this world will self-destruct

pax luminaria

2009-11-14T01:28:00.000-05:00

Belief is a funny thing. I often feel that my belief is a set of contrasts instead of affixed stars in the sky, in relativity to Jack, I was the heathen outsider, the unrepentant atheist adrift in nothingness and nowhere. To Rudy, however, I feel like a believer, my swirling, syncretic schools of thought, my awareness of my cellular structure as a vehicle with the capacity for more, seem like devout prayer to his black and white atheism.

I was raised in nothingness. There were casual references to God when I was a child. I owned a picture bible some grandparent or relative had given to me in a well-intentioned moment, but it was never discussed, never mentioned again. Our gods were the Minnesota Vikings and my mother's leatherbound edition of Portrait of a Lady. I learnt to worship at the altars of Dylan Thomas and Richard Feynman, and to be frank, I probably would've made it to those temples anyway. But we never went to church and I was overwhelmingly grateful for that. The weight of religion petrified me, a black lodestone upon my shoulders.

As I age, I find difficulty reconciling myself - the passionate teenager I was with the disinterest and cynicism that permeates my being and awareness as an adult. Somewhere, behind my ribcage and my viscera, I am still that shorn girl that drove out to parking lots of temples when I was under stress, hoping that somehow, despite my renegade status, I still belonged.

self-immolation

2009-08-01T00:23:00.002-04:00

We talk about goals around here. Dreams, great expectations, Manifest Destiny. Boys and girls around me telling me that their life goals are to get married, start a family, maybe get a dog. I realize I am choking, clawing, goddamn, get me out of here. The midwestern desert goes on for hundreds of miles.

I have been trying to claw my way out of here for years. You know the score. Age eighteen, all set and bags packed and - how is it that I'm back here, age twenty-three? How is it that I'm still in my hometown bookstore and driving down the same old streets, my parents' house, that gas station, still working on the same novel - age twenty-three? Has nothing changed in five years?

Some things have. I learned how to love and leave. How to teach oneself to put on a brave face. How to even be happy. How to watch your world explode around you, your body take you hostage.

This time, I'm going to make it. I'm going to leave this goddamn city, going to take off for a hardwood-floored apartment in Chicago with Victorian wallpaper and paint underneath my fingernails. We'll sell shirts over the internet. I'll sew clothing, put together a show. Maybe I'll get good at the guitar or at least pretend to.

I want to set the world on fire.

lake people

2009-07-30T13:23:00.001-04:00

Our mutual existence amuses me. I look at you, the way you sleep, the hair that falls into your face as you curl up on your side. You and I are paired kindly, lock and key, we drink when we're bored and look impatiently up at skylines aching to get away from our mediocre addresses.

I met you and knew you immediately. The impatience in the walk, the unsettled hands, the ability to light up over quality pop culture. I know you have loved and left willingly, chosen something in yourself first, because I have done so. What you walked away from and why, I don't know. But I know that I looked and saw complacency and chose my creativity and inspiration first, and turned on my heel and ran like hell.

I bet you're good at things. Good at living paycheck to paycheck. Good at convincing others to do things. Good at loving until your heart explodes. Good at running away to save yourself. Good at considering jumping off of bridges. Good at making love. Good at smiling even when you don't mean it. Good at learning how be happy anyway.

I don't know. Maybe you and I will walk off into the lake someday.

the fare of bookstore workers

2009-05-30T02:51:00.001-04:00

No, we don't have that book in stock. No, chances are that at the elusive 'other bookstore' you plan to visit, they won't have it either.

You'll just get it from Amazon.com? That's nice. Enjoy paying shipping and handling, despite my explanation that you could skip it here. Believe it or not, I'm really just trying to help you and not annoyed by your bitchy response.

Why don't we carry that particular title? Does it look like the walls of this store expand beyond known dimensions and Euclidean geometry? We cannot carry everything, thus the special order system.

No, we don't have 2009 calendars, they were discounted out inJanuary. But take a look at our 2010 calendar display up in the next few weeks.

That is a print-on-demand book, miss, would you like to order it? You'll look for it elsewhere? It doesn't exist unless we order it - that's why they say print-on-demand.

You're looking for a book. Good start. But you don't know the name of the author or title or even what it was about? You think it was blue and on the front table around Christmastime... in Scottsdale, Arizona? Oh, lord.

No, the third installment of the Dean Koontz Frankenstein trilogy doesn't exist.

The correct answer to "I'm sorry, that's out of print" is not "Well, can't you print more?".

It is also not "Can you check in the back?".

I am not a mall directory. Please visit the mall information center downstairs.

We have no Paperback section.

We have no non-fiction section. See Fiction? It's everything else.

For the love of god, don't walk around barefoot in my store.

I can only order the Anarchist Cookbook to your house. It's a non-returnable item, meaning that if you don't pick it up, we'll be stuck with it on our shelves. If 20 people do this, we have 20 copies to unload of a title that doesn't really sell.

Please let your kids know that making castles out of the magazines isn't exactly appropriate.

Then again, let yourself know that taking Penthouse out of its plastic and leaving it in the bathroom is ALSO NOT APPROPRIATE.

If you are going to read in our store, which we do encourage, please do not crack the spine, bend the covers, or dog-ear the pages. This is merchandise, not your personal library.

If you have a stack of books and cannot find where they go or are in a hurry, it is perfectly acceptable to leave them at the Information Desk or at any register to be reshelved. We thank you for this.

But please do not shove them randomly in the House Decorating department.

Books are not stools.

You need this book for tomorrow? This rarely-sold, out-of-popular demand book? Why did you wait until today? I can have it in 3-4 days. Oh, you'll look elsewhere? Even when I told you I could call the other bookstores for you? Good luck, kiddo.

Your college bookstore is the place to find your textbooks. We are a retail business, I won't have your Introductory Algebra book by Kaseberg on the shelf. I can order it for you. Oh, you waited until the last minute and need it for tomorrow? Tough shit.

You need a book of information on Norway geared for an eight year old for a report? How can I tell you these books do not really exist?

We don't price match. Or price gouge. The price is what's printed on the back of the book. The publisher sets that.

Put the goddamn phone down.

What do you mean it's ridiculous that I won't take this book back? You don't have a receipt, the book was printed in 1996, and the pages are yellowed. Do you really think I would have missed any of that?

We do offer a Big Green Discount Program, which is pretty awesome if you are a nerd like myself. Please don't take it as a personal affront if I inquire if you're a part of it.

If I push the program a little more, it's not because I want to exploit you - it's because you have four hardcovers and it's probably a damn good idea.

And no, sir, I will not discuss the stimulus package with you.

a manifesta, of sorts

2009-05-07T00:30:00.001-04:00

You know me, either to love me or revile my company. My generally amiable nature, a sharp, dagger-shaped tongue. My intolerance for willful ignorance and for idiocy. I have a ferocious need for independence, a heightened flight reflex, and a quickness toward defense. I'm an aesthete, politically charged, and simultaneously a cynic and a believer in idealism.

You probably know the details, being born a soldier's daughter on the outskirts of a southern Bavarian city. How I moved from city to city, never in one place longer than a year. The Bible I was given and kept hidden beneath stuffed animals in the back of my closet because I was afraid. The divorce happened in 1994, one year after the great flood, when the riverbanks ran up into the streets. We came to Michigan like exiles the next year.

I have loved twice, each time relinquishing a part of myself, and each time retrofitting myself with some kind of cast iron armor.

My grandmother looks to desperate measures to stay thin, injecting herself with pregnant women's urine. My mother looks drifty. Sometimes, I eat fire. I modify myself, looking for some sense of reclaimation, as if this pale, tiny creature with the long white hair isn't my own, by trial or fire. I mark her, with ink and steel and dye, taking back a shoulder, hair, my ears, saying this is mine again, isn't it?

What is a lover? I am imperfect, the silent, sidelong stares, the willful impetousity, the need to drive off into the horizon in a fit of wanderlust and a new album, 'Where have you gone?' you ask, and I outright
refuse.

Our political markings maim us, you expect me to bend, to recognize the glory of personal freedoms and states' rights. I ask why socialism is a four-letter-word. Maybe I fall somewhere more moderate, it depends on the day, my transient readings, loyalties, realities, my great love for the next great.

I cannot express myself, cannot. Would trade my blood for eloquence. I would be damned by mediocrity.

When I die, I will donate my body to science. Take my ashes and build a miniature Viking longship, set me out to sea ablaze.

Should I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

The expectations creep up slowly, imperfectly, the heteronormative expectation, that creeping, crouching, encroaching madness. The glance at my hair, my figure, my looks, judging some outward value. Offhand remarks about children, marriage, the ever-present damnation. Lay here passive and be silent. You speak, and expect me to nod, mitigate my own beliefs, failures, colossal mistakes.

Where is my glory? My sexual predatory gleam. To have taken what I want and to lay claim a flag. The are footsteps here where my forebears have walked. My value is reestablished. Harlot. Wanton. Fanny Hill. Sometimes, I touch soft skin and make love in the dark hour before dawn, to say 'come here and be quiet'.

Afterward, we listen to Bob Dylan in the dark.

I walk home.

drinking with the nemian lion

2009-03-16T01:53:00.000-04:00

I want you to recognize my brilliance.

oceans never listen to us anyway

2009-03-15T23:14:00.001-04:00

"Here's what I think, Mr. Wind-Up Bird," said May Kasahara. "Everybody's born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up. What I'd really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person. But I can't seem to do it. They just don't get it. Of course, the problem could be that I'm not explaining it very well, but I think it's because they're not listening very well. They pretend to be listening, but they're not, really. So I get worked up sometimes, and I do some crazy things."
- Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

on homosexuality and gender identity

2009-02-12T01:21:00.000-05:00

To talk about sexuality is to talk about a multitude of things. It is not simply to discuss my outward genitalia, my defining physical sex and whom I would like to bang if given half a chance. It also encapsulates my gender identity and awareness, my gender role in a relationship and in relation to the outside world. Perceptions of heterosexuality and homosexuality in and of their own selves.

Perhaps the first thing to address is my gender identity. Or, perhaps more accurately, my lack of one. I do not self-identify as female or male, but finding myself somewhere inbetween, in an atypically gendered area. I first dealt with this when I was fourteen or fifteen years old and whilst watching a movie, came to the realization that the sexual act was heightened to me once I noticed that I wanted to be the one doing. I wanted to perform those acts and roles upon another female. Not as female to female, but as male to female with myself in the masculine role. After wondering if I was transgendered for a year or more, I came to decide that I was satisfied with my body in the female sense and my mind in a more masculine sense - in effect, somewhere out of typical gender and sexual roles.

The LGBT community I find alienating and always have. The all-or-nothing approach, the extreme focus on male homosexuality and the exultation therein - always serve as some kind of obnoxious reminder of the masculine focus and privilege enjoyed. The lesbian community is marginalized here, relegated to the outskirts of the two gay bars, to the pool tables that line the sides while the boys listen to Lady Gaga. In effect, like the forgotten cousins, distantly related. To consistently support the homosexual boys in their pursuit for liberty, all the while having to listen to Madonna over Tegan and Sara and discuss Oscar Wilde over Virginia Woolf.

In short, your culture, not mine.

artist

2009-02-10T01:23:00.000-05:00

I don't like poetry anymore,
the way it winds up and twists about my wrist,
for attention, a bowl of milk set down
on the hardwood floor,
the bit lip awaiting the credit approval,
balancing lightly, lightly
on my hips.

Art claws,
in retrospect, to have never have become the artist
would have been cleaner,
to not maintain
It comes in adrift, after hours, after bed, after the brushing
of teeth, like a late night lover who didn't call
I am home now.
I waited for you, lonely and cold,
a pining widow after the great war.

It doesn't do to sleep facing
the wall, away.
Art doesn't breathe, doesn't sleep, casually encircling my
shoulders with hatchmark scratches, the sinewy seduction
of my nerves, my bones, my thighs,
some aching need left unsatisfied
oil and charcoal and then
nothing.

It leaves again, in November,
in happiness. Until I am clawing at my contentment,
tearing lovers from my limbs, satisfaction.
Come home again.
He breaks through
walls.

monstera dentata

2009-02-10T01:22:00.000-05:00

I have a recurring nightmare in which I dream that my teeth are loosening and falling out.

Last night, I dreamt that ten did.

on the ascension to the presidency

2009-01-20T01:24:00.000-05:00

As I came of age in the late 1990s and through the course of the last decade, I diligently studied the words and deeds of the past American presidents. But I also absorbed the awareness of the whiteness and maleness of these beings, consistently aware that while the laws may have been amended to allow me to run for the highest office of the country, the internal prejudices would never been overcome. That I, as a female, would never be president. Not barred by law, but by popular preference for the white man. By the prejudices that I would turn the presidency into a laughingstock by making swing decisions influenced by my menstrual cycle, that I would elevate the choice of my lipstick into a national concern. In short, that I, as a female, was too frivolous to be taken with any serious consideration.

But these sort of prejudices, albeit different ones, were the same that accompanied Obama’s course to the presidency, through Hilary Rodham Clinton’s sterling campaign, both annihilating these thought-processes and bringing me to tears in a sudden realization that the world I had lived within, in some semblance of tacit acceptance, was changing, mercurial and different. A country I could perhaps be proud of again, the city on the hill, where America does not mean bravado and swagger, but the great ideal of the West, civility and reason, science and intelligence.

President Obama, you have ascended to our highest office today accompanied with the greatest outpouring of hope I have ever seen accumulate in my generation. You come with our dreams for energy responsibility, for an exercise of power coupled with idealism and tempered with morality. The faith we put in you is unparalleled. You have acknowledged us all in your campaign and your inaugural address, our various creeds, religious and non-believer, our backgrounds, and you have not elevated one above the other, except the awareness of our common nationality and some great, elevated hope of transformation from the destruction of the past decade.

You have my support, good sir.

compartment

2009-01-18T01:25:00.000-05:00

The awkwardest thing in the world is this silent coexistence, where my coat brushes another being, our breaths mingle in dry, winter air, with no words to mark awareness.

I have gone through what no other man on the earth has gone through; I have put my lips to the hands of the man who killed my children.

2008-12-10T01:26:00.000-05:00

I spend the day wandering around the campus, aimlessly covered in glass-filtered sunlight. I am shedding myself, becoming something new entirely. It's an annual event, to molt. I feel myself suspending the awareness of reality, reading different styles of books, quitting my full-time position, leaving the homestead, joining an athletic gym. There is something at the end of the tunneled vision. Something alive.

I would drain myself dry for eloquence. I would drown myself for preeminence.

Here R and I sit, encapsulated in our own separate worlds and bound only over a mutual roof. I want to reach out to him, to somehow touch skin to skin through our shields. I don't move, he doesn't make a move to understand. He doesn't read my electronic words or rifle through my papers. I don't understand.

2008-11-14T01:28:00.001-05:00

epochmaking

2008-11-11T01:31:00.000-05:00

I need you younger than me
and easily impressed
liberal, leaning over in your chair
to touch the static screen
the president-elect's acceptance,
your chest heaving
I need your lips to pillow,
to beckon and dip beneath my
insistance, my tongue, my mouth,
talk of books and poetry,
anne sexton and philip roth and the
inevitable willing death of all things
bright
I want you to touch me and be
silenced, your breath coming
shallowly
your legs long and your veins blue
beneath pale skin
I want you to read to me
make promises I will pretend to not have
ever heard
the graciousness to come
I want to have loved you
in the dawn of something.

definition

2008-11-11T01:30:00.000-05:00

what is beautiful?
the curve of your arm, where the muscle pulls and your skin
dips,
the smell of copier ink; long, carpeted, hotel hallways;
the hair on my toes; freshly-printed books;
tobacco; wrought-iron;
worms brought up on pavement
after a rain;
my car dashboard; the burn scar on your right
hand
that I run my fingers over
to memorize, as if data were stored
in my fingertips;
the sound of a single car door
closing;
our tempered ferocity; your father who collects
bottlecaps and the headlines of Time magazine
arranged in a story of continual
descent;
the way you close your eyes to keep from
seeing.

hello darkness, yet again

2008-10-29T01:32:00.000-04:00

hello darkness, my old friend,
I've come to talk with you again,
because a vision softly creeping,
left its seeds while I was sleeping,
and the vision that was planted in my brain
still remains
within the sound of silence.

domestic disturbance

2008-10-14T01:34:00.000-04:00

god, I want to love poetically
I want to rip the veins from your chest,
your arteries, your lungs,
I want to suck the breath out of your mouth
with my tongue, my saliva, my mouth,
I want to consume.

my anger is palpable,
I rage, break dishes,
your wide-eyed stare,
the wrinkles in your shirt,
the glass is caught in the
dishwasher door.

i am willing my body to science; i am only electrical charges

2008-09-19T01:35:00.000-04:00

I loved you for the space between your teeth, for the way I felt on the airport platform, for the promise of white dresses and saviors. I didn't love you but to love the way it felt to love you, to swoop in upon my gallant knee and offer you my cleansing worship. I love everyone like this, with vanity and with fire.

Dissolution

2008-03-16T02:21:00.001-04:00

I began shrinking on Easter Sunday. My husband noticed it first. "Your pants are looking long there," he said, looking over the top of his glasses. I shrugged. My shrinking began in such incremental increases, just a few millimeters each day, that I hardly noticed. I began to see the undersides of chins, noses. Soon, I could no longer reach the top shelf. I started marking my height each morning on the doorjamb to the bathroom, the reversal of a growing child. Even my doctor, despite my panic, examined me and declared me perfectly healthy, albeit four inches shorter than I had been six months ago.

The shrinking is coming faster now. I am two foot tall and perfectly proportionate - like a child's doll. As I got smaller, I started creeping into the tiny spaces that would hold me. The breadbox, the dryer, the bathroom cupboard. I curl into a tiny fetal position and lay on the towels. My husband tells everyone that I have left him, although he sees me walk about. Sometimes, I say hello to him. He pretends not to see me, his pale eyes staring straight ahead. On Saturday, he packed all of my things away and cleaned. He sleeps alone, and I come over and nestle into the corner between his chin and clavicle. "I love you," I say. Sometimes, he wakes up. He says nothing.

I am getting smaller yet. Someday I will disappear.

slide

2008-03-16T00:56:00.001-04:00

I have stopped watching television.

It wasn’t intentional, although I cannot said I mind the repercussions. Instead, the concept of turning on the vast black box next to me has grown further and further comprehensible, less a part of the visceral reality I inhabit. I have lost the remote in the laundry. I don’t look to find it. Certainly, however, it has disappeared down some wormhole into a vaporous and shifting future. Not my reality.

I am okay.

Jörmungandr

2008-03-05T00:37:00.004-05:00

aishiteru

2008-02-15T00:35:00.000-05:00

Who are you, the ghost in my mirror asks, and I really have nothing to tell her. I am the infinite and the obtuse, I respond, but it means little.

The thing about falling in love is that it's like leaving a door askew. Wind rushes in, the ice and the snow, unbearable heat, and there is no screen, no barrier to stop it. My heart is laid bare and naked. I love you and all I want to do is to raise my arms up over my chest to protect myself. I want to step away from you, to come up for air, but I am entangled by your pale eyes and the way you hold my hair back as I throw up tonight's alcohol overindulgence. I want to throw myself into you, to cleave into your skin and become a part of you. I want to mark you with my very sharp teeth, to leave dental indentations a coroner could identify.

I haven't ever loved so nakedly, know that. I rest my elbows on the table and I think you understand. I am always one step ahead from the broken heart, always willing to pull the plug to protect my mercenary soul. She shattered me and I built my walls higher than those of Acre, higher than those of Jericho. It's been a long time gone and I'm leaving the front gate open for you. It's not easy. You know that.

You and I are cut from the same cloth, the same mail. You fascinate me, with your sarcasm and vitriol, your hesitancy, your gentle touch and rough palms. I know you from some mirrored response in my own skin and sinew. Our synapses fire on similar stimulai. Our brains nestle together in the same relapse. You look as cautious as I feel. As idealistic. As beautiful.

I made you a mix tape. It's settled in the back of this collective, dually something I think you might enjoy and something I've created to explain myself to you and what you've done to me.

I love you. There's no other way to say that.

all watched over by machines of loving grace

2008-02-09T02:50:00.001-05:00

Rudy.

january literary recap

2008-02-06T01:42:00.000-05:00

David Sedaris - Me Talk Pretty One Day
Borrowed from Rudy, still sitting precariously atop my knitting basket. I've been avoiding reading much Sedaris for several years now, although I'm not entirely sure why. This is a collection of interwoven essays and short stories, affording a biographical view of the author. Some were every shade of hilarious, namely the ones featuring his actress sister, Amy, whereas a few of the later ones dealing only with the author felt a little self-congratulatory.

Pamela Nagimi - The Woman With A Worm In Her Head and Other True Stories of Infectious Disease
A collection of an Infectious Disease Specialist's stories and encounters over the past twenty years of her work in the field. Her descriptions of the illnesses and the progression thereof are brilliant and clinical. Sometimes, she gets a little overbearing in trying to afford something spiritual to the medical cases (i.e. A scene in her residency involving a fetus's hand and seeing 'the work of God', not exactly my bag.) I will never eat salad in a foreign country. Gah.

Terry Pratchett - Making Money
The newest installment in the Discworld series, this time centering on Moist von Lipwig and his newest profession (prison?) of being Deputy Chairman of the Bank in Ankh-Morpork. I ripped through this one, finding it one of the more humorous and lucid of the books in the series, with a particularly hilarious and apt commentary on economics. Seems like Moist is being primed to be head Tax Collector in the next one, which will be awesome.

Susanna Kaysen - Girl, Interrupted
I picked this up on a break at work. A short, succinct portrayal of the life of a mental institution patient circa 1967. It's told in a series of brief essays and memoirs, interspersed by papers from the author's own hospitalization. Kaysen captures the caged and blanched feeling prevalent within whitewashed walls and what madness is - and stigma. A quick, interesting read.

Alex Robinson - Box Office Poison
Rudy picked this up from work for me and brought it whilst I was sick in bed with a fever. This is a genius graphic novel, very fluidly illustrated and centering around the entangling lives of about six to eight protagonists. The art is decent but the particular brilliance is in the humanity of the characters and one's recognition of their own self within. I really enjoyed seeing nontradtional female characters in there - such as Jane Pekar, who isn't dumpy or busty but is cute, draws, enjoys sex, and I bet could give me a run for my money in Soulcaliber.

Bruno Schulz - The Street of Crocodiles
One I suspect I will need to reread every few years. The Street of Crocodiles is a dreamlike foray into Schulz's childhood in Poland in the early twentieth century. Betraying his roots as an artist, the book reads like a painting, dripping with carnelian red and naples yellow, August sunlights slinking into parlors and dusty ornithological droppings. The haunting aspect is intensified by the entirely descriptive way the book is approached (there is little to no dialogue) and the eerie, heartbreaking rendition of the author's father, who sinks slowly into madness and is ignored - the way a sweater would unravel or a spot be sunbleached. His father sets about creating a bird menagerie atop the roof, a treatise on the proper way to treat tailor's dummies, and his slow and eventual metamorphosis into a reviled cockroach. Like a dream, the book hovers somewhere between fantasy and reality, one is never sure where ground he is setting foot.

snapshot

2008-02-06T00:34:00.000-05:00

The snow hovers between at the freezing point, slush soaking through my sneakers, my socks. I'm working forty hours a week, sleeping off the excess. We play video games and I bring Rudy pizza while he battles his way through Karazhan. I make tea in the mornings, I sleep through most mornings. We smoke cigarettes off his back porch and I try to memorize the stars. I've had my heart broken, he says, and I nod. I know, I say, I have too. He knows. He asks what her name was. I tell him yours and none of the story, keeping it locked away in my heart. I tell Rudy my secrets, the perverse sexual fantasies I kept hidden from everyone else. I tell him I want to go away and study. Come with me, I say. He nods. I feel I can trust you. I can start healing now.

What's wrong? he asks. It's the five year anniversary of my suicide attempt," I tell him. He nods. We say nothing more, he puts his head on my shoulder.

I love you. And that's what I really needed to hear.

it is quiet here

2008-02-05T03:38:00.001-05:00

pink moon's gonna get you

2008-02-05T00:32:00.000-05:00

We lay on the bed, Rudy puts his arms behind his head and stares up at my ceiling. I pick at the chipped varnish on my nails. I touch the expanse of his bare chest, our skin shades match, translucent and spare. His eyes seem so wide, so open and vulnerable.
"I sometimes forget that you are a seperate person from me," I tell him and he nods faintly. There is a gulf of things I cannot bring myself to say, to tell him how my heart expands when he touches me, how I would like to press my hand into his and to watch our skin melt together, to where there is no separation.

I hold things back, sitting on the edge of the bed, my bare back serpentine. Inside me, stories climb up the staircase esophagus and want to crawl out. Imps. I see him, those pale eyes behind walls, from beyond my own fortifications.
"I've had my heart broken," he says. I nod, I know. The clenching weight, the heaviness.

In my drawers are many secrets, packets of condoms, lingerie, ancient journals in illegible script, a postcard my mother sent me once - years ago. Bottles of sleeping pills, hoarded like insurance.

I love you. And this love is not the love for a prince, I love you more for your cracks, your battered self. In your cracks, my heart can seep in and smell your hair, your neck. I love you for being willing to trust me, to allow me in. A wildcat, a frightened, gentled animal. Sometimes I see a semblance of something to give. My short, square fingers, my faded hair, my bitten lips. I tell you stories, old ones, and you wait patiently and you don't push me - and with you I can be this important thing, entirely autonomous, able to bleed profusely and still love. I tear myself to shreds and I am somewhere else entirely.

I will never be able to pull your head into my chest to see.

beyond bone and skin

2008-02-04T02:01:00.001-05:00

pause and hear me breathe

i will swallow my tongue whole

2008-02-03T02:16:00.001-05:00

Lately, I find myself staring at skies and avoiding silence.

write upon me

2008-01-22T17:49:00.000-05:00

i open my mouth and only my teeth are there

2008-01-18T01:46:00.001-05:00

lake michigan

2008-01-18T00:46:00.001-05:00

Once we came to the shore
where the waves lapped and returned
like Persephone to her mother, never satisfied,
and the corpses of alewives ran
rank.

Mama stripped me down to my
lavender underwear and blue polo shirt,
and told me to run
along.

And James and I came to the edge
of the shoreline,
and it climbed up our toes,
and it climbed up our thighs,
and with aquatic fingers culled me from
gravity and into
nothing.

I lifted my
little foot and thought of
handing it off
like an offering.
A piece of refuse to throw
and to never
wash back up.

which will wither and wear away

2008-01-18T00:45:00.001-05:00

"'Can you understand,' asked my father, 'the deep meaning of that weakness, that passion for colored tissue, for papier-mache, for distemper, for oakum and sawdust? This is,' he continued with a pained smile, 'the proof of our love for matter as such, for its fluffiness or porosity, for its unique mystical consistency. Demiurge, that great master and artist, made matter invisible, made it disappear under the surface of life. We, on the contrary, love its creaking, its resistance, its clumsiness. We like to see behind each gesture, behind each move, its inertia, its heavy effort, its bearlike awkwardness.'"

- Bruno Schulz, from The Street of Crocodiles

the pebbles forgive me, the trees forgive me

2008-01-18T00:44:00.001-05:00

memento mori

2008-01-18T00:41:00.000-05:00

Where have we gone from here? I spend the week alone. My father and stepmother alighted for a ski trip in Montana and the house laid open as a book. I drift ghostlike from room to room, my mind bent on blackness and cold. Shall I dig a hole beneath? Shall I crawl within? Allow the worms and the spiders to penetrate my body, to enter in as a lover does. To sleep and be quiet, to come when called and be called no longer. I hesitate.

Rudy pauses, his hand on my cheek. Should I stay, he asks. I don't know the answer. I shouldn't be left alone. His pale eyes understand, the mark of controlled insanity to my own, the hallmark of the death wish.

My walls are higher than mountains.

My walls are mortared and strong.

impasse

2008-01-18T00:39:00.000-05:00

It is dark here
and my hands, my small hands are not enough
to pick it up and keep the night at
abeyance,
a grand, bodily
dyke.

The children are in awe at the
great black bat of night,
a giant's dark boot,
stomping in upon me
as a sea-wave.

To the depths, to the end,
calling me,
culled with siren voices
slow and enchanting,
come with us to nowhere, they say,
to nowhere and to not at all.

Once,
I sliced myself peeling
tomatoes,
and blood dripped in a long rivulet
from my veins to Mama's
butcherblock countertop,
like a slaughter,
my skin cleaved away from my body,
a flap,
to be removed
like a curtain, a bandage,
a girl's dress.

It ran like
Phlegethon,
uncrossable,
into the grinding dark
garbage disposal.

definitions

2008-01-05T05:23:00.000-05:00

In storybooks,
the kiss comes at the end,
with only blank pages and a back cover,
a happily ever after.

I love you, we say,
and I fidget after that,
playing with the car stereo and burrowing my
tiny hands into your pockets,
your pale, honest eyes,
as if I could explain.

I love you, I say,
but I cannot fill your veins with the same icy
desperation, the way I would like to
cleave to you,
to say yes, yes, and I want to mark you.

But know that if you say one day
that you would like to leave this car
and never return,
I will stop.
I will rebuild a wall and have
harder eyes,
a prize fighter's stance,
and will come back home

to my own violence.

this is the way the world ends

2008-01-04T00:49:00.001-05:00

not with a bang but a whimper.

teach me how to fight

2008-01-03T02:14:00.001-05:00

"What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable Will,
and study of revenge, immortal hate,
and courage to never submit or yield."
- Satan

John Milton, Paradise Lost

2007: a literary recap

2008-01-02T02:47:00.000-05:00

a collective of books read, with favorites marked in bold.

Jane Austen - Northanger Abbey
Dean Bakopaulos - Please Don't Come Back From the Moon
Georges Bataille - Story of the Eye
Joseph Brodsky - Watermark
Italo Calvino - If on winter's night a traveler
Albert Camus - The Plague
Stephen Chbosky - The Perks of Being A Wallflower
Agatha Christie - Curtain
Agatha Christie - Miss Marple: The Complete Short Stories
Agatha Christie - Dead Man's Folly
Agatha Christie - The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Agatha Christie - The Moving Finger
John Cleland - Fanny Hill: Or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
Joseph Conrad - Heart of Darkness
Patrick Dennis - Auntie Mame
Alexandre Dumas - The Count of Monte Cristo
Umberto Eco - The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
Umberto Eco - Foucault's Pendulum
Anne Fadiman - Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu - In A Glass Darkly
Jasper Fforde - The Eyre Affair
Germaine Greer - The Female Eunuch
Ursula K. Le Guin - A Wizard of Earthsea
Ursula K. Le Guin - The Tombs of Atuan
Hermann Hesse - Siddhartha
The Oxford History of Medieval Europe
John Kelly - The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death
The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain
Haruki Murakami - Norwegian Wood
Haruki Murakami - South of the Border, West of the Sun
Baroness Orczy - The Scarlet Pimpernel
Luigi Pirandello - Six Characters In Search of an Author
Sylvia Plath - Ariel: The Restored Edition
Katha Pollitt - Virginity or Death!
Tim Powers - The Anubis Gates
Richard Preston - The Hot Zone
Christopher Priest - The Prestige
Philip Pullman - His Dark Materials Trilogy
Marilynne Robinson - Housekeeping
Alex Robinson - Tricked
J.K. Rowling - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Anne Sexton - Transformations
Dai Sijie - Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
Lemony Snicket - The Grim Grotto
Lemony Snicket - The Slippery Slope
Lemony Snicket - The Penultimate Peril
Lemony Snicket - The End
Patrick Somerville - Trouble
William Styron - Darkness Visible
Sarah Vowell - Assassination Vacation
Kamy Wicoff - I Do But I Don't: Why The Way We Marry Matters
Gene Wolfe - Shadow and Claw: The First Book of the New Sun
Elizabeth Wurtzel - Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women
Banana Yoshimoto - Goodbye Tsugumi
Agatha Christie - Death In The Clouds

goodbye 2007, you were good to me.

siamese

2007-12-26T02:48:00.000-05:00

Once
there was a circus sideshow
two heads conjoined,
strange knobs of flesh growing out
where none should.
People stare.
We're shy.

Our fingers keep the thermostat high,
bundled like fists in our pockets,
and when the world is stabbed,
run through with an awl,
you and I foam from our joined mouths
simultaneously.

I can feel your heart beating through
my back.
I can feel.

At night,
after the laughter fades,
I wipe your face, you wipe my mouth,
and lay ourselves down in cocoons of
blankets,
touch
by touch
by touch.

The Everest Exploration Expedition

2007-12-25T02:49:00.000-05:00

Father came home once in the summer with mountain climbing gear. He spread it out on the wooden kitchen table like a museum exhibit - water bottles, lined jackets, rigging, highlighted maps.

"I am going to climb Mount Everest," he said, and I think I believed him.

Some nights I sneaked downstairs for a purloined snack, some midnight television, I would walk past his cracked bathroom door and peer into the sliver of light to see him standing there, proud as a puffer-fish, cap set jauntily upon his head, a conquerer waiting. He liked to buy maps of the region and spread them out after dinner, highlighting the nearby cities where supplies could be purchased and help rung up. I would throw the takeout boxes away so the sweet and sour sauce wouldn't stain Kathmandu.

My mother came to pick us up one evening, hustling us out the door with coats half-zipped and our heels still trying to worm into our boots. "Of course your father couldn't have you ready," she mutters under her breath, "when he has his mountain climbing to worry about."

Father threw away the maps later. We never talked about it again.

2007-12-07T02:55:00.001-05:00

tourniquet

2007-11-28T02:51:00.000-05:00

We curl up on a friend's couch, meet beforehand for a drink. He's got a tall winter ale, I'm waiting on a gin and tonic. We're wearing hooded sweatshirts and sneakers, self-conscious smiles. We play author trivia and he takes my hand, quietly, and under the table. God, you're beautiful, he whispers, as I rest my forehead against his. We play ironic independent bands and sing along to Air Supply. I mention something from the past and he waves it aside. Don't think about it. Don't think about the past. Don't think about the future. We live largely.

I had my hair cut today. Rudy runs his fingers through the new bangs, his fingertips resting on my newly concealed forehead. I like it, he whispers. I smile. He looks so funny when he smiles, as if he weren't sure precisely how to do it. I tell him I could fall in love with him someday and we both seem a little terrified. When will I meet your friends? he asks, and I tell him they're all gone, disappeared to other states. Migrants jumping trains to other states and other countries. Lady Jane in France, Kyle in New York City. Someday, maybe.

And then I understand that Postal Service lyric. We've got freckles in our eyes that match, kid.

And when we kiss, they're pretty closely aligned.

I'll leave that David Sedaris book in your box tomorrow, he promises, handing me back a copy of Bakopaulos' Please Don't Come Back From The Moon.

Did you like this? I ask, It reminded me of you.

I did.

sugar bowl

2007-11-13T02:53:00.000-05:00

Mama,
I climbed atop this counter
and into this cupboard
to get the sugar bowl down
for you.

I couldn't reach,
so I stole my brother's stool
and Father's family medical books
to make a great tower like
at Pisa or at Babel
and come to the sky where
fine white sugars and vanilla extracts
are hidden.

And you came to me so angry,
you could have hurt yourself
like a god, like a hurricane,
and pulled me down from my
funambulist's balancing act,
and, Mama -

I just wanted to make you smile.

and I, agnolo di tura, buried my wife and my five children with my own hands

2007-11-01T01:06:00.000-04:00

There was a moment, one month ago, where my life diverged in a yellow wood. Between clapboards and television shows and I saw us standing there, on a patterned linoleum floor, a sander in his hand and sweat dripping from his brow. I saw letters from retirement plans, financial security, a child tugging at my leg and begging for more juice. I saw myself never leaving. A signed and sealed death warrant.

And there, I saw you, you beautiful thing, with your hair cut short and that irritating smile playing about your lips - and I wondered where you'd left to. I missed you. Come back, you vital self, with anger and rage dripping from your every pore, where to create and to leave a mark on the world is a matter of life
and of death.

We've come about, full circle, learning bits there and here. I coalesce you within the woman I've become in the past five years since I've known you, since I so brutally ripped you and your vitriol from my body.

How does one fully heal from a suicide attempt? You don't, is the answer. Instead I walk through daily life, breathing in and breathing out, consistently conscious of being deliberately not quite. You're still locked away in there, but my saner, higher self retains control. I am calm, I am not integrated.

Five years.

And to R, I have to say nothing. He stands a little to the side, as battered and as much flotsam as I am, scarred by some internal war we can never hope to win - only to filibuster until the world ends. I never need to explain. He lends me Darkness Visible by William Styron and I find another eloquent explanation of the armistice in my skull. I don't ask where we stand with each other, it's not needed. Only to have some unfettered moment, without expectation, without need, of complete knowledge. Two kids in sweatshirts and sneakers looking up from quiet.

Sometimes I sit outside the church again, the devout atheist set at peace by some knowledge of institutions that came before me and still loom taller than my little car. Big hands that offer to catch you at any moment.

I tell people I'm fucking strong. I'm starting to believe it.

threadbare

2007-10-03T01:09:00.000-04:00

And I'm not a woman, I'm not a girl - just some fucked up kid with glasses, with shoes too big and pants too small. And Mama's not home and Father never talks and the moon looks too damn big. And I want to fight you, I want to fight everyone. God, I just want to connect my fist to something - metal or bone - as if that would be solid, suspect.

prescriptive

2007-09-13T01:11:00.000-04:00

We go out after work, D and I, badges in our hands and the hard glint of booksellers in our eyes, grasping for beers from twin sides of the moon. I roll the edge of the wooden bar between my fingers. The red nail polish is chipping. There is a similarity there in the stopgap between my skin ends and hers begins. Driftwood people. Flotsam and jetsam. I want to grab someone, to yell, here, touch me, just once and tell me it all ends well. Do the theater-goers sleep well at night?
There Mama is, sitting at the wooden table, idly stirring her white wine and killing fruit flies with her teeth. And there is James, pale and quiet in the corner with matchbox cars. I am thinking of buying a boat, my father says. Let's get married, Jack whispers, kissing the wet side of my neck, holding the whisper between his tongue and lips like a promise, some kind of redemption. Easy happy ending. I receive calls from the hospital, you really have to come this time,", Mama says, her stepfather delirious "he's really drunk himself to death this time." Could I bring a bottle of wine as condolences? My anger sweeps. Jack and I make dinner.
I feel as if something will catch fire.

proserpine speaks

2007-09-12T01:13:00.000-04:00

I always feel as if I belong to winter, their wide expanses of snowy fields, ice dripping from windshields and down drainpipes, as if it had poured straight from my spinal cord to the street. My pale face indistinguishable from the Snow Queen's retinue, little puffs of breath on the car's window, staring out at and craving summer as if it were a forbidden lover - a Capulet or Turkish Delight.

civil war

2007-09-12T01:12:00.000-04:00

When you came home, I carefully
did not look up.
You coughed, shuffled your keys around,
moving piles of laundry with a loud
hiss.
I did not look at you. Instead I made dinner,
an entire box of spaghetti, and put two plates
down, for you or an imaginary friend,
who was late.
You did not thank me, but poured two glasses of wine,
full to the brim and left one on the counter,
as if forgotten.
And when we slept, I turned down
your side of the bed,
and you brought a glass of water and set it
on the other side of the world, on my nightstand
unsipped.
And we slept in armistice,
neither consenting the battle,
each silently listening to the breathing
of the ghost at our side.

plea bargain

2007-09-01T01:13:00.000-04:00

He's gone. The house is low and empty, humming with electronic cords and furnaces. Autumn is coming, riding strident on cold evenings. I paint my fingernails, reorganize the kitchen cupboards. And I think, god I need to disappear somewhere, where are we coming to?

My twenty-first birthday is on Wednesday. He's made a point to be home. We'll tiptoe through the piles of laundry on the floor, the disheveled back room, our backs tense and straight, through casual lips asking why is nothing ever getting done? Perhaps it'll be your turn to lobby the question. I'll become stoic, silent, mention finding a different place to live.

Does it ever get easier? Perhaps, but not today, as trains hurtle down and their whistles cry, I do not think I am the person you thought I was. It's as if you imagined my wanderlust and cuckoo's cry to be only the product of youth, that my distaste for having children and settling down would dissipate when presented with your American Dream - you, a perfectly coiffed apartment, the promise of a brave new world. You could have everything. And nothing.

I feel so caged.

mercurial

2007-08-26T01:15:00.000-04:00

I believe you are holding me back from being everything I secretly am.

fiat lux

2007-07-20T01:16:00.000-04:00

I am a bibliophile at heart. Always have been, if we're speaking honestly. I generally keep my library closely monitored and carefully organized, first by subject matter and further by publication date. Upon first meeting, I fall in love with books, not only their printed word, but their spines and their binding, their sewn or glued pages, their smooth paper, their covers bright and somber. I love the smell of books, the feel, the way they nestle into the palm of my tiny hands. This is one of the reasons I work as a bookseller, because I am a lover tending.

Sometimes, I am bemused by my fellow readers. My mother, for example, who cracks spines and folds corners and underlines sentences. She tosses them into her purse, the edges to be banged and tattered by pens and checkbooks and lost keys. Grandfather, who writes his careful marginalia and flagrant quotations on the title pages. Who records the date of acquisition. And then there is myself, the quiet, careful curator of a mausoleum, who pauses to keep the spine intact, who keeps them clean and pale and pristine. A librarian by nature.

How do you avoid them? Their pages seeking, clamoring, screaming to tell you of the Emperor Alexius, or of how Tamerlane snaked out from his painted Muslim stronghold at Samarkand, how the carnifex was a man bringing the end to the sun.

And then, afterward, the world ends,
not with a bang
but a whimper.

start transmission

2007-06-26T01:18:00.000-04:00

There's this strange world, this moment of self-awareness that we seem to inhabit. Battered and bitter and damaged, a sense of something else, a sense of pride in simply being alive and being aware. Eyes picked shut by vultures and harpies, our dirty hands grasping for the sky. My dirty hands trying to steal the sun. I am ice cold sometimes - like salmon coming home together, but I am afraid the sentries will forget the passwords sometime - and we will walk past our lives of cities.

I try to pour myself into letters sometimes. I try to tell you everything, the pale, flax-haired child who watched clocks and stared out the window into blackness for the sign of her mother's headlights. And I was quiet and read all of my books and drew in the margins of my schoolwork, and I worried, god, I worried so much. The dishwasher could break, the hurricanes could come, killers lurked around every corner. And there was Alex, so redhaired, so little, so oblivious and there was no one home to cook, no one home to clean, no one home to put us to sleep - and I was so lonely, shivering and breaking with concern.

And then, one day, my parents came back. And I fell apart. And I was angry, and I was wild, and I hacked off all of my hair and dyed everything black. I took the craft scissors with the orange handles from my mother's sewing kit and tore at my clothing until it hung in tatters. We walked tough. Teresa adopted me and drove me home everyday after school, promising something beautiful, some kind of friendship that could give this urgent release. I slept on her couch and smoked pot while she took baths and plucked her eyebrows. Britt learned the chords to Petty songs on the guitar. Nothing gave. We threw parties there. I worried when the kids took the car to drive a block. They hit a mailbox. I didn't want to worry anymore - and said nothing. It wasn't enough. We drank all the alcohol and I sat and polished off the leftovers in the fifths. I didn't want to ever be sober again.
I was so angry. I exploded.

And then things were quiet. Spring came, it was yellow. Life was pastel and lonely. I rarely left my bedroom. We graduated quietly on a moderate day. One red balloon floated over the bleachers, I watched it for a long time.
I needed more time to heal, but then summer came and there was nothing.

you don't say

2007-06-26T00:54:00.000-04:00

abandon all hope

2007-06-20T00:53:00.000-04:00

onward apathetic soldier

2007-06-09T00:51:00.000-04:00

hide and seek

2007-06-08T01:20:00.000-04:00

Mama didn't look back at the house in Iowa,
but I did,
climbing up and twisting through the seatbelt,
for one goodbye.
Her brown, freckled hands tensed on the black wheel,
the sun setting into her eyes,
as if she wanted to restrain me,
as if I were looking somewhere on the front porch,
in the shadows or beyond the two-stall garage,
for my father.

We came through, buzzing our way through the
apartment building with the excitement of a
long-last slumber party,
all pizza pie and sleeping bags in huge, empty,
carpeted rooms,
decorated in cracked, cardboard boxes
labeled "Kitchen" and "Bathroom" and
"Closet",
as if to say,
he isn't here either.

dreamscape revisited

2007-05-23T01:20:00.000-04:00

Last night, while I slept, you and I crouched down behind concrete stairways. We were hiding away, desperately excited for something. You wore great, ominous sunglasses. I had on a red cheongsam dress. Our relatives danced in the distance around a great bonfire, performing wedding ceremonies between plastic lovers that looked exactly like us. We were going nowhere.

the white witch of the north

2007-05-22T00:51:00.000-04:00

get on the cart

2007-05-17T01:22:00.000-04:00

You’re stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?
Stranger in a Strange Land. It would fight back.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
Consistently. I have a strictly platonic crush on both Hercule Poirot (from Agatha Christie's series) and Wodehouse's Jeeves. Otherwise, my love of the likes of Professor Snape and Mr. Darcy are well-documented. I also, funnily enough, have a tendency to develop attachments to historical figures in my studies - namely Enguerrand de Coucy (A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century) and Llywelyn ab Iorwerth (Welsh king, 1173-1240).

The last book you bought is:
Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov and the His Dark Materials Omnibus by Philip Pullman.

The last book you read:
I just finished Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco and South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami last week.

What are you currently reading?
Concurrently:
The Tombs of Atuan - Ursula K. LeGuin
The Subtle Knife - Philip Pullman
Journey to the End of the Night - Louis-Ferdinand Celine
The Closing of the Western Mind - Charles Freeman

Five books you would take to a deserted island
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami
If on winter's night a traveler - Italo Calvino
Ulysses - James Joyce
Metamorphoses - Ovid
Collected Poems - T.S. Eliot

the last great stand

2007-05-08T01:22:00.000-04:00

You may not remember much,
about the world when we were young,
which seemed to go on forever,
about the black pits we dug with our ragged fingernails
and sweaty palms
that seemed to be bottomless and aching
for our small, eighty-pound bodies to
swallow;
You may not remember much,
the great pale steps that lead from the Lincoln Monument,
and how you stepped so close that
your shadow fell all over them and tumbled down
like a promise,
and I was terrified.
You may not remember much,
little brother, of how we armed ourselves with
foam guns and arrows, as if fortified for the last stand,
the last great revenge,
and how I knew that if the lines were breached,
if the defense should fail,
I would swallow the foam bullets whole,
to protect you.

for Romeo, who is my brother.

who am I?

2007-04-07T01:24:00.000-04:00

I love 24-hour supermarkets and fast food joints. It makes me feel less like the only person awake in the world.

we do not speak his name

2007-03-31T00:50:00.000-04:00

sideshow

2007-03-29T01:40:00.000-04:00

a very dangerous game

2007-03-29T00:48:00.000-04:00

disassociative

2007-03-28T01:25:00.000-04:00

I said no.

it was a long way down

2007-03-28T00:47:00.000-04:00

ethanol

2007-03-15T01:27:00.000-04:00

mix for a long winter's night

01. Arab Strap - Meanwhile, At the Bar, A Drunkard Muses
02. The Jesus and Mary Chain - These Days
03. Nine Inch Nails - The Perfect Drug
04. Siouxsie and the Banshees - Sick Child
05. Akira Yamaoka - Promise

a very wrong time indeed

2007-02-21T00:46:00.000-05:00

a most curious child

2007-02-19T00:45:00.000-05:00

asymptomatic

2007-02-17T01:50:00.000-05:00

The dishes are piled up like a
ceramic Mount Kilimanjaro
in the sink.
Forks and spoons and our last cereal bowl
encrusted with
dried oatmeal and
last night's delivery pizza
scrape the
stratosphere.

I overslept,
an alarm clock betrayal,
pulled a sweatshirt on, a pair of jeans
over a naked body still lined with
yawns and blanket indentations,
gone commando.
I brushed my teeth in wide circles,
and through the foam
told the cat to hurry indoors,
in figure-eights past my leg,
and out of the freezing rain.

It's Thursday,
somewhere in the middle of February,
in the middle of icicles and drifts
of sunblocking grey snow.
I don't keep track.

Sometimes I think you and I
are colder in February,
our fingers blue and ice
to the touch, our hearts
hibernating,
pulses slowed,
with summer in our back pockets,
waiting.

minute poem

2007-02-17T01:28:00.000-05:00

I get so fucking angry,
balling my inflated fists up like sledgehammers,
my barbaric yawp choked in my throat,
livid and vicious and I could
tear buildings down with my
teeth -
and you call it cute, volatility packed in a
five-foot frame, pat me on the head and smother me
with impotence.

2007-02-16T01:52:00.000-05:00

manifesto

2007-02-03T01:28:00.000-05:00

Baby,
someday you and I are going to take off and
drive for miles and miles and -
until we see the edge of the world,
where the waves come up at us like
carnivorous walls;
we'll kick our feet up on the dashboard, my little knobbled ones and
your hairy toes, cracking open some Chinese takeout, yes,
from downtown,
dribbling with florescent red sweet and sour sauce,
crab rangoons, and eight great cartons of rice. Afterwards,
we'll steal a Pollack painting and make it our bed,
rolling about naked and bestial, and later,
we'll hang the big damn thing back up in the museum
and nobody
will notice any difference.
Maybe we'll talk about love then, or perhaps Shannon Woods,
who was shopping at the Walgreens on Fourth and Main,
her great big belly pouring over her jeans,
leafing through the perfumed magazines and throwing
the inserts on the floor,
I remember graduating with her,
before she'd gotten that monstrous rock on her finger,
something that left a gaping, glittering cavern when
the miners stole it away.
She's got a house, Spaghettios, a second kid on the way,
the perfect
American Dream.

But baby, what I can promise you is only that some night,
you and I can climb rooftops and drink
swill and I will quote you
the most tender and poignant Hallmark card
in the world.

the ride of the valkyrie

2007-01-24T01:30:00.000-05:00

I'm reading a couple of items currently. Aside from the various selections for class from Wordsworth's impressive oeuvre, I'm also recently engrossed in Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch. Nothing in here is a foreign concept to me, nothing is shocking or repulsive, but the reconnection with thinking about a woman's own vitality, own rights, and ability to fuck around - this is electrifying.

The ages between eighteen and twenty have been those of confusion and loss of self-identity for me. Prior to that, I knew I was the post-punk reject who had some kind of spark of genius parceled away deep inside. But at eighteen, I started dating men, mellowing out, growing my hair longer - and I could never reconcile the fact that I wanted to do these things with the simple idea that these were the commonly accepted things one did when in a heterosexual relationship. Was it something I wanted? Or was I pandering to the mores society had chosen for me?

Honestly, there's a few things I need to change. I'm comfortable sexually, the concept of using a male (or female, for that matter) for my own sexual pleasure is one I've never had a problem with. But I need to be more insistant on obtaining said pleasure. On bringing topics to the table that I'm interested in, like the Battle of Agincourt, or Robespierre's Reign of Terror, or my not-inconsiderable knowledge of world religions. I'm comfortable with my body, naked or clothed and being seen either way. I dislike wearing much jewelry and am too lazy to paint my nails - and I feel no concerted pressure to. Cunt is a favored word in my vernacular, bitch a lauded compliment.

My sexual history is something I've vaguely danced around in considering. I've been with women prior to my current heterosexual relationship and something about being considered a virgin when I first slept with a male vaguely bothers me on that front. It's as if it's discrediting what I'd experienced beforehand. I don't like this. I don't like being considered to have turned from the dark side to the light or have been 'converted'.

I'm a really goddamned strong person. There is nothing that will destroy me, nothing that I won't survive after several fifths of vodka and pack of cigarettes. Sometimes I forget that. Sometimes, it gets lost.

the red ribbon

2007-01-12T00:44:00.000-05:00

wanderlust

2007-01-09T01:32:00.000-05:00

The memory comes later.

It's the space between midnight and three a.m. that the memory creeps in, along cracks and potholes, stretched by winter's ice. June is curled up asleep on the destroyed brown couch, crumbs all dribbled down the cracks. Cats licking themselves clean in the window and obscuring the streetlights. Sometimes, I can hear her father snoring in the next room. A deep, gravelly snore, one that takes the grit right off of the driveway. I'm awake, thinking about taking the car and driving off. I need to drive. Need to stretch the rubber legs somewhere off into the distance, the great big horizon reaching over and enveloping me. As if the escape to the distance would mean the end of the race and would lift me high up and disappear into ever-satiated safety.
I stay put.
Sometimes it's home. I can hear Mama's quiet intake of breath. A steady stream of televised babble runs. I like the noise. There are three cigarettes hidden in the top drawer of my bedside table, one's slightly bent from when I'd brought it out during last night's drive home and thought better of it. I had to save them. Wanderlust runs high. That sense of near-explosion as one stays still, desperate to reach out in a thousand directions and once and scream -

I stay still.

in the company of monsters

2006-12-31T00:43:00.000-05:00

let me down

2006-11-29T00:40:00.000-05:00

malaise

2006-11-11T01:33:00.000-05:00

I hate that you and I are a matter of public discourse.
I have the most intense urge to do something to mark myself physically as a warrior. To cut my hair off or emblazon a Viking symbol upon my back.
I want Neruda's honesty.
I would trade my blood for eloquence.

the world is quiet here

2006-10-11T01:34:00.000-04:00

From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.

- The Garden of Proserpine, Algernon Charles Swinburne

dreamscape

2006-08-25T01:36:00.000-04:00

It's past midnight. You and I are asleep entwined on the basement couch. I'm half-awake and slowly come to realize the room is crawling with tropically-colored spiders. Webs cover everything but us. A machete is suspended by webs above us like the Sword of Damocles. I knock its suspension slightly to lessen the blade's threat some. A spider is coming down a single strand directly for your sleeping face. I can't wake you. I can't wake you. You shuffle awake, brush some of the webs aside. I can't get you to care about the encroaching spiders.

memorandum

2006-08-23T17:16:00.000-04:00

I'd rather be anything but a supporting character.

stout

2006-08-13T02:12:00.000-04:00

"The Burgundian chronicler Philippe de Commines thought the English a choleric, earthy, and volatile people, who nevertheless made good, brave soldiers. In fact he regarded their warlike inclinations as one of the chief causes of the Wars of the Roses. If they could not fight the French, he believed, they fought each other."
"The Wars of the Roses" - Alison Weir

robotomy

2006-08-13T01:36:00.000-04:00

In the future we will all have robot servants and our hands will shrivel up from disuse.

theme for summer (add gin and tonic)

2006-07-17T01:37:00.000-04:00

Hot Butter - Popcorn
Shogun Kunitoki - Montezuma
Louis Prima - That Old Black Magic
Belle and Sebastian - A Summer Wasting

little red riding hood

2006-05-02T00:39:00.000-04:00

snow white triptych

2006-04-22T00:38:00.000-04:00

monstre

2006-04-20T01:42:00.000-04:00

pygmalion and galatea

2006-04-20T00:37:00.000-04:00

the torturer

2006-04-20T00:35:00.000-04:00

the moon lady

2006-04-18T00:33:00.000-04:00

ineffectual

2006-04-12T17:17:00.000-04:00

Fact:

I would like nothing better than to hang about curiously talented and sarcastic individuals, trash-talk current literary events, and call ourselves the Algonquin Round Table Revisited.

insides

2006-04-05T00:32:00.000-04:00

idealist

2006-04-03T00:31:00.000-04:00

the only immortality

2006-03-31T00:30:00.000-05:00

interstice

2006-03-27T01:41:00.000-05:00

After the divorce,
my father took the living room couch
and left a gap, a blank empty spot in the white room
with the bay window,
like a missing puzzle piece.
I would sit Indian-style in that spot,
would run my fingers over the indentations on the carpet
where the heavy legs had once
stood.
He took a small apartment on the other side
of town - it had white walls,
a soft, beige carpet.
We came every other weekend,
he threw open the door with a sheepish grin
and a steaming pizza, the scent of garlic and
tomato permeating the
white, calm walls.
We slept in one bed, like it was
a slumber party,
my things in bags, my toys lined up
on a shelf in the hall closet.
He didn't give us a bedtime then,
as if staying up until dawn playing Mortal Kombat
was recompense for
the gap on the floor where a dining room table
should have been -
for the two homes I shuffled between,
each missing pieces,
like a thousand-piece puzzle torn
apart.

watchman

2006-03-26T00:29:00.000-05:00