the insidious thing about re-entering the city is that sometimes you don't realize it until it's too late. the mist creeps up like a cold fog rolling in over the ocean, blurs all of your edges out slowly until you are a creature of vapor. look at yourself in the mirror. what do you see? a woman in fog?
you aren't brave enough to wipe away the condensation. the person you are when you're solid and real is too bulbous and blundering, too insipid. instead you share a slice of cake with the garbage can and suck tar into your lungs on the balcony. what you crave is a kind of destruction you can control. this might be killing me but at least i'm choosing it. it's mine.
there are lighted windows in the distance but the further into the city you wander, the more remote they become. moisture in the air blurs them out until there is only you, the mist, and the empty buildings of what your body used to be.
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they said: be seen and not heard. make your voice so small it withers and practice the art of concealing. be seen but never perceived. obfuscate. be an outline of a woman, a silhouette in mist, don't let them know you want. your wanting is your weakness, your wanting is your sin.
they said: people are not psychic and they cannot read your mind. you must communicate your feelings. you were taught manipulation but this isn't how you nourish the people you care about. use your words.
god, i am trying. i have spent so long swallowing myself and then reaching down my throat for the scraps that i don't trust my own ability to give the words shape. when you hide yourself away for so long, even you forget who the pieces total up to when brought back together. recovery is an act of violence, of breaking down and fashioning together, and there is nothing beautiful or easy about it. there is nothing palatable here, nothing digestible.
god, i am trying. i am pulling parts of myself from the back of my throat, i am digging them out from between my teeth, i am finding them hidden away beneath my tongue. all of these pieces i am trying to give to you, inviting you to watch as i cut and staple and solder them together into something understandable. i want so badly to be seen. can you make out the sharp edges now? can you see the dark circles under my eyes? the slant of my nose?
god, i am trying. i am working my jaw around a tongue that feels like leather, trying to form the right words for you. my mouth is dry and my lips are cracking but i am choking out syllables and sentences for you, definitions and descriptions. i am saying: this is me, please notice. i am saying: i am trying to be better, please be patient. i am saying: i need you so much closer, please don't walk away.
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Oddities (2)
My heart is an oddities shop: I take from other people in small handfuls and store pieces of them inside myself, on consignment in carmine caverns. I collect almost-lovers and preserve fragments of their hearts in glass jars, tie them together with ribbons and strings of pearls to wear like medals, artifacts of half-conquest, leave them on shelves to collect dust and float in the formaldehyde of bad memories. The walls of my atria are lined with his poems, her songs, their touches--
and none of it has ever been quite right, all oddly misshapen, abnormal. My heart is an oddities shop. Her music is too Saint-Saëns, Danse macabre, all xylophone and rattling bones, the sound of our knees knocking together in the dark, clumsy and frightened; his words are too honeyed and soft, cloying on my tongue, fruit on the razor’s edge of ripe and rot; and when they touch me, it is always fumbling and selfish, when my hands take theirs take back threefold. I am pieces of a skeleton, malformed, in the wake of them.
I carry these things and they turn my body into a shadowbox. There’s a glass casing over his hand-print on my hip, a moth mounted in the cavity of my mouth where she kissed me, pins in the palms of my hands keeping me on display. There is a string tied loose around my left finger where a price tag was once attached. My heart is an oddities shop.
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Oddities
My heart is an oddities shop: I store fragments of other people inside myself, taking in small handfuls. I collect almost-lovers and tuck pieces of their hearts away in glass jars, tie them together with ribbons and strings of pearls, leave them on shelves to collect dust and float in the formaldehyde of bad memories. I have his letters, her photos, ???
and none of it has ever quite been right, all oddly misshapen, just slightly malformed. Abnormal, oddities. Her music never quite matched my tempo; his words never quite painted an image of the core of me; and when they touched me, it was always fumbling, always desperate, always selfish. Everything my hands took, they clawed back threefold. I carry these things and they turn my body into a shadow box. There’s a glass casing over his hand-print on my hip, a moth mounted in the cavity of my mouth where she kissed me, pins in the palms of my hands keeping me on display.
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you treat your anxiety like a viper
like it’s something separate from you,
beyond your control. you treat it like
the venom it breeds isn’t yours,
like the wellspring is not somewhere
inside you.
when you begin to set your bridges on fire
i finally let you and you burn me for it.
you expect me to be a snake charmer,
but my body is not a rehabilitation center
my tenderness is not 20mg of lexapro
it is not my job to suck venom from your wounds.
you’re dancing on the stage of your own
self-made misery, a prima donna of
flagrant self-destruction -- but i cannot
unmemorize the calories in a cough drop.
my hunger might still be a black hole, but
at least i recognize my own event horizon.
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we kneel at the water’s edge and tempt it to rise,
testing the murk with our fingertips. the mud
beneath my heels slides along the riverbank, a
game of unsure footing – when you stand the
shifting weight gives the shore its upper-hand and
the dark waters take me.
on my back i descend and the sunlight filters
through mud and moss, jetsam of green and brown
in the wide unblinking blue of my eyes. i open my
mouth and inhale, sucking swamp into my lungs –
you could raise the sand if you wanted, but instead
i find home below in the riverbed.
don’t pull me out – leave me to crawl along beneath
the surface, gnawing on lichen, a vision in muddy
waters.
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sunflower
they say that absence
makes the heart grow fonder--
or was it fungus?
you don’t get to walk away
from the garden and come home
again to find it thriving. roots
you planted five years ago
still need nutrients to survive,
and you say now that eight months
is a drop in the bucket of five years
but eight months is long enough
to kill a sunflower. you
can’t save a dead flower by
over-watering it. the root-rot has
already set in. you’ll just have to
grow a new one.
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first couple of lines reworked from the first lines of wind of the appian way by cyrus cassells
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more than peace and cedar elms, emboldened
junebugs adrift in the breadth of grass, i love
the depthless sky, clear of starlight-jetsam,
in oppressive small-town silence.
as i sit encapsulated in the ambient ocean of
quiet, harmonizing crickets herald a shift
in the universe. light-pollution is a distant memory,
miles away in our modernist milieu, but
the clouds reign supreme here in cold nowhere:
no twenty-story buildings with late-night lights
to imitate stars gone extinct, no streetlamps to press
back the pressing darkness -- only me, the universe,
and the junebugs. the starless sky is a murky
ceiling, and it renders the cedar elms in strange new
formations, many-armed monsters held at bay
by the moonless dark. we are sentinels, the
junebugs and i, witnesses to the destruction of
the universe’s iridescent magic. beyond the boundary-
line of my blanket in the grass, neighboring houses
become distant planets, the street a solar system thrown
out of harmony.
sandia. h.t.
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Rosemary for remembrance,
and pansy for thoughts—
touch her only with temperance,
paint her golden with reverence,
tie her hair up in knots.
Don’t worry over her severance
from reality, her irreverence
for the flowers that rot.
Did you expect deference?
Deference? Your inference
reduces her to an afterthought;
this is not her interment:
she is not buried by embitterment.
Are you? In your overwrought
concept of her, is her innocence
the cure to your belligerence?
How necessary is it that she garrote
herself for the sake of your deliverance?
Watch her choke on rue in recompense.
you must wear your rue with a difference. h.t.
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parts of my wallet are a scrapbook of my sickness.
tubes of lipstick and stale cigarettes are pillars of disorder,
remnants of meals i never ate. recovery says that tom ford
and a marlboro red are not dinner, but if you dig a little
deeper – it’s fine. wrapped around one tube is a whataburger
receipt. don’t look too close: it’s from months ago; the most
recent receipt is from the grocery store and it was for more
cigarettes. wedged between driver’s license and gym
membership is the starbucks card, worn with relapse: red
cigarettes, red lipstick, and black coffee are the core pillars
of a balanced diet.
there is a rabbit hole in my wallet, and i don’t know how to
talk about it without accidentally inviting you to follow me
back down. we’re all mad here, but there are no little glass
bottles inviting you to drink; there are no little cakes inviting
you to eat. the load-bearing walls of my wallet are cigarettes
and lipstick and a butane lighter and – relapse says maybe i
should leave my debit card at home today.
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limerence
honey
drips
the sun across your face in golden light.
she would have swallowed it to make you warm enough.
her need sits beside her with gnashing
teeth—
muzzle it and watch her strangle herself on the leash
just to be closer, closer, closer to you.
somewhere along the way you lost the true meaning of
passion:
latin root: pati.
it is written on her bones. she was made for this.
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honey
warmth spreads in a soft haze, permeating the empty spaces between bodies and seeping deep beneath skin. a sunset of pinks blending to blues blending to black blankets in from balcony doors. laughter and idle chatter hum distantly in every corner, a hymn to the night sky and to us. smoke curls in from the open doors, layering with the low beat of a song only the stars are listening to. the three of us together here means safety. a soft pink glow populates the room and we are sunshine even as a jealous moon peeks her light from around the trees. it fogs in with the smoke and the cat on the balcony and the faint smell of a spilled drink settling into the carpet, unnoticed.
at one in the morning we are still midday. the open doors spill our pocket of light into the polluted sky and together we have enough of it to spare. we are giving and taking in tandem, a sunbeam for a secret, a secret for a song and when it’s us we never seem to run dry of things to give.
at three in the morning there is nothing but us wading through honey. the stars have trickled out one by one in staggered fashion and all that’s left is us and the mess we’ve made. on the balcony we drip ash and breathe smoke and streak soft smoldering light into the open sky and the moon whispers a song about witchcraft on our lips.
at four in the morning sunlight burns out and settles down into the carpet. the air becomes a cooler shade of blue.
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