stephanielanegagewords

[stephanielanegagewords]

Shadowbathing

The radio is on and the car is dark. You're driving a long empty highway at night, well, almost night, the sun just disappeared behind the mountains ahead of you but there is still light in the sky. It's all dusty gradient pinks and grays. Lights are beginning to wink and blush at you from the black land surrounding. You're not quite sure what state you're in but you find the rhythmic blinking of the red lights from radio towers sprinkled on the crags of mountains somewhat comforting. The AM radio plays scra a a atchy through fuzz like the feel of a fabric you think will be soft to the touch but instead is rough wool. You've run through your CDs and you like listening to AM radio when you're driving long distances, you like to hear the voices of the unheard, echoing through the mountains and the desert that get trapped on your antenna like a fly catcher and then they're all leaking and sighing through that fuzz, that wool in the speakers before eventually those voices unheard bounce and echo away to the sky. The light fades even more and the radio is littered with static. Your vision dazes away as you drive into night. You've forgotten to tune the channel and it's completely white noise now, static and electric and somber and empty. Your lilted gaze falls on those winking blushing synchronized radio towers and you realize the light from them is purple, not red. Has it always been that way? At that moment a noise, muted as the static cuts across the radio, a shrill but unassuming tone, high and light and unwavering. Steady as those dark dark mountains all bathed in shadow. beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep. And then—a voice—quiet and calm—waxing and yawning through wool and the opposite side of a fan blade, spinning—

look to the signs, watch for following rocks, forecast says winds are high and sights are low. something will. float floating like a dead orb all glowing black and dripping into the space behind your... eyes. roll back. echo in exile and live beneath the sand. the world shakes her head at you. there's nothing beneath your skin, i saw the void there under your flesh. so go on white knuckled like you’ll feel anything other than the alien nothing that the desert dark put there in the first place. better off alone, with your future ghost. blink yourself dry in rhythm with the mountains. feel the hush. shhhhshsh. don't listen too closely to the friends you'll never hear or the words outside your head. goodnight now, goodnight.

beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.

[stephanielanegagewords]

power goes out

you're an oil lamp that burns bright when the power's out you hurt my eyes but i'm here for the hurt and i can't look away it burns my retinas and well, you do , too like lingering ghosts lifting and lifting and losing and floating on you're an indescribable color on my periphery and you're floating just out of grasp - there's blood in my teeth and i'm tired of the drag of it all and of diiiissssssssociating the universe is tripping over itself i'm afraid to lose my winter skin when did this timeline stop and the other started the clock runs too fast and i don't know how to set it back and i'm tripping over myself in time on a balance beam between realities i'll fall off and swan dive, clumsily, into a pile of rocks. - break my neck , of a beer bottle and fill my mouth with blood smile show me those pearly reds - and i've woven here a fabric of different lives fuck me over and i'll steal myself each thread and from one or the other or the other unweave it all pull that thread, ruin the pattern, i want the fabric i touch to be just as unwoven as me - kill me in cacophony love me in darkness look at me in the light of day ask me if i've seen the flowers bloom walk me past the decrepit building and tell me how it reminds you of this

[stephanielanegagewords]

Burial Ground

A dreamless sleep and a breeze washes through it. But that is all. There is a crime scene made of leaves and an absence of things. There is a small footprint edging, smoky in the dark. All of the clearing is leveled, circular—grass blades folded in prayer and every twig that was before reaching towards the sky is laid down to rest. With no encroaching branches of surrounding trees, it's almost perfect, very civil, very understanding, cylindrical.

Somewhere, through the twigs and gravel and languid air, there is music playing, softly. Drifting from a campsite thirty yards away. Embers from a now ancient fire puff solemnly and an empty tent stands yawning. The old sound, airy from the forgotten campsite radio rambles on, some old blues song all raspy from the '20's, an odd echo, forgotten. Filtering through the still of the leaves. “...I went to the crossroad, I fell down on my knees...”

The finger plucking of the guitar, graveled through years of time travel to be here now, leaking from the radio's speakers, weaved through the strange arrangement of trees. It was a weird burial ground, so eerie now, at nightfall. The ghosts that occupied the campsite were well aware of their bodily absence, their echo of voices gone, yet embodied by the raspy old blues singer's words.

“Where have we gone?” they ask each other.

A purple light streaks across the sky, jittery, it jumps. Like a flame against the clouds, electric. Other-worldly. Bodies and consciousness separate, the two campers were still yet connected, bathed and drowning in the purple light above the ground.

As they rose, they touched the black of the sky with their fingertips. Felt a presence outside of themselves, other minds and consciousnesses. Their absent skin was left with the atmosphere. “Where are we going?” they ask each other, occupying the same whisper of a thought. They rose further, through the purple light and into a space to inhabit, for now. They were joined by other consciousnesses, their thoughts entangled into one with starry minds, forgetting completely about the coughing campfire coals and raspy blues singer back on Earth, far away, in a forgettable campsite, beneath forgettable trees. They didn't mind the abduction, in fact, they welcomed it. And so, they were joined by the beings in the purple light. And so, they were guided to the stars.

[stephanielanegagewords]

Are You or Someone You Know...

there are spirits in this house of wrinkled matter they slam doors and break dishes and they whisper louder in the wintertime they send me text messages they steal my palm fronds out of passing thoughts of summertime they drink white wine at my sister's house and they don't invite me they hold my hand and keep me from floating off the surface of the earth and into outer space, past the atmosphere where I can keep my eyes open and think about larger things like my atoms being at home there, with relatives and friends because they are all small and made from starstuff and, well, since everything is, I guess my spirits are too.

[stephanielanegagewords]

its warmer here than I expected we’ll be looking at this postcard in the future like a star, backwards in time, now little cities like constellations or ripples on the crest of waves I wonder if I’ll ever get closer to space than I am now Jupiter’s eye is blinking, slowly Saturn turns its head, hexagonal I love you like the moons of Mars

[stephanielanegagewords]

PLANETARIUM

here you are you've touched air particles in exchanges through liver and lungs with the history of everything this is when someone usually says did you know you're drinking the same water as Abraham Lincoln once drank? and you'll think why did they choose him why is Honest Abe honestly the go-to in this particular brand of did-ja-know's and here's-a-fact's why don't they ever use Hitler or Genghis Khan or a tyrannosaurus rex as an example (I would if I were them)

I will try my hardest to keep 'I' out of this there isn't really an I here in all of the earth I is slippery it's very thin and sometimes tall there's nothing really to grasp it and it can easily get lost when you're looking for it through the trees and in the honest multitude of three dimensional spaces I is still trying to stand up because I is either two-dimensional and has nothing to stand on or I is a strange sound gargling out of somebody's throat and this I is gargled in various different tongues of apes an average of 764 times per second Abraham Lincoln himself gargled this almost 9 billion times before he was shot in a theater and then Booth would fall from the balcony and claim both 'I broke my leg' and 'I killed the president' and these phrases would bump Booth's I count up to 9 billion and 2

right now there is a woman attempting to make and market a thermos travel mug and thinking that she's vaguely concerned that the prototype's outside plastic still feels warm to the touch but then counters her own thought with the notion that this warmth is perhaps a sort of comfort to somebody, especially for the people in the cold parts of the earth, like the places where you have to wait for a bus for a half an hour in the air that's a handful of degrees below nil and even though the prototype may be subpar to its competitors this counter-thought is a validation of a human touch, a proof of temperature and of blood-run and beating heart so in the end she thinks it's not really subpar at all

[beat] [beat]

and right now there is a young boy-man on a stage in a small town and he's dressed and sweating in a donkey costume and acting his heart out literally his heart out as he falls to the stage and the show stops in silence and the cast will look out towards the audience through the bright wash of the lights searching the darkness on their faces for somebody's help the boy's heart has stopped. but now you are thinking what's to this? what's a pulse-less boy in a donkey costume to the whole rest of everyone that's ever been? now you are in the audience with your face-darkness being searched by eyes of cast members who will jump into the light? will the boy live? many hearts have stopped beating in the time you've been reading this (107 to be exact) and so what's another void heartbeat?

(to be perfectly transparent, the boy did live, and celebrates his short death with an annual deathday party)

"how is your birthday today?" "well, it's a good day if it doesn't rain" says the dog to the leaves, unaware of the amble of the winding white noise yelling from those thoughtless branches and yet, a coldness from above will bring you to the thought: sometimes you just can't help but to be angry at the wind as it blows frigid from the north until

there is a girl knee deep in a mud plot somewhere south of here crying in the sun rays and she thinks she feels a wiggling of movement at her feet and that the earthworms will eat her alive (this is what her brother told her happens when you're buried underground) what she doesn't see through the salt is a leaf growing all bright green through the mud she doesn't see toes or eyes or the fine hair on a leg or a dog walking underneath a streetlight a couple of hours from now and 2.7 miles away the dog holds its leash in it's mouth it's ears all back and it's thinking about the impossible gradient of the sky

unknowingly, that dog would leave its paw print in a plot of wet cement, under the streetlight there while its ears were all back, and that impression would last for another thirty-two years after the dog's death (which happened on a sunny day in mid-March under a tall oak tree in the mud) and so it left its amendment on the Earth that outlived its soul, that paw print, all besides its pile of old bones in that expanse of wet dirt. How many eyes have stumbled down while walking, caught on that image on the left edge of the sidewalk? only to gaze at the print and give a passing thought of curiosity with a furrow to one brow. (I will remember the dog, and hope you will too.)

I will try my hardest to keep 'I' out of this. And yet I will assert myself and my means of existence as I hope you will, too. 'I' is a presence, unending and infinite. 'I' is gargled from Abraham Lincoln, it's fallen horizontal on the stage as a boy in a donkey costume, it's a poorly designed travel thermos, it's a girl standing upright in a plot of mud, it's one of the bones of an old dog underneath an oak tree during mid-March, it multiplies itself as unending and uncountable drops of rain on the day after your birthday.

'I', in all of its narcissistic necessity, is a tonal diphthong, a motion inwards, hands pointed in a concave V ending at the heart in its place in the chest, and then a movement outwards, arms changing into an uplifted “U”, a curved line with endpoints as fingers that are signifying the meeting of the sky and the horizon it's an excitement, an expression towards the lonesome necessity of 'you' to the utter entropy of 'we' a tune sung towards the very uniqueness of being.

[stephanielanegagewords]

but you stand you—sunflower stalk all tall and alien and lovely and I—perhaps a glint in the sidewalk below

your hands are big, the lines on your palm are legible walk, go lead us, meriwether, to the mists of the pacific.

soft now & warm or the persistence of rain? it talks to the frost barren opposite side of the window-glass

you see he said I get the lonelies real easy these days

[stephanielanegagewords]

Poems for New York

i. bow string broken underground and the tone of it echoed for miles lead me down the hallway at one AM in a straight line follow the lights & don’t look back, orpheus the dust between tiles will linger and your feet stutter, you all metal bones stiff, exiting don’t quite see the streetlights through the mist tonight

ii. & God save Sol LeWitt black structured & spine-like back-brace extruding & beveling your perception of it what if it was the black cube instead or the gray cube or the frosted translucent cube reflective in it

iii. I thought I saw you in patterns behind marble eyelids, suspended lamented in the mouths of subway singers and the polyphony of moving air of metal on metal of the gap between buildings and flawed intonations of the bitter condition I don’t think that the dogs & the flowers should be kept separate. I thought I saw you then, too I thought I heard you say you agreed

[stephanielanegagewords]

Thanksgiving

I’m crawling there and waiting for a velvet dress shirt I haven’t seen those wheat stalks and it’s been months it doesn’t seem so long I suppose but I’m grappling the northern vortex of banality and mostly-empty glasses of white wine harboring a fruit fly corpse the kitchen floor is dirty my mother wouldn’t approve I want to close my eyes and I’ll see my black dog bawling in a farm thicket during Thanksgiving running herself worn I know I miss the aches that she doesn’t anymore

[stephanielanegagewords]

sun sapiens

that hill was a tiny planet you are almost the city skyline from the top of it all spread out and standing on a bench blinking and shining as if the stars themselves came down from the heavens and settled amongst us creatures

[stephanielanegagewords]

Oddly Swallowed

your eyes have been speaking in tongues I’m looking at you through the passenger’s side window glass coated in condensation in writing I will talk to you but my room is a hospice for pens

-

the floor’s got its own plans it’s huddled in dirt and dust but the glass of bourbon falls both ways I think it’s just whiskey unless the floor is building it’s own Tennessee drawing state lines like arguments I figure it shouldn’t last but you looked downwards and it just seemed

like phantom speech

you wolf-biter

-

BLUE STAR written twice and all backwards on a tarp dangling as a split precipice/split fountain is just a gradient as the sky is.

-

“I’m going to know you” funny as it’s getting darker sooner now you’re across a body of water and your body is a cross of water I’m going to know you too I can only ask this of the light on the bricks— where is the steam leaking from edges unpaved asphalt and grit rocks and gravel

swallowed it swallowed it whole

-

the flower shop is closed today “how is your birthday?” “it’s a good day if it doesn’t rain”

-

you could build gallery walls out of the dust in my lungs on the inhale hang all the work I’ve made in the next dimension over curate a cacophony of idealisms that were merely a passing thought in someone else’s sleep

-

And God, there’s a spot on my hips with your thumbprint on it I’ll fold over all electric as the lines of light leak from shadowed glass, interrupting our walls here

the moon is out just as much in the day time as it is at night wave hello to its duotone in the afternoon sun

-

sun sapiens uncomfort refrigerator ephemera familiar distaste drink up ur wine before the fruit flies do for a run-of-the-mill satisfaction

-

I’m walking directly into the sun fragile as it is and eclipsing the Earth in shadow and everyone will be cold for just a moment I’ll think of the grass blades that shudder just for a second shhhhhshshh a moment of silence for the grass. I’ll think of the mud-flaps on the rear of a semi-truck pausing in motion the mud will be stagnant and patient while I go the current flows on, the fish at the bottom of the river will blink lazy a couple lights in windows turn on but I’ll have been gone for eight minutes already.

[stephanielanegagewords]

This is the Day the World Ends

MAN sits on a park bench at the edge of the Earth, overlooking a city somewhere, sunny as the air in mid-May blows thinly and the dogs are barking at the bottom of the hill and a red kite is pitted against a blue sky in his periphery. Having presently departed, MAN had just run into a pair of old friends from his hometown, one which frankly looked heavier than he had been in high school (though he had only gained a medial 4 pounds over the years) which was something MAN was taking slight solace in. MAN now stares at the visible skyline over the hill on which he sits, brows furrowed and eyes squinting toward the blur of bright hues, reflecting, his mind speaking.

MAN’S MIND: Everything’s changed. Just then. Instantly. MAN: What do you mean by that? MAN’S MIND: I s’pose it’s just that in that second, when you saw those two people approaching, the blurred faces in the sunlight just rising over the precipice of the hill, like a fucked up kind of nostalgic sunrise, there was a feeling in your belly, right beneath your stomach lining that was like a schism, an awareness of interruption— MAN: Interruption of what? MAN’S MIND: [louder]—of the air, here. Or maybe it was more like the relative passing of time was disturbed and the universe shook a little bit. MAN: The universe shakes because I see someone I used to know. MAN’S MIND: I know it doesn’t seem right because of the utter vastness of it all and you’re an assortment of molecules on a lowly corner of this dark expanse, but there are worlds beneath your eyelids. [beat] Do you want to see how the world ends? MAN: Must I? [MAN looks to the red kite floating lowly now, defeated by the picking up of wind. It vibrates against the blue.] I’d rather you show me something blank, and I’ll stay ignorant for a little while longer. MAN’S MIND: [quietly] There isn’t choosing, now. You know.

MAN nods. Jostling from the past in corners of the mind, organic. Every memory of who he is and who he’s loved has faded. The sun, lumbering on through the sky fiercely, began to expand and distort. The sky grew dark in midday protest. Heads and eyes belonging to all things that day turned to see, though they knew it was coming. They all flew their kites, red. Each blade of grass sang it’s own swan song as the flares of a dying sun brushed the Earth and left a husk where the world once was. MAN imagined he saw fireworks, silly as it was that day in the afternoon.

[stephanielanegagewords]

1691

I haven’t stayed put this long in months. Haven’t occupied this house for long enough to watch each shadow of light crawl across the floor and get stuck to the walls from reflections in dishes. I can listen to the birds. Do you hear them? From this corner here it sounds like one’s inside the walls

—

It’s like an out-of-body experience you know? Maybe there’s another you out there, in another dimension or in a strand of a far away universe. Sometimes I look up all the other people with my exact name online and wonder what they did and how they got there and should I be living that life instead of this one? That one has a baby. That one lives in Harlem. That one has big teeth and plays Dungeons & Dragons. That one works at a Walmart in Iowa.

—

My sight is jarring slightly, vibrating against a wall as the sun sets and I’m still here in the house. I feel a tremor in my step, as part of me is going elsewhere.

—

What do you think the chances are that we will watch the sun go nova before we are gone Will it blunder through the dirty paned windows in the nighttime like the orange light from the streets of the city? Grain the walls with flares Bright at night like a summer day in July Waiting for strands to tangle, making a husk of the planet or something Maybe it’ll look like two astronomical fireworks, dancing That everyone will watch From inside this room

—

But I will breathe easy, now. It’s quiet here at 2AM and the buildings outside are bolder and it’s all a little blurry, but the shadow of this house falls faintly on the sidewalk below, proclaiming itself. There’s a fossil record in these walls, ghosts in the attic. Relics, bones. A proof of existence.

[stephanielanegagewords]

prosetry

I. Sun Phantom I think I recognized your face again for the first time in months reflected on the back of my retinas but the moment was vain and baleful, taking me up in the shock of it and stumbling feet stuck on the floor on its way out. I blink harder in the nighttime, shades up with lights from the steeple through dirty glass panes and I’m yelling aloud in my sleep without knowing because there’s no one to hear it but the air in the cracks of the walls. Every night in those sleepless dreams I fall from the sky over into antiquity and drown in the Icarian Sea.

II. Rent is due On the onslaught I figured the rest would be determined but bail is too harsh in this economy so I opted out and back, residing now in this detrimentality of a 3BR, 1BA, no heat except when we’ll spare the cost and maybe we should because the plants are dying and it killed my fish once

III. I Ran Thickening in the Illinois atmosphere as the red lights flashing in unison across the plains are caught in the stagnant air. I think they’re wind turbines. I didn’t figure I’d be here on Independence Day peeling over blacktop with sparks ascending over Bloomington. Heart caught on the gravel of a rooftop back in Milwaukee and it’s trailing my organs like a line of breadcrumbs from there to the middle of my nowhere home.

[stephanielanegagewords]

Milwaukee

Walking down Brady street with the sun on my eyelids and palms. Milwaukee in the summer is unrivaled until the dense air creeps into bedrooms under door-cracks and I’m laying on the wood floor with a fan on my legs. The lake makes the air viscous and the cigarette smoke lingers too long and I still drink hot coffee even though I’m sweating through my bra straps because iced coffee isn’t very good, in my opinion. I’m beginning to long for (in vain) October last year when our landlords didn’t turn the heat on in our apartment until mid November and I slept with four blankets and in that jacket someone gave me a while back and a scarf wrapped around my shoulders and neck. Thinking about it now it was silly we smoked inside that house but maybe my opinion will change when I’m waiting for the bus in December and it feels like I’ll be waiting for eternity because I can’t feel my fingertips and my socks are wet with slush from the holes in my boots. Besides, I have fond thoughts for those times. Like when we would sit on my couch together with coffee in the gray mornings and share a cigarette. Or when I couldn’t sleep at 2 in the morning and I found myself sitting by the windowsill smoking in that state of melancholy that comes with any sleepless night. And now the air outside is sweet with vanilla from the bakery across the street and I don’t know whether I prefer that or the wet, languid smell that comes from the brown Milwaukee River. At least in winter I can watch from above the geometric pieces of ice that wander down it; they kind of fit together like a puzzle but not exactly because much of the ice has melted already and gone back to being brown, fouled water.

[stephanielanegagewords]

Unground

Asphalt words dimly lit Or desolate or effervescent Or small Cryptic.

Will go someplace where the bitter doesn’t violate my bones You tire A hole behind the eyeballs.

Laughing sitting cross-legged on a performing stage. Came through in the tone of my voice here. Once

Would the coffee rings okay our sense of falsifying luxury? But no, They just brown the dirty notion of a nineteen year-long fictional satire.

And in my head these images talk Won’t stop, slip It falls With no more than a glance from a passerby And collapsed on the hard marble floor.