vivewrites-blog

[vivewrites-blog]

For Barter

I offered up one pound of my vulnerability for barter.

You considered it,

raw, dripping, on the scale.

One pound, exactly.

A calculated decision on my part.

I had been trying for months to figure out

how to get you to part with a piece of your heart.

I’d tried to impress you so that you’d think

you had found something special

and would try to hold on to me.

I’d tried to lull you into a sense of

safety and security

by taking care of you,

and hoped that you’d want to keep me.

I’d tried to fuck you into oblivion

so that your lust, which was powerful,

would keep you coming back to me.

And yet, you guarded your love

like it was the fucking federal reserve

or some republican senator’s daughter’s honor.

(Of course, she’s probably fucking all the dudes surreptitiously.

Good for her.)

You had told me that being in love was an addiction

and that when it ends the body goes through the same symptoms

as a junkie separated from his needles.

You don’t drink much, or do the hard stuff.

but you are a smoker.

I thought I could never be with a smoker, before you.

But now I crave the sight of you leaning against the lamp pole outside my apartment,

cigarette dangling from your mouth.

Or reclining in your cracked leather chair,

blowing smoke out your opened window.

So, one pound offered.

I waited to see what you would propose in return.

November 24, 2017

[vivewrites-blog]

[vivewrites-blog]

Kuiper Belt

You told me you hoped I’d go home tonight and write a poem about taking all the men on the planet and putting them on a rocket ship and blasting them to the Kuiper belt.

Well, I got home tonight and I heated up some leftovers and I opened a bottle of red wine and I watched a documentary about Joan Didion.

See, she, Joan, she knows how to take words and string string string them together in the meandering way that thoughts flow downhill towards some sort of truth or simplicity about you and me and everyone here, right now.

Tonight I left the dishes in the sink, rounded up every last man on earth, explained to them that their manspreading and mansplaining and manfredding just would not do. Not any more. I apologized, as a good woman does, and shut the airlock on the tiny spaceship. 5 4 3 2 1 Ignition.

Nov 10, 2017

[vivewrites-blog]

In which I haven’t spoken to a human being in too long

Lips glued together, I

Couldn’t get out of bed this morning.

My tongue fingered the backs of my teeth,

sticky with sleep.

My jaw parted slightly,

and my tongue slid along the edges of my incisors,

rough and ragged.

A chip, there, from being kicked in the face

as a twelve year old on a soccer pitch.

Continuing its exploration, my tongue probed the fleshy boundary

just beyond the gap in my teeth

which yielded slightly, but did not break.

I stared at the ceiling,

fault lines of cracked paint traversing one end of the room

to the other,

illuminated by the weak fall light coming through the

old window, shrouded in a thin, worn curtain

just opaque enough to deter prying eyes.

I felt my limbs, splayed in repose.

Arms bent above my head,

left foot pressed against right knee,

hips open.

My ears picked up the sounds of the street below.

Occasionally the hum of an engine starting.

Occasionally the whump of a trash bin closing.

Occasionally the roar of a teenager on a motor bike passing too quickly.

And I wondered how long I would lay like this.

Oct 29, 2017

[vivewrites-blog]

Dublin Airport, Thank You Annie Clark

October 22nd, 2017

Waiting for a flight back to that cold place with its cold people. I should be clear. It is not really cold there. Not wind off the lake in January Chicago cold. Not Sierra mountain cloudless December night cold. (December 31st, 2011). Not Ireland October rain soaked into your socks, your shoes, plastering your jeans to your thighs, the hair on the back of your neck to your neck, cold. But cold permeates everything there. Doesn’t matter if it is not. It is. Like the cold filtering up through your cracked, creaking floor boards. (Rotted, probably.) Like the cold streaming through the gaps in your porous apartment door, also ineffective at keeping out the sounds and smells of your neighbors. Like the cold seeping under your window panes which won’t close any more because the cycles of swell through the seasons, through the years, have left them misshapen. (Rotted, definitely.) Back to 30,000ft. How high is that in meters? This translation back and forth, back and forth, leaves me without a metric. And Celsius feels so small. It can’t capture the difference between deep in your bones cold and the cold which only gets stuck in your layers of fat. Those layers have been accumulating, waistband cinching a little tighter each time you try on those grey pants. The ones which used to make your ass look tight but which now leave a red mark around your hips. Tightened the belt around my hips where your hands were missing. I think about that often now and I don’t even know whose hands are missing, but they aren’t there. My teenaged self loved Ani But I don't have some much time now for that earnest self-loving, that hopeful self-searching. Only time now for décollage and atterrissage and waking up on Monday mornings in a cold bed, in a cold country.