barycenter

I dream of your thirst for flushed cheeks
and ragged breathing. I whisper these summons
into my own tangled hair, silver locks strung with keys,
as if in the words I struggle to keep
from their quicksilver tumble from my lips,
in the way I keep my mouth from seeking

a descent, where damned river sinks into this jaded sand,
a song I sing to the tune of October and November and on and on,
as if black apples eaten under cypress trees
and those long-memoried lists of love were no dream;
as if at my demand he will always reach for me, once more

oh beloved, at least once more.

I play at accompaniment, draw him close
to drive him--augment it with roses and char,
with thyme and burning sugar--each song a pale-moon reflection
of how I require one hand at my throat in challenge,
how inexorable in his love,
how he raises my face to his own, so coolly

calculating my every shuddering gasp, how I live
and die for every maddening kiss. These draw us but
the truth is, cold is a game we both can weave so clean
until mouths meet skin, always sweet, a sigh and a smile,
sometimes sharp teeth and ruin,

pretense and authority. He knows this fire, too,
disguises white-hot and trembling in a pale scrim
playing at snow-sheets and shade-trees, my sunrise.
Silk-glass spun, splinters left in my skin and so-sure hand
on me shaking all imperceptible
to any but the pulse I've swallowed, shuddering,

he knows every cataract, cascade, and riptide

running through my veins will be an undoing,
and still it comes singing, still I come singing,
still it comes in fog and rhyme and unmarked depths
to catch us, even aware, bright paper lanterns all alight,
a burning in renunciation of those ashes we already knew. 

Thesmophoria

It is not right that I cannot pull the ghosts
and wreckage of all that pain out of your hand,
clenched half-closed around a cigarette,
while your lips firm with the idea that I will turn my back.

I cannot say: here is my heart, full of teeth
and bent nails, bound to destroy, bound to reform--
I cannot speak without the rust of tears betraying me.

Give me your hand and let me draw out the cobwebs,
put your palm over my chest full of forge-coals and discarded ore,
touch me and be assured that I know of sorrow,
know of its threads that come loose and tangle,
knot around the tongue.

I cannot say: the stars in their bloody orbits know
that I am unable to walk away from your wounds
with healing held behind my sharp teeth,
ever needing to press my mouth to the cut,

to whisper black ink and snip loose threads,
prayers rising in smoke. I cannot tell you
I can hear your refusal to acknowledge that pain.

You grit your teeth and go on, you turn
your face aside from the only words I have to give.
We are not twins, but mirrored. I do not fear any end
but uselessness.

Labyrinth

Sometimes, you sit on the floor of the shower and breathe steam until you can cry. Sometimes you breathe steam so you can go back to breathing air. Sometimes, you chew your nails to rags and avoid looking at the razor hanging on the wall.

You can sleep for twenty hours a day. You can sleep for twenty minutes. You can feel the panic-rat scuttling around the corners of your mind, digging in with its surprisingly adorable claws until the chest pains begin.

You go for days, weeks, months at a time, in recovery, feeling strong and capable and positive about where you are headed in life; feeling the old power rising in you whenever you say no. Whenever you say yes. Whenever you say what you really want instead of temporizing, hedging because you are worried about what the inquiring person will think.

And it's okay, when you make it through these days, even if you wake up the next unable to breathe or think or see, even if you did it to yourself, trying to re-educate your brain on the subject of abuse. It's going to be okay. Some days, it is not okay. And that is fine, too.

But in every minute and every breath, there is the possibility of fear rising in you. Irrational and rough and blood-warm, or acid, or colder than you've ever felt before. At any given moment, you are vulnerable to surprise, to the wrong word, to a stray thought or idea. You fear being brittle, or too inflexible, too pliable. Too broken.

You are not broken. You are going to be okay. Even on the days you are overwhelmed by all this feeling? We get through. One breath at a time. One step. One word.

Every part of you is a victory. You have breathed steam and air, you have given tears and thought and time. You have eaten, you have hydrated and rested. You have not cut. You maybe cut only a little. You thought very seriously about hurting yourself and decided against it? You win. It is okay to make mistakes, and you will. Because progress is not a straight line, or a race, or a contest.

Every time you think, "It could have been me," you can also remember: You are still here. You are important. You are alive and you matter and you will, eventually, leave all this behind for whatever you want of normality.

Leaving things behind is not bad, or heartless, or cruel. It can be necessary to breathe steam instead of smoke, more oxygen than nitrogen. Leaving things behind can be a necessity. You can still remember with love, but you do not have to carry them with you.

I am not a role model, I am only stubborn. I sit on the floor of the shower and cry, and I have to remember to breathe, and I think, "it could have been me."

But it wasn't. And I do not think I will ever allow it to be.

Level 32 Ranger

This might be the weirdest birthday I've ever had. There are things that have happened over the years that, written down, seem like the fiction I work so hard to create. But this is the year that things are truly strange. There is not much that I can say about it, here. There are too many words unsaid.

I have left abusive relationships, I have clawed my way back to the surface. I have looked into a night sky that seemed endless and unforgiving, searching for a single star.

I have written and I have not written, I have left too many things unfinished. I have lost companions and lovers and friends and a home. I have left a place that never suited me and retreated to take asylum in a place where it rains, even storms, and where fireflies hang in the dim summer nights.

I am feeling my way back into my own skin. The damage is legendary. But I can still tread water.

I do not know where I am going, or how I will manage to move on.  I do not know, anymore, what I want from life, other than to put one word in front of another, one foot in front of the other, and go on. I want to write down the books in my head, not because I feel that the stories should be free of me, but because I want there to be more to life than dead pages cluttering up my brain.

When you come here to see an empty page, celebrate for me. Because when I have written every word down in ink like blood, when I have emptied both barrels at the page, hit my target, and moved on? I will be free.

I want to persist like Octavia. I want to breathe again.

I want to live.

besotted

5/21/15:
I dream of a soft blanket wrapped around me, the snow falling on your city lighter than breath. I'm writing at a window, my window, wherever that will be, with my legs curled under me and my headphones on. There's hot chocolate on the stove (there's liqueur to mix in it) and the window is cracked just enough to feel the ice in the air, just enough for the smoke from my cigarette to slip out in spiraling clouds to join the blue light of dawn.

I dream of walking to work in the winter, of coffee shops encased in ice and the steam that unfurls from the cup in ghostly flags. It is the silence of a movie's opening credits and who knows, yet, where this story will go? It is the thrill of uncertainty that keeps me balanced, standing tall. Seated, wrapped in dreams and blankets, sweater swallowing me whole and my teacup balanced on my knee. A breath of foreshadowed winter that can touch me, even here.

5/27/15:
I do not find it hard to imagine what other people want from me. I behave in a certain way in certain situations. I do not slip, in general. In specific, where you find me, it is different. I am on terra firma only when I know what is expected of me. At any other moment I might slip into the diction and hauteur of someone else's expectations, and disappoint.

I can argue, I can demand. I can sit demurely on the floor, knees canted to the side and skirt tucked around my thighs while I smoke a cigarette in the sunset. I can laugh and flirt and do many things without thinking about them, but I cannot, somehow, intuit what you want. There is some kind of block in play.

Do not give me leave to decide for myself what you want. Do not leave me without an operating manual for our conversations unless you want to see me gasp like a sea-creature hauled upward. Choking, inelegant, on the sudden lack of pressure. I will write these thoughts (maybe), but put on the spot I can no longer speak. Will I ever be able to say what I mean? I cannot ask you, not out loud. I could ask you with my fingers, trailing along your sides. I could ask with my eyes, silently fixed on yours. Tactile, assertive, never yielding, never mute. Except somehow, now, I am.

Perhaps I am caught in the web of your expectations no less than anyone else's. Perhaps I will find a voice in the spaces that exist without thought. It hasn't happened yet.

--
to be continued.

ohana

no nine-tailed fox, not now. only washi dissolving in ink and tears and rain. your lips are gone and the light that rang in your eyes like the nine thousand names of god has dashed against the rocks and shattered into nine times nine thousand indifferent fireflies.

that name was a silver bullet on a full-moon night, piercing cold, meant to wound until I folded out of your way like the paper crane, I whispered, I warned you, that simple fold that may be my true form. I cannot bar you from harm when I have no more stars to light my way. I used to know where I was going from here.

you are not who you were. I cannot be who I am. I will remember who I was, someday, and I will braid my hair into a coat. a chain. a noose, a sail. I will no longer look into the night sky, hoping for a way home. I have learned the futility of loss, the frailty to mourn, but I never regret. just give me time to stitch this up and regain my balance, to stop bleeding out on someone else's floor.

Sepsis

Where is the worry? Is it in the second-day stubble of my shaved legs? Or is it in the swell of my breath, pooled in my lungs like the tide and pushed out with a sob? The things I never noticed until your absence from my body? I do not know. Today is grey, the kind of grey I love. It is about to rain.

I have slept too long, wrapped in blankets and piled with cats, purring somnolent on my chest and hip. They reach out to each other in their sleep the way I imagine reaching out to you.

I will not dress today. I will write or I will smoke on the porch in a nightgown. I will drink cafe au lait with almond extract, and I will eat dreams.

The cats do not miss me. They have curled down in the warm puddle of blanket I have left and they are sleeping again.

I cannot focus on any one thing, your hair swept to the side and ending in a wave, my beloved ocean in shades of wheat and gold. Your eyes, blue and green, cobalt universes. Your lips and wry smile, the defense against any endearments I might muster in an array of hope, pleading.

I tell you I love you and I cannot see if it sinks in to the hilt. If it touches you at all. At all.

I light candles against the day. I wake at night and breathe the damp darkness I have been dreaming. I hear music, I want to sing, but the words are no longer there. Salt on my tongue washed away with too-sweet coffee and heavy smoke. I cannot see myself without you, and I try.

I live. I breathe. I exist. But your context is missing, your definition and style. I can touch and be touched and I will enjoy it, I will arch against another, and another, and however many others, and whisper in other languages the words they need to hear. The words I need to say. What meaning does it have, when I am not beside you?

Here is a game I have been playing: Who is the secret center of this dance? I reach out and manipulate because it pleases me to do so, in the moment. Because it fills my emptiness. Because I cannot touch you, because I cannot see my love sink into you, to the hilt. I wish I could be ashamed of my cruelty. I have nothing left, not even a conscience. You have all the best parts of me, still.

All that is left to me is sin.

gilt-edged

the key grinds in the lock, the tumblers turn

and I am mute with need, my shaking hands filled with 

cast-off shards of iron and agate, glass sticking into skin,

blood welling from the edges and you sink deep. somewhere,

I left my resistance out to dry.

I will pull my ribcage apart and let you eat, replace my red-running

muscle with silver wires, that wretched heart with a canary

stained with iodine, leave me packed stiff with gauze 

and settling in for the winter, racked with longing

and marveling at the chill.

it's supposed to be spring and still I run through gasping cold,

ash-brown trunks blushing green, maple buds burning 

against the sky like the embers of every lonely cigarette

that has flared between my lips at night. at dawn. at civil twilight.

you have coiled between my thighs to hold the ashtray and 

even wordless, my hollows and edges limned electric,

there is no difference between the summoning

and the invitation.

drive

I have sand in my teeth
salt on my skin
and I will not dive into fresh waters,

I will not drop these stones

waist-deep in other oceans.
I will still go on
seaweed-crowned

into every night.

a pact

Jotun, jotun, brush my hair, and I will be your Thursi.
Call me night and call me cold and I will warm for you.
Cry out in my arms and I will be your Yagayevna,
witch-daughter and eater of flesh,

praise me and I will sing. Unholy hymns rising in the
air like wisps of fog, surrounding you,
binding your arms, knotted tension and anticipation.
Peel back my skin with tempered wit.

I will take your hand and place it on my throat,
hold a hallowed knife against your spine, press these
words into your mouth by moon-dark and while you
choke on them, I still will sing,

pull you into the tide. I will drink
deep of your lust, your longing, and your adoring
gaze. See me as I am.
Braid my hair into fetters, chain yourself to my broken heart.

Frost-eater, fell and fair, wrap my braids around
your wrists and hold tightly. Call my name
in the night, gasping for breath under my wave,
until we drown together and rise again with the tide.

Brush my hair, long strokes from my crown to my waist
and I will sing for you until you can weep no more.

Drought

I adore the rusty colors of the tree outside my window. It's true. Autumn reminds me of you, even though I see you in other seasons. I think of you often in October, when it's warm and the sky is still screaming blue, with no hint of the rain we so desperately need. I'm waiting for autumn the way I once waited for you. I take a pill and curl up at night instead of waiting with my breath held to see you walk by.

Rust is the word, and the world, forever and ever, amen. It shows me that nothing is forever, that the very air can eat holes and pits in the strongest of creations. Air and sky and waves are trying to dash you out of my memories, but you remain, stubborn and silent.

The greenest trees are outmatched by this drought, by people who still are watering their lawns in the morning and in the evening, disregarding the freshwater clams who died in dry creeks, the frogs that no longer sing in the night behind my open windows.

I have rescued plants from discount sales, I have saved fish from drowning and from dinner. But I have not spoken to you in so long, not with honesty and the love you deserve, even now.

When you died, the cliche struck me as obscene. You are a hole I cannot fill, and I am a puzzle of only edges. If you had left me for someone, at least I could hate you. I am familiar with hate, intimate and rough and salted with ash. I am less familiar with these empty spaces that taste like blood and regret.

The things we learn as we grow older are not as important as I expected, and the things that I learned when I was young, from fairy tales and stories, are the ones that have never changed.

Landscape

I don't like cities
concrete fountains and spurs
instead of trees
instead of the horizon
or the shore.

I wonder if we all begin
by drawing ourselves against
a white background. No sketch
of my face has context,
in no painting I have made

with my hands
does a background exist. Not
even arabesques,
not a grid or a line, although
sometimes a shadow
makes its way below.

I want to be seen in candlelight
or on the sand. A view
of the porch, where fireflies gather
in the green; or the mist reaches
subtle hands to touch your face.

I am beginning to refute the blank--
I am tenacious, can hold on for ages and empires,
but I can also let go.

Inverted Jenny

It is no good now, to relegate me to your desk, its rolling top accordioned down over aching limbs. You have crumpled me into a bundle of letters, long faded and tied with dusty ribbons.

In the old days, it was a brush, a teardrop tuft of some soft fur. You painted intricate characters on my skin and the ink slipped sweetly between us.

At dawn, I watched you scrub the tint from your hands and wished for an end to all mornings.

When you grew weary of darkness, the sharp nib of your fountain pen scratched indigo myth into my back, and red-ballpoint corrections flowed down each side. Once, you left a discourse in green marker, your declaration of independence stamped boldly at my waist. I thought that one true. It was the quickest to smudge, though your verdant prints lasted for days.  

Those nights of calligraphy stained me. Cuneiform shadows rise from my surfaces still, copper-brown or the cerulean of tranquil seas; but each dawn you returned to someone else's senses, ink trimmed carefully from your skin.

I am as patient as parchment, out of place, but I remember. However you inscribe me, emboss me, engrave me--by morning, the end of dreams is written plain.

--
For the Scriptic prompt exchange this week, Michael gave me this prompt: "'Think of writing as writing a letter to someone.' -Kurt Vonnegut. Write about mail, or post offices, or postal workers, or writing and receiving letters."
I prompted lisa with: "Pressing business, tonight at the brocade factory."

Après moi

The strawberries are red lips, glistening in the bite marks, freshly glossed and plump. She catches herself staring at the half-eaten one dangling from her shaking hand and sets it cautiously in the saucer. Her teacup is just to the side, sitting in a ring of milky runoff, the pale tan soaking into her grandmother's lace tablecloth. Scattered strawberry leaves, still attached to garish red chunks, discarded like a tiny pile of skulls on some barbaric grassland.

She would pour herself another cup of tea, but the pot is cold, and the cream jug is in shards next to the antiqued baseboard beneath meticulously restored sash windows. Instead, she wipes her berry-stained fingers on the ruined tablecloth and rises, bare feet whispering over bare boards. She steps out of the sunroom, onto the neat grey carpet of the parlor, and when her footfalls grow silent, she might as well be gone.

The note under the sugar bowl remains, edges ragged with haste, a mute affirmation of months of suspicion. The blue ink scrawl, square and cruel, rattles latches in the darkest hour of the night.

In the carefully-appointed guest bathroom, she puts her small fist into the mirror they bought in New Orleans, silver-backed shards sticking in her knuckles, blood falling into the sink. Just droplets, at first, and then the deluge.

Trust is not porcelain, shattered once but potentially reparable. Trust is a dam that holds back everything we would rather forget.

--
For the IndieInk Writing Challenge this week, Leo challenged me with "I trust you to break my trust in you." and I challenged femmefauxpas with "Please write a flash fiction story (600-1500 words) opening with a character stating, 'That's not enough,' into the phone and hanging up. There should be at least 580-1480 words after that opening. In addition, please ensure there is a clear ending to your piece. No 'to be continued,' no vignettes, no continuing characters."

smokescreen

it's a goddamned miracle,
your face in the morning,
rising into an evening of shredded song.

if I dare touch a fountain pen, dark words
fly out, iridescent black feathers
drifting down to lodge in my hair

where last night's sunset is still sleeping.
you remember a mirror image, I know.
you see silver-sharp and frail

when I am bone and ink and ember.
I am all of these, steel and amber,
shimmering oil on restless water, pushing impatient

at the struck match burning so slowly
toward your long fingers. I can let
the past reel out behind us like copper wire. I will not forget,

but I can still breathe you in,
old words tattooed in crimson
stitched into my skin.


Written for Marian's musical prompt at the Imaginary Garden with Real Toads.

avarice

I want a snowdrift
in which to keep you, falling
at my feet, abject--

or just you, writing
ghost stories at the window
in winter.  The cold

can't win out over
the warmth of words, slipping through
interlaced fingers

under a blanket
of snow in muted colors,
this endless feeling.

parfumerie

Stifle the nutmeg and bring out rich leather, weave in notes of dying hay and cold stars.

It is still too warm here to hope to catch autumn's scent, the bitter chill and crackling sounds.  It is the end of summer of all our end of days, here, so far away from dim nights lit by poison-green firefly flashes and a single kiss in the darkest corner of the porch.

Every overheated day I weave another daisy chain of dull words, despite the heaviness, the dreary humidity.  I want book-weather, knitting-weather, bright-orange and musk-weather.  Pumpkin pie and ginger cookies, ground whole green tea leaves untouched by snowy sugars. I want the mossy drip and drizzle of what passes for winter, here on the wrong side of the world.  I want the rubber scent of rain boots, the taste of forgetting, the joy of scattering crystal drops from copper curls.

I want New Orleans in October, but I will settle for graveyard dust and marigold petals, cigarette smoke and thick rum that is as old as I am, black lace stockings and a fistful of candy corn.