invincible joy that only comes on the cusp of eighteen

We are invincible even as the stone scrapes our elbows and knees

Even as it rubs raw our hands

We are invincible still as salt ensures these scrapes will scar

We thank the salt for it; even fifty years removed from seventeen, we will all remember this

The way we howled at the sky as our crowns began to crack and thunder and rain, voices torn raw and ragged in joy and pride

The rush of cold air down our throats a viciously administered and defiantly taken reminder of our youth

Of our own triumphant existence

We are soaked to the bone as we leave

After what feels like years (but is in truth only hours)

Caked in dust and salt

Covered in new scars

Robbed of our voices

Unquestionably alive

Our footfalls shake the earth as we retreat back 

Back to the order and bustle and paradoxical silence of the city

Hands and knees scarred

Crystalized

Our own stained glass windows for our own little church

Built on salt and stone and stormcloud crowns

Sermons preached with lightning and finished with thunder

Holy water laced with youth.

[letters-from-the-gaps]

The Angel

The jumbled corpses of a thousand satellites twirl and dance through geostationary orbit above this little blue planet. Did you know that? Do you know how fast they waltz, too far to be in the atmosphere yet not far enough to truly be free? No? Me neither. There’s a lot I don’t know. Up here, the stars hang still, and the Earth spins faster than you can possibly comprehend. Eventually, this graveyard of humanity’s many forays into the great void will turn to dust and sand and microscopic particles of metal and fiberglass and circuitry: they’ll slam against each other over and over, dashing against rocky shores of their own making, until they stretch across the whole of planet Earth. Nothing will ever leave, then. Imagine that. A rocket rises through the air, piercing the heavens, finally reaching for the cold and empty and crushing void, only to be torn asunder by the angry ghosts of its forefathers. 

The stars are mostly dead, too. Oh, sure, a good number of them are still burning, somewhere out there in the black. But most of them ate themselves up long, long ago. Maybe longer than I’ve existed- though I frankly doubt that. A thousand thousand years ago, a star collapsed on itself, crushed by its own inexorable gravity, screaming and retching light and neutrinos and radiation far and wide. Some of those stars held planets, you know. Trapped in the same gravity well that would be their eventual doom, the only thing those worlds could do was look at the end and accept that there was no escaping. Some of them faced their death with nobility. Most of them ate themselves alive trying to escape. Maybe some of these pinpricks of light are worlds, you know? Maybe one of those stars is really the desperate final cry of a world swallowed by star-fire. Shattered by light. The very same light we see today, still racing outwards from a corpse, still trying to reach the edge.

Oh, did you not know? Of course there’s an edge, silly! Where do you think the far far far worlds go? When the universe expands, it pushes out like the fissure between tectonic plates. There’s no malice behind it: it simply does what it must. It’s an unfortunate way to die, to be sure. Watching the stars get dimmer and dimmer, until you hit the edge. Some called it the gateway to the other side. Do you want to know a secret, though?

There is no other side.

Me? Oh, I’m just hanging around, waiting for the graveyard to disintegrate, as it were. I could try to explain what I am, where I came from. I could try to communicate to you details about my home, about the endless sky, the ever-hungry void, the vast seas. I could try to describe the endless screaming static of the stars, could try and transcribe their whispers and frothing rants. But I don’t think I could do it justice. Also, it would probably fry your brain.

What am I? Old, for one. Older than old, older than dust, old enough to remember when this planet was all fire and smoke. Yet I am also young, especially when compared to my kin. Now, those are some ancients. A few of them predate the Big Bang, apparently. Forgive me, I didn’t really answer your question. I don’t think there’s a real word for it, in your- wait! I remember! Gabriel brought the word back a little while ago: Angel. I’m an angel.

What, not what you expected? No offense taken, don’t worry. Those of us who first came here- like Garbriel- had a little more…Why am I explaining this to you? Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but do you really understand what I’m saying? I know you comprehend what I’m saying, but do you understand? 

…

…

Hello?

…

…

…

Oh. Ok. If it’s…If it’s any consolation, Earth isn’t slated to bite it for a long, long time. I know that kind of rings hollow. I’m sorry about that. 

…

…

…

…

…

…

Sorry.

[letters-from-the-gaps]

Monsterfucker

Written in June of 2024

The first thing you figure out when you wake up as a monster is that your teeth finally feel right in your mouth. Maw? Either or–being a stickler on matters as trivial as that is the role of jesters and jokers: you are neither. Peel back your lips, open your cavernous mouth; watch as the dim morning light catches the edges of wicked canines, the tops of terrible incisors. Wonder if they’ll grow like a shark’s, endless legions marching towards their end. Feel the new muscles along your jaw, your throat, recognize that they’re built to bite down and not let go. You were always good at that: not letting go.

The second thing you figure out when you wake up as a monster is that your hands are clawed. This kind of turns you on for a second, in between fading panic, and so you try to ascertain why. This doesn’t take long: you’ve always been simple in your desires. Why is it such a surprise that seeing an attraction in yourself is still an attraction? Why does it always take so much for you to believe other people when they find you attractive? I think you’re hot, someone told you once, and I really want to take you home. They meant it; you didn’t believe them until a few days after they had made you see stars, after they had sent you home with dark marks dusted across your throat and thighs. Why do you thrash against that so much?

The third thing you figure out when you wake up as a monster is that, contrary to what fiction would have you believe, you are not afraid. If anything you’re aroused: looking at yourself in the mirror, all shimmering scales, all sinuous strength, all apex predator’s grace? How can you not be? Christ alive, who wouldn’t be a little turned on? You’ve spent your life holding in barbed remarks, holding back from righteous anger. Before today it had rotted you, had left you gnarled and bent under the weight of all the things you wanted to say. But now, biting the air with new jaws, running new hands along scaled sides? Who in their right fucking mind would fault you for a little righteous fury?

The last thing you figure out when you wake up as a monster is the simplest realization you’ve ever made, and it clicks into your brain with preternatural ease: you don’t really care if you are a monster, because you feel right. Correct. Proper. Skin pulls the way it should, and muscles ripple the way they should, and your slitted, iridescent eyes catch the light the way you know they always should have. You don’t care if this is monsterhood–you’ve never cared for personhood.

[letters-from-the-gaps]

A poem about my favorite Russian space dog

An ode to Laika

Patron Saint of One-Way

Trips.

Journeys you can’t come 

back

from.

Glimmering little star, Canis

Major Tom

I followed you.

all the way to the sound of 

hope and

joy and

wild green growth.

I owe you my life,

and I love you

very

much.