One More Mile

Eyes follow lines that laced wings beat
Into the wind, making changes
Across scenes hiked by your two feet
That couldn’t even manage
To dance nightly with my mother

When these arches can’t stretch
For one more mile of rock
This wanderer’s pack rests harshly
Complaining of burdens and memories
On knees I once bounced on

I know the name “father” makes stark contrast
With the yellow cups the laced wings drink from
(It’s the color of mom’s old house dress)
But those arches couldn’t stretch
For one more mile of rock

My ears feel with green needles
From there across the gap
My face blends into cold mountain sides
My feet stretch out into damp grasses
And my body blends
Into one more mile of rock

Heat

The rhyme forms no verse of which to speak 

My astonishment is no less for that

That you can make words from my fingers sing

More than my falsetto scolding rings

When I catch you, again, in heat 

Galveston

I am surprised when I surface
Gulps of salted air
Rasp in my mouth
Grained tongues coasting
On waves of bitter water

I am surprised when you surface
Your face crests over
Peaks of foamed ocean
And smiles despite currents
Dragging you to sea

Communication

My
Voice, it
Vaults! Lurching starts
A trembling arc, higher
Until it leaps into blank sonic
Spires, streaking wire notes behind me.

Then
It comes
Sneaking down, slinking
Back into linear disorder,
Where my music now has
Borders, dismissing the tune I’ve been
Hissing, dear disarray, I’m now missing

You.

Today

There’s a swell in me. So often do things relate to water, I think there must be a connection in my sign to surf, but I am a only a Ram. Rams do nothing but drink and dispel, sucking up lifeforce like marrow. I’ve seen no other writing like mine, I fucking suck and my fly’s down.

I think of things passed before us, the things we don’t speak out against. How sorrowful is the melt into passing time. Children hurt and neighbors die, isn’t that the way of it? I read my husband a poem once; he cried and held my hand in a sunset. I haven’t seen him since. The endings of some movies are true.

I just ramble and I just type and the words amount to nothing, they see no one or they see ghosts of faces pressed into screens and I think hooray, I am honest. Because no one sees me, I am alive and I drink freely, brooding silently over the welfare of my sister’s children. My son is nine today.

Sick, and feted and wasted are the roots that rot untended in my garden. I should check them now, but there are rules, aren’t there? We shouldn’t garden at night, we should mind our own fucking business, and now isn’t she ranting and losing it and doesn’t she weigh less? I am beautiful in my new dress, although I am losing my demographic. I’m mad and I’m a parody.

I should scream. I should open my mouth and scream. I should break glasses and dishes and stomp into them until someone takes notice. Who will notice? A screen, behind a screen, we’re immune. And then, then we fall into clotted lives that suck us into ourselves until we don’t see into the eyes of others. The contact, ugh, to look into sun spotted eyes, I shudder. I let him take a part of me.

How does love fit into a box — are we dying in our fucking boxes and sweating into nothing?

I bleed into flowers and land that doesn’t belong to me. It blooms deeply and thrusts blossoms at me; I vomit into flowerbeds and they produce beautiful, unspeakable things that no films capture. They make me weep in violet and I count out rhythms in 4/4 time to make them rigid. The crooks in their stalks disgust me and I sleep again and I work again and I mother again.

Captured into a burgeoning life and mind and smell that contains everything I’ve done wrong today. I smoked and I drank and I lied and I failed, every small failing of the day told and done. I sweat and groan ecstasy into today. There is another morning tomorrow.

Capturing Angeline

She always barged in, half-dressed and drunk, flinging herself on my couch and my mercy. I say that with my tongue in my cheek to indicate there is no mercy here… she’s incapable of accepting mercy. She is, however, capable of looking like a heaven-raped starlet, flung over my beige flowered couch like a housewife finished with her chores. Her lips bloomed brightly in the worn pattern of the sofa, and the petals of her mouth seemed to make the fabric more limp than before. I looked busy with the curtains instead of the upholstery of her skirt, rough like the tongue of a cat.

“Let’s play cards,” she demanded, reaching under the couch to retrieve the deck kept there for her predictability.
“Not tonight, Angeline.” My heart is already thudding under my thrift-store shirt. I’ve worn holes in the armpits, but she says she doesn’t notice.

I start here not because it is our beginning, but because it is the eventuality of our lives together. I know a story ought to start with the beginning of things, the creation of a character leading with his occupation and his life’s work. But instead I feel it only serves the purpose of this diatribe to being in the middle, in the wear. I’m broken in and there are holes in my shirt.

This isn’t to say I didn’t still feel the bite of newness between her stinging visits, but to say that it is a half-life, a life spent waiting for her to fall into my doorstep again. I wish furtively that she will be swallowed into the relics of my flat’s sagging belly. I want the florid landscape to become a portrait of a her, as unreachable as the surrealist wreaths of fragrance on that sofa. But she only trails vapor, whiffs of a torture.

At intervals in her absence  I huff the scent she’s left in my bed and my shower, wandering her trail’s lost luster. I think about her hair and the strokes it makes in the soap of her back. She’s washing her hair before leaving me, depositing my scent in the drain with those amber strands. I don’t clean my drain anymore. I can’t bring myself to yank out the clots of her, spray disinfectant on those strings which, with any luck, contain my particles and hers pressed together.

I see her again and again, her hair a dark cloud under the glass surface of a porcelain lake. I started for a moment, just after her eyes burst with red clouds. Angeline’s eyes are now exactly like her lips, red reminders of a drab furnishing.

And so there is where we begin, in the middle.

******

She smelt like smoke and drink when she leaned into me to make herself heard in my ear. The brush of her was exquisite.

And there it was, in the beginning. We were in the beginning of things and the feeling of love wracked me into her. I lusted in my heart and my mind and my tongue was swollen.

And now, a million miles later, outside her window,  it didn’t matter that she blushed and closed her eyes for long blinks. It mattered that she arched into him in increments which felt tailored to me in the night. It mattered that her hands found his hair and there it was, the thudding of blood and burned promises.

I dropped my keys into the gutter. I stubbed a toe on the subway steps and I sat next to a talkative woman on the train.

The woman looked momentarily hesitant to extend me the courtesy of her conversation, but after a pause she launched into the reason why she moved to the city. The city, the city. She’d come to the city, so her story went, to make something of herself. At 40, her brown eyes held a trace of what she once was, ambitions she’d misplaced along with her children’s socks at the laundry. She’d wanted to be a star. I didn’t want to know her name.

Names make life more complicated than it ought to be. The convention of naming ascribes value to items which really deserve no nomenclature. Who cares that a tub is a tub, and that somewhere in the world it’s not even a tub. It’s some equally made up word with etymology traced back to the time and point in which someone discovered vocal chords and had the bright idea to trace words into them. An entire race muttering grunts incognito as society.

I ended the train ride with a nod to Crystal (of course she’s named Crystal), and started back down the streets to my empty flat.

*****

“Eat it! Eat it!” my best friend screamed in delight when I put a snail to my mouth and, with my eyes closed and a big gulp of air, sucked in the mucus and muck of a gastropod. 

It wasn’t the anticipation of the taste and the texture, as with some things, that was worse than the reality of an act. The act itself was unforgiving grotesque. We had been, as it happened, studying the French Revolution in school , which led to the eventual suggestion of sampling what French cuisine had to offer. Of course upon maturity I realized my folly, that French cuisine can’t be boiled down to the raw ingredients of the making of one dish. But with the naivety of child, and with a child’s imagination, a snail plucked from my mother’s garden was a French platter as good as any.

Through my repulsion, through heaves of my stomach, my lips formed a seal around the opening of the snail’s home and found suction. I felt a wet motion in my mouth, and the bitter bile bit into my taste buds and stomped signals to my brain. I made it perhaps two more seconds with the writhing garden creature in my mouth before I redeposited him into the dirt, unaware of the finality of the fate he was spared thanks to my repulsion.

Do you understand now?

*****

The rain eventually stopped. I looked at myself and wondered where my flesh went. The face in the mirror looking back at me was a vague reminder to eat more.

The end of things. I settled into the sofa cushions and rubbed each palm slowly and intentionally over the barbs and balls of my least favorite reminder. I stroked the edge delicately, remembering the feeling of the fingers I brushed over her, wanting to savor her lines but also impatient, eager to press her into this pattern. I’d push into her deeply, with each retreat checking her edges to see if I’d had success or gained purchase in my dreams of art becoming art. She crept no closer to becoming the inanimate portrait I so desired. I’ve made do with the loneliness of longing for such companionship.

Wandering Bahlatha

Long in tooth it happened then,
I found my gloved hand stroking her
She looked long at my aching knees
And saw me riding side saddle there

Her coat lay in want of grooming
And never wavering, her ghastly gait
Trotted in my imagination and my want,
To be a horse, myself untied

My thirst for adventure took me there
Into the swamp of June’s damp heat
Where I lay in a mattress of wet bugs
And wanted to be near to her gallop

I met her on the road from the town
Wandering Bahlatha, her bleeding gums
She was unpinned and was not tame
To her master there was no answer

We spoke to each other through apples
And I thought her too keen to hold
To sly to trade food for ownership
Even to the likes of my chained spirit

Yet I mounted her unfettered neck  that day
We rode together into muck of June
Be it filled with stars and wanting things
We passed for gods flying over them

Missing: Tongue, Condition Unknown

Dear Mother,

Have you seen my tongue? I’ve lost it somewhere along the way and through the shuffle. Perhaps it slid through this hole in my jaw? How it managed, I don’t know. It’s slippery, that tongue.

I’ve looked everywhere for it. I even asked my lover, “Have you seen my tongue?” He replied, “No, not for ten months since,” and now aren’t I a neglectful daughter? He’s not concerned, and says he’s sure it’ll show up. I patted his plump pockets one morning before he left for work. They felt empty to my hands… but one can never be too careful, right? While I’ve not ruled out theft, I’d put up “LOST” posters around town if I thought its return worthy of reward.

It’s not always been so worthless – there was once a time which my tongue was the ruin of men greater than those who’ve stalled it in the year past. It brought tsunamis with its tip and caused orphaned hurt to seep from the pores of foes, that tongue. Quite a thing to see was Tongue, when it set its sights on singing out demands for ransom. You remember Tongue, don’t you?

I’ll describe it as such – busting. Filled with vigor and venom, the pandemonium of Tongue struck just before fists and slaps. The burn of bruises faded long before the tough tissue of my name gouged into the walls of the minds of my opponent. Psychological warfare is bonafide strategy, don’t you know? I read that somewhere recently.

Somewhere along the line the gears of war ceased to grind. It’s silly really. I suspect my tongue signed a treaty, stupid little thing. I’d hoped for better, but I knew deep inside its lascivious roll would call fiends of greater talents to suck its marrow. I was somewhat prepared for rapture but still was unable to exert control when each pink bud was stroked to silence. Oh, it was Tongue’s turn to leak and water, just Western karma at its finest.

So, I suppose you could say I’m disappointed, indeed. While my looks still hold their camp (my eyes are quite fine, if I may have a moment of vanity, Mother), my weapon of choice was always that pink petal. My looks, so sharp, are obvious. I have developed quite the distaste of them, those looks so close to yours. But, oh, Tongue was a magnificent secret weapon. It was enviable, really. Of all the loss I’ve had, the loss of my personal song is most regretful.

Perhaps in my disappointment of my tongue, I’ve forgotten to consider the possibility of your disappointment in me for being so careless. I’ve lain awake and struggled with the thought now though, after putting down this letter for a night. I lost my pen, too, somewhere between the darks. Do you remember when I was a child and I misplaced everything I owned? It was a rare visit to friends and family in which I didn’t leave my clutch behind. Perhaps Tongue is there, in a lost purse? It would be in good company, swimming among plucked weeds and secreted rocks were it so.

Though I’m disappointed, Mother, I have yet to give up hope. As I’ve mentioned, it’s slippery, that tongue, and it operates under a less than clear directive. I’ve looked into cups at bars, and peered into the mouths of men for it, to no avail thus far. Perhaps through my inquiries I will one day again enjoy the luxury of speech.

Yours eternally,
Donna

Home Is Where the Heart Is

Seeing the place I lived as a child become a vacant lot was something too painful to have given much consideration to, until the point in time in which it became reality. Like most things that are dreaded and thus buried in our subconscious, the thought had itched in the back of my head. I’d been having dreams in which a bulldozer with teeth and laughter had come to eat the rotting boards and annexes on the house off Whitmore Street, dreams I’d been embarassed to realize I’d awaken from grasping for a little pillow I’d slept with as a child. Not finding it, I’d pull my sleeping companion closer to me and bury my face into his fur as though his was the chest of a man and seek to return to more pleasant memories of the home I was raised in.

And return is what my mind does, when it wanders on the days and night which I allow it to. I fall through a tunnel of age until I’m 6 again, sitting in this lot and picking flowers for my mother, flowers I’d collect with the childish desire to please that we somehow lose as time swings past us. In order to blossom as individuals we, for practical reasons, must lose some of those small niceties of consideration – “I do this because it makes you happy, I do this because it gives you comfort”.

I lost my role as the pleasing child when I learned that I couldn’t fly. I stood in that back of this lot right here, in front of the still-standing chain link fence and demanded my mother let me fly from the top step of the trailer inexplicably parked in my backyard. She argued, fearful of what would happen to me when my feet left the step, and I chafed at the weakness of her fearfulness. Even then I shrugged restraining hands from my shoulders and lunged for air instead of ground.

I fell that day, and oozed with scrapes and wounds. I cried with the injustice of being wrong and with the disappointment of being, at that point in my life, incapable of flight. But eventually, within the confines of backyard and the backyards of the friends that surrounded it, I conquered greater leaps and greater heights. The jump from the steps became a leap from the swing set at it’s highest arc. The jump from swing set became a free-fall drop from the highest limb I could climb to on our magnolia tree. The free fall became a leap from the roof of a storage shed nearby and on and on into infinity, an endless list of drops and jumps spanning a lifetime.

At twenty-seven, I am still leaping. I still look for the highest points to climb to and calculate the impact and success rate to legs that have grown in some ways stronger and some ways more unreliable as the years set in. No old maid am I, but the nicks and small fractures of being a habitual jumper have led to landing pains. You know, the jolt that radiates through you after a particularly long fall — it’s indescribable, isn’t it? The rise of your stomach with the weightlessness of flight, followed by the electric agony that bolts through your shins and into your hips is addicting, isn’t it?

Perhaps it could be said that home is an addition of sorts — a return to a place because of the feelings it conjures or the sense of security it brings. Maybe no one has stopped to wonder if home is something we’re all mainlining, sitting in white rooms with TV sets that show us places too far from home to reach… at least for those who can’t bear to trek the distance without their fix of comfort and security, without a dealer to dial. I’d like to think my own addiction of distance jumping may yet turn out to be less harmful than the addiction to complacency.

And so, it must be said, that perhaps the lot serves a better purpose now as a vacancy than the structure of memories it once was. If you’re planning on a clean break, it’s often said that either the physical or psychological totems of the past addition must be removed, snuffed out, burnt down. With the symbolic burning of my home and past comes the birth of high hopes from that which might arise from the ashes of past comforts. Perhaps I’ll encounter taller structures still to leap from.

Glory Paid To Ashes Comes Too Late

And Thus a Phoenix Rises

There

“I can find camaraderie in darkness, at least”, the girl thought to herself, sitting in the glow of a streetlamp.

Camaraderie seemed to in short supply these days, so far as the girl could tell. She crossed her right ankle over her left and stubbed a pilfered smoke out on the sole of her shoe, relishing the acrid smell of burnt rubber. Maybe comradery was why she was here, following some homing beacon through alleys and across sidewalks. Her eyes flicked out into the night — she sat, 15 and obvious, on the curb of a residential street. She thought of sleep, and of the endless days that lay before her.

The girl couldn’t remember what she’d been dreaming of or what had overtaken her, but then again she rarely did. Sleep for her was fitful but hardly ever memorable; she had awaken earlier that night as she sometimes did – calm, yet deeply sweating. The hardwood floors in the bedroom she shared with her little brother had gleamed with streaks of moonlight. Rolling out of bed, the girl made a careful point to step over the beams as she hunted for the shoes she had kicked off earlier that evening. Shoes located and in hand, she moved seamlessly from room to hallway to door (mind the creaky hinge), as gracefully as a ballerina performing a long practived paus de duex.

Sighing, she raised herself off the curb and kept shuffling. So far she had seen no cars in the two miles she had come on her own miniature trek to the West, but experience reminded her that it was always better to stay in motion. This wasn’t the first time she had run away, but it was the first time she felt solid instead of unmoored. What had started as an impulse had now become a drive.

The majority of houses she’d passed on her journey thus far were dark and sleeping, but here and there she spied the occasional light of a shift worker or night owl. Pausing outside of one such house belonging to the latter, the girl was gripped by the urge to see what was illuminated by the glow that beamed out of a nearby window. She took care to step lightly over the precarious tree roots that reached up from the yard to catch her toes and reveal her trespass. Peering into the window, she found herself looking into the bedroom of a girl who appeared to be around her own age. What would happen if she helped herself to this home, put on the pajamas of this girl who lived in a soft pink room? What to do after she cut out and zipped into the pink girl’s borrowed skin?

Looking more closely at the room’s owner, the girl contrasted her own tight brow to the other’s smooth eyes. This girl would be hard for her to imitate… but not impossible, at least for a brief spell. But what to do when she was inevitably discovered? She already walked uncomfortably, sat uncomfortably; she felt sure the others in her school saw her own skin sliding when she moved. Cheer, walk, learn, fuck. She smiled and dug another smoke out of her jacket. After inhaling deeply, she blew smoke out the corner of her mouth and stepped slowly back to the street, her eyes thirst for voyeurism temporarily slaked.

Where to wander now? She had no real friends of note, none worthy of being called upon for aid in a crisis. The girl knew that her solicitations would be met with mock sympathy, or even worse, false understanding followed by an instant newscast from one friend to the next until everyone knew where and (most importantly), what she was. Somewhere in the night a cat called out, as if voicing agreement.

It came to her suddenly as she stepped over the crack where grass met pavement — John, the name of the boy with slanting eyes. Being 25, perhaps “man” was more apt, but he was a man with the hands of a boy much younger. Glancing at a street sign, the girl remembered the way to his house, only three blocks distance from where she stood. The girl turned left, and the wind changed with her, pressing into the small of her back.

—

When John opened his door in response to the girls light tapping, he looked low slung and heavy despite his height and lanky frame. The girl was momentarily struck with the possibility of allowing herself to care a bit for this quiet boy, but as he opened the door farther to allow her entrance, the glare of the streetlights fell into his eyes and she remembered herself. Her stare dropped quickly to the worn threshold.
“Hey, what’s wrong?” he asked her, reaching out and tipping her chin upward, hoping to catch another glimpse of her furrowed brow.
“Things,” she replied, gently removing her chin from his fingertips.
Despite the easy gesture, he looked abashed and withdrew slightly into the doorway. “Come in,” he said softly.

The girl stepped over the crooked doorway and breathed in deeply through her nose. She loved the smell of other people; every one of them was different, as though an individual’s thoughts leaked out while they slept and stained the smell of them into their possessions. Patting her sides as men do when they’re looking for their keys, the girl’s mouth allowed a small smile. The smell of ownership was another reason to travel lightly.

John had moved on while she daydreamed, easily regaining course even through her unorthodox entrance. Back to sucking on a joint, rocking slightly on the balls of his feet, he turned up the crooning of a man who was singing about something he could never have. They sat in the living room floor and watched one another out of the corners of their eyes. The girl allowed herself a small sip of his; they were limpid and beautiful, the eyes of someone who might understand if she could just bear to let him.

—

She was high, gloriously so. She was high in the way you can only be when you’re 15, riding passenger in a 10 year old Buick, a vagabond looking into the stream of a Texas afternoon. The thought struck her – she was alive. She looked incredulously at the backs of her hands. She was made of cells and throbbing matter, she could eat or bleed and it was all the same to the universe. She gathered her hands to her and concentrated on keeping her eyes off of pets who had wandered too far from home. The girl settled back into her seat, trying to rejoin the thoughts of the others.

She flipped down the visor and made the motions of fixing her hair in the cracked mirror set there. Life was all about acting natural. That’s how you made it through being high, through classes. She caught one of the three passengers in the backseat (all friends of John) staring intently at the back of her head, and his eyes flicked away as though she had burned him. She flipped the visor back into place and took a deep breath.

It was hours or minutes later when they came to their destination – a house on the edge of town where no one would care that she was 15, high, and a runaway. Stepping onto the pavement, the girl silently surveyed the teetering two-story structure, surprised by the similarities between this and the house her aunt lived in just a few blocks from her own home. The similarities didn’t bode well for her hopes of finding a place to blend in and disappear for a moment – though she smoked and drank and fought with the rest, she knew she would never be easy here.
While the girl was lost in her thoughts, John had slipped into the space by her right thigh. Taking her by the hand, he leaned his weight towards the house and pulled her the rest of the way from the car. “Come in,” he said.

—

The girl had always loved the beach.
She had occasionally met people who claimed to love the beach as well, those these people were the infrequent relation or visitor from out of town. They said “beach” with a different thing entirely in mind. They said “beach” thinking of swells and white sand and Floridian bikinis on top of idle tans. The girl looked out at the beach that surfaced in her mind when the word was introduced; the tide was browned and murky, clogged with seaweed.

It wasn’t necessarily welcoming. One had to be careful for predators and debris when stepping into the surf. It wasn’t many years before that her sister had come screaming from the shore with bright red streamers on her legs, the calling card of a particularly vengeful jellyfish. But if you knew how to step, and knew when to be still, the water could take you where you needed to be. The girl’s vision narrowed for a moment, and she allowed herself to envision a barefoot John, pausing on the edge of the waterline. He reached back to catch her hand.
“Come in,” he said, and she allowed him her hands and her feet.

As the day went down into the Gulf of Mexico, she sipped a beer (another courtesy of John) and hung her tired shoes over the edge of the seawall. John had protested hotly when she requested to be left here in Galveston, 40 miles or more from her home. Her silence had convinced him more than any argument would. She looked past her feet to the beach 30 feet below and thought how ironic it was that silence communicated more than words to people who knew how to listen to it.

—

She ended there, close to the way she began, sitting on concrete and smoking conspicuously. The girl saw the cop’s lights as he pulled to the shoulder of the seawall, but she made no motion to move. The girl was used to being caught, and knew people who struggled in quicksand sank faster than those who knew when to bring their knees up, those knew how to relax and listen.

A cop ambled over to where she sat, blonde and still high, smoking the cigarette that turned out to be her freedoms undoing. As he closed the gap between them, the girl dug the toes of her right foot into the ground. She lifted her left foot over her right knee and crushed out the last of her stolen cigarettes into the meat of her sole. Smiling, she sat still and waited for her next current to come.