I Will Explode Into Life

Stared at this new blackness, the mindborn worlds fled, and the mind turned off: a madness or a beginning? —Diane di Prima

2012-01-23T16:26:00.000-08:00

Somewhere south of the Appalachians where the accents get heavy and slow like molasses, winding through the hills in a white van with a peeled orange in my palm and here I am all worried about nirvana, trying to think what Jack means when he says this world is nothing but in our minds, our silly human minds too bound by our senses to make sense of this world that we in turn create. But here’s the thing: my mind’s too scared to leave behind my body, and my bones are shaking in their sockets afraid to crumble to the dust that they came from, and the sky and the earth are both looking blue because it’s just so frightening to lie down and be swallowed up in their great eternal emptiness.

But emptiness is really just mindfulness, balance, the great celestial seesaw between consciousness and acceptance of our place in the universe—very small, really, very plain, very peaceful but only if we are awake and empty, like the space between a pitch and a melody, that vibrant silence that roars in our ears like blood but not quite. No sound but no absence either. Peace is not the absence of war and silence is not the absence of sound, peace is the fragile teeter-totter of the universe, smiled upon before it teeters back down or totters back up, beautiful in that moment of balance.

But emptiness without awareness, that just feels like loneliness, the vast alone space in the egocentric center of what our selfish minds of stainless steel have come up with to describe what it means to be sad: alone with all of creation—our creation—too vain to recognize it as our own and call it good. We invented a god to do that for us. We can believe in fabricated deities but not the weight of the soil in our hand, the clarity of the air in our lungs, the cold of the wind against our baby pale cheeks. We invented science for that. All this energy, it shoots from our fingertips when we grasp with young searching hands at the bars of our crib and try so desperately to climb out, to see the world out there, to touch what’s beyond so we can see that it’s real.

But it is! It is because our minds make it so. Oh beautiful minds we humans must have to give such beautiful form to the nothingness that embraces us in one big earthly hug. And like a mother to her babe—too young to speak but old enough to point while standing on wobbly ankles and peapod toes—our Mother Earth tells us shhh shhh listen dear one, for the night is speaking to you, she is whispering her secrets and howling her fury and her voice is so beautiful, isn’t it? All these accidental world noises just the pale flutists of a symphony orchestra, sitting with their ankles crossed under their black skirts in the front row just before the conductor who glances down from time to time, yes, he does, but smiles at the whole, this great cresting wave of sound that rises and swells but rarely breaks but when it does, oh, it’s the most beautiful of it all—the silence before the handclap, or the ringing of an empty auditorium where a musician plays alone, that silence more precious than a single sound, those pale human sounds that we mistakenly take as the proof of life and life beyond us—the clacking shutter telling tales of the wind that we will never see; the screaming asphalt under rubber tires as a car and its headlights rush through dark America is our a proof of motion; we hear the creaking of boughs in a wintry forest and we say we can hear the weight of snow. And to hear the world is to name the world, know the world, hold the world as if it were ours to own. Frail humans! Deafened by ego.

We say we know the wind, that it is ours to keep and hear. The energy of this world is ours to harness. The water that flows or freezes or floats in the clouds is all ours because we have named its chemistry, and by naming we really mean claiming because nothing can be ours unless we first create it, name it, so it becomes real through our senses so it makes sense to us—and that, so foolishly, is all we think we know.

But shhh shhh says Mother Earth to her babe whose head is all full of abstractions that he cannot yet name or claim. Be still and listen and you will hear the wind for you are the wind and there is no difference between you and the wind and the wind and you and the wind is you. Be still and listen to the wind within and without you. For as you create the wind in your mind with clacking shutters and flying flags and desert storms that blind your eyes with sand, the wind too creates you. Who would you be without the wind? For if you are the wind and the wind is you than neither can go on without the other. Be still and listen to the wind.

The wind speaks of all that you know but know not how to speak. The wind speaks the language of the trees, of the secret inner places of the mountains, of the clouds who weep at the beauty of the world, of a single feather floating, of the ships lost at sea, their sails flapping in sounds for no one but the wind to hear. Be still and listen to the wind, for the wind knows all of those languages, and so must you, for you are the wind and the wind is you. The wind sweeps her coquettish skirts all about this fanciful creation and when she laughs it echoes about in this vast emptiness. Tell me, child, can you hear her in the silence? Can you feel the silver peal of pure laughter? Will you laugh along with her, and laughing be glad, because in this nothingness there is peace, and in this peace there is gladness, and in this gladness, know laughter?

He who listens to the wind knows how to listen to himself without knowing himself or the wind, for he who listens to the wind does not name the wind nor does he name himself—naming would disrupt the silence and the absence and in this no-place of silence and absence would sprout the arbitrary seed of language, sown from the tower of Babel so no more would there be peace, just sounds, shouts, the attempt to name our own creation with our tongues, so loud that we forget how to listen, and when man has gone deaf who then will listen to the silence? He will mistake silence for the sound of blood pumping through his temples, mortal, loud, beating like war drums and booted feet. If man can believe that the shallow sound of his own circulation is the divine whooooosh of silence than certainly he can believe that it is just and right to die for his country, to deprive his fellow man of that blood flow he counts as inner peace, he knows no better, he has forgotten how to hear, he has been listening to his organs groan for so long that he has gone deaf but he hardly even knows it. He cuts off his own ears for fear of the sound, for solace in the self-silence, for love to grow or fester in the bloodstream.

But love is no love when it rests only within us. Like the wind love must be within and without us. We are love and love is us. Love is no love unless we take it out and try it on, not afraid of the sunlight like a potato that turns green and poisonous with oxygen. Love is no love unless we find it in everything and in our selves, unless we give it to everyone, unless we open our pores and accept it from everywhere like sunshine with no fear of sunburn or sunrise, just that glow when your body is your own and the rocks’ and the wind’s and the world’s—the eternal embrace when you are love and love is you and you’re no longer afraid to give it away because there is no difference between me and you and she and him and we and they. We love one another because love is no love any other way. And then there is not loneliness but perfect balance in the emptiness that is really not empty at all—it is full of nothing.

Be still and listen to the wind my child, she said, and you will learn how to love. Love is nothing more and nothing less than the wind and you. There is no knowing of love like there is no knowing of the wind. Clacking shutters or creaking bedsprings are just the pale imprints of some great invisible beast in the snow. We follow the footprints but never find the source and we are led astray of our own ignorant volition and intuition, wandering in circles chasing after love but in the end following our own footsteps in the snow, having forgotten entirely about the object of our search and staring endlessly at the ground and our boots so worn that the wool of our socks has begun to show, tracking the traces of an ever-invisible beast that, if we look only for its evidence, we will never know.

Clacking shutters cracking trees creaking bedsprings under a mattress meant for one, handprints purpled bruises on the soft skin behind the ears and under the armpits, the songs we have sex to—Sigur Ros or The Beatles or Mono or Radiohead or Damien Rice—whatever audio form we think the invisible beast is taking these days. Or sometimes just silence. Lips and teeth and toes and fingernails. Walls that are always too thick, blinds that never keep out the sun or curtains that mimic the night. But where is the love in all this? We’ve gotten ourselves all tangled up again, sheets and limbs. And off into folklore, pornography and children’s novels, the invisible beast scampers, taking his footprints with him, leaving no trail for us to trace. We’ve drawn ourselves up a map that leads from where we were to where we are and back again, and so proud we are of our own handiwork that we never realize that we’re lost until that emptiness full of nothing starts to feel more like loneliness again and we wake up one warm December morning and realize that we have forgotten how to listen to the wind.

We mistook our racing blood for that great cosmic pulse again, and now it bulges against our veins and ribs with nowhere left to go. That’s what the wind was trying to say, but we just haven’t listened to her for a while except in drug-induced sadness that feels strangely like ecstasy because they’re really one and the same and beautiful only in their oneness. But when we clip them up like newspapers they don’t mean anything anymore, we throw them out of balance and tumble down the teeter totter after them, down and up again, down and up again, never pausing in the center where they and we are all one again. We take refuge in tragedy or comedy which are really the same, after all, and neither teaches us to love.

22 December 2011

Je suis . . .

2011-03-21T07:02:00.000-07:00

Que je m’en fous alors ! Mais qu’est-ce que vous voulez que j’en fasse ?

Pardon . . . j’aurais du me présenter tout d’abord. Voilà, c’est moi, c’est Rachel, dite Rachel—je n’ai même pas de sobriquet. Je pourrais résumer toute ma vie avec l’objectif qui se trouve en haut de mon CV : je suis étudiante américaine, bilingue ; pleine de compétences, de motivations, d’imaginations, de mensonges (mais si je les dis en français personne ne saura que j’ai menti).

Qui suis-je, vous me demandez. Ben, je suis comme une copine en train de tromper mon amant(e). Ou bien, je suis comme la sale métèque, enterrée jusqu’aux chevilles au rivage étranger. Ou même mieux, je suis comme la fille de parents divorcés, qui hurlent l’un à l’autre à travers des vitres opaques et fermées ; qui ne se comprendront jamais ; qui ne se réconcilieront jamais ; qui déversent en invectives un océan menaçant entre les deux. Et moi ? Moi je noie là-dedans. Oui, je m’y noie. Venez me cherchez avec un gilet de sauvetage. Mettez-le autour de mon cou comme la corde de potence. Sauvez-moi-en.

Mais, vous ne me comprenez pas. Vous me regardez, les yeux écarquillés. Mais qu’est-ce que j’ai dis ? Je ne fais pas le pitre, j’essaie de m’expliquer, honnêtement. Et pour le faire il faut que j’avoue que cette ville-là—celle que j’adore, celle dont je languis tous les jours—elle, oui ELLE m’a violé. Voilà, c’est ça, la sale vérité, toute nue. Ce pays-là n’est pas parfait, et il ne le sera jamais, même si je l’aurais voulu. Mais j’y suis fidèle quand même.

Have you understood nothing? Nothing at all? Just tidbits, snippets, scraps? Vocabulary words, the ones you learned in high school—illustrated, laminated, tacked to the classroom wall for easy reference. Girl: fille. American: américaine. Sorry: pardon. I’m trying to explain to you who I am . . . does that mean nothing to you? Mais que voulez-vous de moi?

(Pace. Un pas, deux pas, trois pas.)

I’m sorry. Let me tell you a story:

I fell in love with a country like one falls in love with a person. We first met in the spring of 2009 when she stamped my virgin passport in purple. I first discovered her body from the window seat of a train that swept me south towards the Mediterranean. Her chest flattens out around her proud Parisian heart ; her slender hipbones jut out—rugged mountain ranges skirting her borders; her fertile soil-skin rises and falls across her bread-basin belly; and down south, her salty shores lap at lovers’ bodies.
I wanted to stay with her forever . . . but the government told me no, like some gruff father figure exercising his paternal duty to dispense and revoke the right for foreign hands to explore his daughter’s lovely body. And so three months later I left, and a year after that I came back again, only to leave again three months later. And still today I straddle two continents, trying to embrace a lover on the other side of the ocean. But the Atlantic bellows between.

I’m trying to tell you that I’m in love with a country . . . but one that abused me, assaulted me, tried me, tested me, rejected me. But I was happy there. It’s as simple as that.

Qu’est-ce que vous voulez que je dise? I’m torn in two. My insides are spilling out. Que je sois ici ou là-bas, l’autre côté de l’océan, c’est encore chez moi. Whether I’m here or there, the other side of the ocean will always be my home. I cannot reconcile this unbridgeable schism. The Atlantic bellows between.

Mais qu’est-ce que vous voulez que j’en fasse? Ma foi tant pis. Je n’en peux rien alors.

(Originally performed on as a monologue for the F-Word ladies (http://thefwordladies.blogspot.com/) Identity show: Who the 'F' Am I?, 14 March 2011.)

Assorted Flavors

2011-03-20T10:04:00.000-07:00

On a humid day in August at the beginning of the twenty-first century, an Arabic man kissed a Caucasian girl while standing on the platform at the train station in Lyon, France. The Moroccan’s name was Karim and that Midwestern girl was none other than myself, but usually when I tell this story I pretend that the Caucasian girl was someone else and that dear Karim was just another anonymous Arabic face.

It’s been two years since then and I haven’t spoken to Karim for at least six months, maybe more. I’ve already told this story too many times, but always from the perspective of the uninvolved spectators, never as a participant myself. An anecdote with a moral makes for great social commentary. Back in the States, my friends at Skidmore College ate it up. They were the daughters of wealthy upstate New York democrats and their fathers all spent their summers betting on horses in the Saratoga races. They preferred to hear stories about mixed couple discrimination than to actually know mixed couples personally.

By telling them the story of the Moroccan kissing the American, I wanted to objectively approach the topic of discrimination from an outsider’s perspective. I had no intention of mentioning the way it tasted when Karim kissed me (thick and salty), or the way he smelled (like shisha and turmeric), or the weight of his hand on my waist (heavy like a basket of wet laundry). These details were irrelevant to the plot. I wanted to discuss more important subjects, like racial prejudices and the reasons why men fight wars (tea, taxes, cotton, communism, horribly misapplied eugenic plots, and the right for an Arabic man to kiss a Caucasian woman in public). And I certainly didn’t want to talk about the way that I blushed when Karim kissed me (from shame, although I blamed my blood-flushed cheeks on the heat).

I used to begin this by evoking that old Alfred Eisenstaedt photograph—you know, the one with the sailor kissing his lady on Times Square. He’s got her swooped down and wrapped up in his broad hairy arms and the whole crowd is watching them, their teeth unsheathed, mid-smile. I always did love that picture. I wanted so badly to believe that Karim and my kiss had been just as aesthetic, if not romantic. So when I told this story to my Skidmore College friends, I pretended that the Caucasian girl’s back had arched elegantly in a deep swoon, just like the woman in that photograph. That was the only detail I ever invented. Except for the third-person perspective shift that kept me pure from the sullying confession that I myself had been the white side of a mixed couple, the rest of the story was completely true.

The last time I had a layover in New York on my way back from Paris, I saw that photograph on a postcard stand in the airport gift shop. I had too much time and no loose change, so I just sat on my carry-on suitcase right there in the gift shop and looked at the picture of the sailor and his lady while waiting for my plane to come. She’s still as elegant as ever in her white dress and white square-heeled pumps, but I had never noticed before that her fist is clenched so tightly down by her side that you can see the bones in her slender hand. The sailor’s hairy arm is wrapped around the woman’s head and clasped over her ear like he’s protecting her from some vicious secret or a naughty joke. And my god, everyone is watching them. The onlookers’ feet are caught mid-step as they close in on the couple kissing on the sidewalk. Instead of having eyes, the spectators just have shadows under their brows. All of those blurry feet and teeth-bared smiles give the photograph a disquietingly claustrophobic undertone once you really notice them.

Even so, if I saw the picture again on a postcard I’d still be tempted to buy it and send it to Karim. But I lost his address when I moved back to the States, and besides, I’m not entirely sure what I would write to him anymore.

It was a mistake to begin this story by invoking that old photograph anyhow. Sure, both my story and Eisenstaedt’s famous V-Day portrait are set in modern, post-war cities, and both prominently feature a kissing couple, but in the case of the Moroccan who had the audacity to kiss an American in public, everyone was watching but not a soul was smiling.
“You’re grimacing,” said Karim as he pulled back from the kiss.

I glanced aside. A beady-eyed woman wearing men’s galoshes and carrying an umbrella was standing no more than three meters away, just staring at us with her painted lips pursed, like I was busy kissing the goddamn devil incarnate. She wasn’t the only one watching.

Karim and I communicated exclusively in French—a language that neither of us could claim as our native tongue—but it couldn’t have been our respective accents that drew the onlookers’ attention. Our voices had been locked up behind our lips.
“The train is late,” I said.

My accent—American with a twinge of Canadian in my diphthongized wide vowels—always gave me away. I hauled it around like a reluctant child dragging his feet. It made me exotic and begged the question: Vous n’êtes pas d’ici?—No, I’m not from here. I’m just here working as a live-in nanny in Montfavet for the summer. The inevitable interlocutor would then pause before handing me my change, or pouring me a cup of coffee, or stamping my bus ticket, and contemplate the charming way I pronounced my guttural R’s instead of swallowing them like most Americans do.

“Come see me again next weekend,” Karim said.

Karim’s accent, on the contrary, condemned him. It would never be good enough, pure enough, smart enough, French enough. His voice unearthed the corpse of a colony that still reeked and attracted flies although the war for Moroccan independence had ended half a century ago. French Morocco was 52 years dead. Vous n’êtes pas d’ici. No question mark this time. Just a statement, a judgment, an ultimatum, a threat. You’re not from here.

“I can’t, Karim. I told you already. I have to take care of the lovely little beasties all next weekend while M. and Mme. De Sévigné visit friends in Aix.”

Karim sighed, a deep, defeated oh.

“Find a babysitter,” he said.

“I am the babysitter.”

“Bring them with you.”

“All four of them? Are you kidding?” I said. “To do what? Smoke kif and eat kebabs? I’m sure the parents would approve.”

“Amine will come over. He’ll make his special coconut chicken curry. The kids would love it,” Karim said, only half kidding.

I would have liked nothing better than to get those kids out of the house, to unplug them from their petty preoccupations, to throw the television in the pool and the video game console in along with it, to plop the kids down in the grass and spend a whole afternoon telling them Grimm fairy tales—the gruesome ones, just to scare them good. We were of the same flesh, the De Sévigné family and I, but we were not of the same mind. I came to visit Karim in Lyon each weekend with a week full of bourgeois misadventures to recount.

“Did I tell you about the incident with the freezer last week? A circuit breaker shorted and Sylvaine was horrified that everything would thaw and we would have ‘nothing to eat,’ so she had Cosette and me clean out the whole goddamn thing and transfer all of the food to the backup freezer in the bathhouse. And you know what? I found rabbit steaks in there. Four packs of them. And not the cheap Auchan brand either. There was filet mignon too. And they were both expired,” I said.

“Amine could make coconut rabbit curry,” said Karim, laughing. “He can make anything. Remember on my birthday when Amine showed up in my kitchen at one in the morning and cooked us a whole rosemary chicken?”

“Of course. But we were already a full bottle of Bacardi martinis in and neither of us could remember how to speak French,” I said. I pulled him closer, burying my nose in the deep V of his polo, breathing him in. A thick smell. Like sweet curry with peanuts, or ginger and turmeric.

“Ana bahebak bezaf,” said Karim, and the beady-eyed woman standing nearby scowled. Sale métèque, I thought I heard her murmur. Rag head.

I blushed and turned away. The platform was filling up with steam. Clusters of passengers all waiting for the late train huddled together but never touched. Sweat evaporated in shimmering curtains from their bare arms and necks, leaving their skin gleaming. The train station was shaped like the enormous, inverted hull of a boat, and the spine of the ceiling arched at its highest point directly above the platform. Fifty feet of inaccessible space hovered heavily overhead while impatient passengers crowded below. An antique analogue clock ticked slowly and surprised puffs of dust clouded the clock’s face each time the minute hand moved.

Karim was fidgeting in my peripheral vision. He kicked at an apple core that had missed the trashcan and then itched the back of his ankle with the toe of his shoe.

Along the tracks, a scrappy looking man of Arabic decent was shuffling between the trash cans, poking through the rubbish with his index finger, looking for cigarettes with more than the butt left to smoke. Only one of his knees bent, so when he walked he buckled over at the waist, as though bowing deeply. He held a cane in one hand but it dragged uselessly behind him as he doubled over with each step. The shoeless Romanians that had been huddling in the pigeon shit outside of the train station when we first came in had now made their way up to the platform. They were selling socialist newspapers that no one would buy.

“What if I came and visited you in Montfavet?” Karim said.

“Impossible. You know I’m not allowed to have guests at the house,” I said.

“But Nicole visited you,” he said in a childish, plaintive tone. He tugged at my hips like a toddler wanting to be held.

“She came over for dinner once. Besides, she’s a French friend from the university,” I said and regretted it immediately. I drew my breath in sharply and tried to suck my careless words in along with it. Karim took a step back but kept holding onto my hips like handles, harder now than before. I could feel his fingernails grabbing at the fabric of my dress.

The uneasy expectancy in the train station was heavy like a pregnant belly quaking over a belt buckle. Further down the tracks, thick violet shrubs vibrated with the shrill buzz of cicadas. Someone coughed. A little boy was kicking pebbles onto the metal tracks. A young mother caught him by the collar and gave his bottom a gentle but reproachful slap. The little boy was sulking now. Disappointed. Waiting.

“Do they know about me?” Karim said, his voice rising. When he spoke quietly I could barely hear his accent, but now I was tempted to put my finger over his lips. I didn’t want to cause a scene. The gendarmes could always come up and ask for his papers. He kept the proof of his legality tucked in his pants in a little pouch his ommy had made for him before he left Morocco nine years ago. No one could tell him that he didn’t have the right to stand on French soil, but it would be humiliating if he got asked to show his papers. I blushed. He would have to unzip his pants and shove his hands down his trousers to pull them out, like some sicko masturbating in public.

“Of course, Karim. This is silly.” I said.

“Do they know my name?” Karim said.

“I told them about your internship and they were very impressed,” I said.

Karim let go of my hips. He left two wrinkled patches where he had crumpled the fabric in his fists. Turning away, he pulled a pack of Winstons out of his back pocket. The faded rectangle in his pocket suggested too many packs of cigarettes and too few loads of laundry.

“Please don’t smoke that here,” I said. “The kids will smell it on me.”

“You’re starting to like them, aren’t you,” he said, exhaling smoke slowly through a thin gap in his taut lips.

“You know, on Thursday night little Gauthier left his Mario action figure outside my bedroom door to protect me,” I said. “And Alban has finally stopped calling me Madame. It’s taken ten weeks for that.”

“You said you could never like them. Your monthly salary is still less than their weekly grocery bill!”

“Christ, Karim! They’re people too!”

The woman in the galoshes was outright ogling by now.

Arabe beur crapule fripouille khoroto. I knew the words too. I never used them but they tumbled in the back of my mouth like loose teeth knocked out by a fistfight. Métèque plèbe racaille raton vaurien.

“You should go,” I said to Karim. “You don’t need to wait. I don’t want you to be late getting back to work.”

“I can stay.”

“Your lunch break will be over soon,” I said.

“You want me to go,” he said.

“You’ll be late.”

He threw his half-smoked cigarette onto the tracks. He hesitated. He lit a new one.

The scrappy Arabic man was approaching us now. He was elderly, scruffy but harmless looking. His faded hair had fallen out in intermittent patches. One deep black eye was looking at me. His other eye was blue and looked awry. A sheath of colorless of puss clouded his blind eye. He grasped a half-smoked cigarette in one hand and pointed its ashy end at me like a threat.

“T’as du feu?” he said as he approached Karim and me slowly, bowing at the waist with every step as his stiff leg dragged along. Karim reached into his pocket for his lighter and held it out to the man.

When he spoke, his voice wasn’t smoky and guttural like I had expected it to be. Instead, it was unsettlingly childish and crisp, like he had swallowed a cicada and was coughing up the insect’s shrill song. I noticed his military-style boots, laced tightly and meticulously over a pair of billowing, khaki breeches. Oversized ears whose pointed tips had been rubbed raw poked out of his garrison cap. The cap was faded but he still wore it with panache.

I had seen his type before. One day when I drove the De Sévigné children into town for ice cream, a camp of sage-green tents, all A-frame style, blocked off the whole main square. Former French legionnaires were striking for veteran’s benefits. One among them—a one-legged man of Arabic decent, perhaps Algerian—was sitting on a street post and shouting Vive Bir Hakeim! over and over again. He must have been eighty-five, ninety years old. His face had disappeared into folds of flesh bleached after too many years in the sun. When he opened his mouth to chant (Vive Bir Hakeim!), the skin stretched out around his mouth, revealing deep, dark crevices where his melanin hadn’t yet faded away.

The one-eyed man stopped in front of me, too close, still doubled over. His forehead was at my torso and I could see the minefield of his patchy scalp. With his one good eye, he stared at me through his eyebrows and reached out to take Karim’s lighter without turning his head.

The one-eyed man straightened his back and groaned. I was surprised to find him tall. He swung out his stiff leg and shuffled closer. He said something to Karim in Arabic as he handed him back the lighter, but Karim did not respond. Karim squeezed my hand. The one-eyed man reached out his cane and flicked each of one of my breasts in turn. Tap tap. Like he was picking out oranges from a basket. I want this one and that one.

Karim shook off his French like a wet blanket and began to bellow in Arabic. I didn’t understand a word. My disoriented thoughts were swimming upstream, from right to left. The one-eyed man just threw back his head so far that you could see the grooves in the roof of his rotting mouth and laughed and laughed and laughed. Then he turned and shuffled slowly away, as though nothing had happened, dragging his bad leg after him. Karim didn’t dare strike the man. He had no right to violence here, even if it was merited. The gendarmes guarding the platform watched but did nothing.

Vaurien raton racaille plèbe métèque khoroto fripouille crapule beur arabe.

Mixed. Mongrel. Métis. Mestizo.

No one alerted the police.

When I told this story to my Skidmore friends, they all gasped at this tragic denouement. Oh my god! That’s awful! How barbaric! The story had served its purpose as a scathing commentary on the perception of interracial couples and the condition of discrimination even in modern societies. Nothing more, nothing less. A perverse, elderly Arabic man assaulted a Caucasian girl and a Moroccan held her hand throughout the whole ordeal and not a goddamn soul in the train station made a move to help the poor couple out, although heaven knows they were all watching. That’s all they needed to know.

They didn’t need to know that as the one-eyed man slowly retreated, I wrenched my hand from Karim’s and sunk to the platform. I felt a stranger to my own skin. I wanted to molt. I crouched with my head between my knees and spat on the platform.

I was hardly the heroine of this story. I was full of just as much hatred as the rest.

Karim was standing as straight and still as a dog keeping diligent watch over a raccoon slinking away in the night.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Karim said, turning back towards me. He put one great big hand that smelled like shisha and hashish on the nape of my neck. I bristled at his touch.

Fucking raton.

I could feel the ground rumbling beneath the balls of my feet as the train swept into the station. Karim picked me up by my armpits and set me upright. No one was watching us anymore. The spectators of our petty drama had seen what they needed to see.

Karim helped me lift my bag onto the luggage rack on the second level of the train and then waited outside on the platform and held my shoulders in his hands until the last whistle blew.

“Please, let me come visit you,” he said. “I’ll make this all up to you.”

“Impossible,” I said.

“You won’t tell the De Sévigné family about this, will you?” Karim said.

“Of course not. They’d worry. They care about me. They treat me like I’m one of their own daughters, you know,” I said, and the door closed between our noses.

Karim remained diligently on the platform and waited for my face to appear in the window next to my seat. I ducked down to pick up the tiny tennis shoe that the little boy sitting opposite me had kicked off as soon as he sat down. His mother took the shoe and smiled dubiously and thanked me. She continued looking in her bag for a box of crayons for her fidgety son.

I didn't look out of the window as the train huffed and puffed and prepared to pull away. I couldn't see him, but I knew Karim was still standing there, immobile, his hands hanging limp by his side and his feet spread hip-width apart, as though he was firmly planting himself into the platform for stability, afraid to be blown away or swallowed in steam.

Write, Don't Think

2011-02-27T21:14:00.000-08:00

Joy. Joy is lonely. I can watch others do it but when I run through others scatter, and the joy scatters with them. Like pigeons on a square in Italy. The ones my mom always told me about. She smiled. I saw her. So did her dad. Transatlantic lust. Hawaii. Greece. New Zealand. Poor ol’ Barbara at home with the kids and the marijuana in the fire place. That’s not funny. Drawers of beads. A chest freezer and a laundry shoot. Grandpa’s workshop in the corner of the basement. Half-finished sculptures of an artist going blind. Tin foil and pastels. Rice paper with ink. Indonesia. China. The Mediterranean.

Success is outside the window. Success is behind my fingers. Success comes out in surprised shouts but I’m not allowed to share it. It’s mine but I don’t want it to be. Success is lonely like joy. So is strength. So is failure. Failure is running in circles but never crossing the finish line. Failure is always running away. Success is always running away. I’m taking my joy hostage and stowing it in the overhead bin on a transatlantic flight.

My favorite is when I fly over England at night. Their cities are shaped like circles, did you know? Have you seen it? Or a herd of sheep gathered around a small oasis of water in the middle of a drought. Illuminated in the night. Fleece. Wool. English boulevards and wild roses. Rain. Then comes the English Channel. Wide. Gaping. But you can go under it. A million miles a minute and a gin and tonic and a dissatisfied family going to a wedding. (They didn’t like the bride.)

That place in London. That square. That man sleeping on his jacket. An open guitar case and the music agent who hated the Pixies. Fuck the Pixies he said. Fuck ‘em. I’d pay money to see you two any day, but the Pixies? Fuck ‘em. Fuck the Pixies.
The embassy. The phone call. Transatlantic is not so much fun the other way.

It’s coming back to sit in the center of a room and laugh at jokes that aren’t funny and try to hide disdain behind my skin that’s no longer my own. Molt. Like a snake. A wriggling snake with a heel to boot and the world’s vendetta against its squirmy skin. Shed. Everything. Nude. Naked. Hollow. Void. Vide. Chasm. Abyss. Abject. Object. Suspect. Subject. Sub. Dom. Dominate. Subjugate. Conjugate. Corrogate. Cardboard. Thin. Wrong. Fat. Folds. Flesh. On. Off. Run. It. Off. Onwards. Forwards. Out the window into the car down the street over the ocean back to earth.

(Written 28 February 2011 during F-Word rehearsal; a nonstop, seven-minute free-write based off of the personal experience of authentic movement . . . and other theater nonsense and whatnots.)

An Appeal to Malika Mokeddem

2010-12-12T15:02:00.000-08:00

Il y a vingt ans, mes parents m’ont donné le nom Rachel Mihuta Grimm. C’est une bouchée de syllabes qui contient le nom de famille de mon père (Grimm), celui de ma mère (Mihuta), et le poids de la légende d’une matriarche biblique (Rachel), mère de Joseph, son fils de merveille, et de Benjamin, son fils de deuil. Je suis la fille d’un pilote avec une intelligence et un esprit aussi formidables que les cieux qu’il traverse et une biologiste devenue institutrice au collège. Mon frère ainé est ingénieur et qui, à l’âge de vingt-deux ans, est déjà un employée respecté et indispensable de Boeing, le plus grand avionneur de monde. Et moi je suis écrivaillon qui se croit écrivaine dans mes moments de fantaisie. Je suis dans ma troisième année d’études d’anglais et de français à Ohio University à Athens, Ohio, une ville appelée comme le centre intellectuel du monde ancien, mais coincée dans la pauvreté démunie des Appalaches.

Ma jeunesse était caractérisée d’un sens profond d’isolement—tout d’abord dans ma famille nucléaire et plus tard dans le contexte dans le village où j’étais élevée. Mes parents m’ont nourrie d’une alimentation de pensées et de spiritualité libérales. Pour cela je serai toujours reconnaissante, mais cette éducation m’a forcément éloignée de mes pairs. Kidron, Ohio: c’est un tout petit village où on croit toujours que le réchauffement climatique est un bobard puéril et qu’un programme de soins de santé universel est évidence d’un germe de socialisme qui infectera notre démocratie. Quels cons. Il fallait que je fuie de là, sans question. Je me suis mise à l’abri de l’ignorance et je me suis refugiée dans le monde académique et dans la littérature.

Pendant deux ans à l’université, j’étais contente de suivre le chemin dallé par mes prédécesseurs dans le domaine de la littérature. J’étais captivée par les bibliothèques silencieuses qui bordaient ma voie et je me suis perdue dans le labyrinthe des grands esprits, plein de promesses d’éclaircissement. Mais bien que mon chemin à moi était individualisé et de temps en temps isolé, je faisais partie quand même d’un édifice plus grand que ma perspective là-dessus. C’est une structure immense construite après des siècles et des siècles d’érudition. Je n’étais qu’une voyageuse qui errait parmi ses sentiers, mon chemin unique mais fixe. Et au centre de ce labyrinthe, prêt à engorger le chanceux voyageur qui y achève, était le Minotaure de Dédale lui-même. Dans le domaine de la littérature, on appelle ce monstre « le canon occidental. » C'est lui qui aura toujours le dernier mot.

Heureusement, j’ai eu la chance d’entrevois à distance ce monstre tout englobant avant qu’il me dévore complètement. Et j’ai compris enfin que les voix de mes professeurs respectés auxquels je me suis habituée à entendre et absorber n’étaient pas leurs voix à eux. Ils ont parcouru dans le même dédale que moi et c’était en fait la voix du monstre, le canon occidental, que j’ai entendue sortir de leur bouche. Ce monstre est plutôt un virus ; il réside dans leurs poumons, il se perche sur les petits os de leurs oreilles internes. Mais de cette position privilégiée, il contrôle tout, il silence tout ce qui le contredit. C’est pour ça que nos bibliothèques sont si silencieuses ; c’est pour respect et pour peur de réveiller et de contrarier ce monstre et son canon.

J’ai découvert que j’avais été si accaparée de la luminosité au centre de ce labyrinthe construite par les mains tachées d’encre de la tradition littéraire que j’avais ignoré tout ce qui est périphérique. Je voulais explorer toutes les pièces et toutes les portes qui avaient étaient verrouillées jusqu’à là. Tournant le dos pour la première fois à ce que le canon occidental et les professeurs qui le régurgitent m’ont toujours dit à étudier—Milton et Molière jusqu’à Giraudoux et Proust—j’ai jeté un coup d’œil furtif derrière ces portes fermées. Et j’y ai trouvé une foule de voix bruyantes, intrépides, hurlant dans toutes les langes du monde derrière des huis clos. Et c’est à ce moment là où j’ai découvert votre écriture à vous, Mme. Mokeddem.

En lisant Les Hommes qui marchent, il fallait que je mette à portée de la main un cahier qui, à la fin de ma lecture, était plein de citations et de notations. Tandis que les feuilles mortes des arbres d’automne effleuraient ma fenêtre, j’avais la tête enveloppée du vent de sables de l’Algérie. J’ai vu les conte de Zohra dévoilent avec les yeux écarquillés d’une enfante captivée par les histoire de sa grand-mère.

La Transe des insoumis a verbalisé un sentiment que je n’arrivais pas à exprimer depuis la première fois que je suis allée en France il y a deux ans. Le nomadisme de mes pensées et de mes rêves m’a rendu en même temps isolée du monde extérieur et exclue de l’identité que la société m’a assigné. Je suis, comme vous l’avez brillamment dit, une identité traversière. Que je sois aux Etats-Unis ou en France, l’autre côté de l’océan, c'est encore chez moi. Je suis dans un état de séparation perpétuelle.

Heureusement, j’ai la chance de faire partie d’un programme particulier à la fac qui me fournit l’opportunité de construire des cours privés et individualisés avec mes professeurs. Ce trimestre passé, j’ai suivi une recherche de la littérature maghrébine avec une de mes professeurs. C’est dans ce cours-là que j’ai découvert vos œuvres. Pour recevoir mon diplôme l’année prochaine, il faudra que j’écrive une thèse ; votre travail m’a donné enfin une nouvelle promesse d’éclaircissement et une focalisation. C’est grâce à l’audace de votre écriture que moi j’ai le courage de m’écarter du sentier battu et de trouver mon propre chemin.

Mon analyse du paradoxe de l’indépendance qui se manifeste dans vos œuvres a déversé un torrent de pensées diverses. Je m’intéresse à la position d’un sous-ensemble marginalisé dans une population qui est déjà subjuguée d’un pouvoir externe. Comme on a vu dans votre roman Les Hommes qui marchent, la barbarie qui vous est arrivée à la fête du premier anniversaire de l’indépendance algérienne est l’apogée de cette disparité. La situation des femmes maghrébines dans une société patriarcale réduit à néant pour elles l’indépendance gagnée du colon français. Malgré cette liberté, elles se trouvent toujours esclaves de leur biologie, de leur mari, de leur culture, et de leur gouvernement.

Nous, les spectatrices et les participantes de ce paradoxe, nous demandons comment révolter contre une société qui nie la signifiance de notre existence. Et si on trouve un moyen efficace de révolter, comment assurer que notre réussite ne répétera jamais les défauts de nos oppresseurs ? Comment nous délier du cycle perpétuel de domination, de subjugation, et de révolution ? Où se trouve notre chemin à nous, un nouveau sentier dépourvu des ornières creusées par les pieds de nos prédécesseurs ?

C’est dans ces questions que j’espère trouver le fil de ma thèse future, et c’est pour demander votre opinion là-dessus que j’ai entrepris de vous écrire. Je les jette dans les airs et dans les ténèbres qui pénètrent au bout de ma compréhension de ce paradoxe apparemment inexplicable mais indéniablement pertinent. Je ne vous demande pas beaucoup—seulement un mot, une minute, une confirmation que cette lutte de compréhension vaut la peine de la battre.

A Campaign of Indifference

2010-12-05T09:56:00.000-08:00

We have made a grievous mistake. We have been shouting—spread feet, raised fists, chapped lips—in our opponent’s own language. He yelps back, gathering the scraps of vocabulary that we toss his way—hegemony, hierarchy, domination, imperialism—and he licks them up like a dog. But what have we done to make him understand that these rotten remnants of progressive civilization are corrupt? That which we cast off as trash is another man’s treasure—a bigger man’s treasure. A master of the alchemy of politics, he hoards the leaden millstones of a sinking society and transforms them into capitalist gold. Do we not only fuel his economy with our words? To him, imperialism is not barbarism parading as humanism—it is capital. Hegemony is not depravation—he translates it as power.

It is a curious phenomenon that criticism is perhaps an even stronger motivation than praise. Success in the face of disapproval is the greatest revenge. Biography tells us that every triumph, for it to amount to anything in the public eye, is sullied by dissent: the English teacher who told the aspiring author that she was a horrid speller; the doctor who told the terminally ill patient that he would never overcome his malady; the taunting football player who pissed on the tennis shoes of the computer geek in the locker room. Our heroes need a battle, scars, a ribbon, a medal, a near-death experience in a country far away, and a mother back home begging them not to go. Otherwise, success, survival, and the overcoming of odds would hardly count.

In the same way that our heroes’ obstacles seem to legitimize their successes, we have a curious human tendency to validate others based on the Skeletons in their Closet. I use George W. Bush for a contemporary example. It has never ceased to baffle me that the American populous could so unabashedly overlook their 43rd president’s unquestioningly average academic success. No, perhaps overlook is not the correct word, for we have ministries and commissions and committees to uncover all pitfalls of a politician’s past life, especially for a position as important of that of the president. Americans simply disregarded the fact that history and biography both quite clearly indicate George W. Bush’s dangerous mediocrity.

But why concentrate on Mr. Bush’s average grades at Yale and Harvard when the American mass media offers us a plethora of much more tantalizing Skeletons to uncover than our former president’s C’s in college? Instead, we spread the legs of our public figures and prod about, searching for scandal, adultery, sex tapes, indecent exposure, or kinky bedroom secrets. Our politicians panties are much more transparent than our government’s policies.

Are we so saturated with superficial scandal that we fail to recognize the sweeping corruption that so characterizes our government and its dignitaries? Again, I do not think this is a matter of ignorance. Instead, it is a symptom of a rather simple psychological phenomenon: the aforementioned glorification of the Skeleton in the Closet. In the brief period of my life when I regularly attended a Pentecostal church (an experience worth exploring more in depth in a separate avenue), Sins and Skeletons became synonymous. In one of the first services I attended at Christian Harbor Church, Pastor recited from the pulpit an exhaustive catalog of his personal Skeletons: drug, alcohol, and porn addiction, licentiousness, covetousness, and depression. The congregation cheered and hollered. Just look how far he’d come! The congregation commiserated with their pastor on their respective Sins, awed over his apparent success in combating these demons, and left the service with hope renewed and faith restored. If he could do it, they could too.

So let us put these too phenomenon—the compelling power of criticism and the curious case of the Skeletons in the Closet—and put them back into the context of our original subject: the politician. It is interesting to see just how many of our politicians have admitted to using drugs, to abusing alcohol, to skipping class in college, to having extramarital affairs. We criticize, yes, of course we do. But as detailed above, this judgment only bolsters the counterargument. “Yes, I admit,” says the politician (hypothetically), “to having used recreational marijuana on occasion during my university years. But,” he goes on to say, “as I matured and critically evaluated my past decisions, the experience has only fortified and refined my conviction that drugs, be they recreational or not, are utterly detestable and should remain prohibited in this great country of ours.” (Aww, cmon!)

And so our criticism, valid as it may be, bolsters his perhaps affected rebuttal. Without appearing overtly condescending, he brings himself down to our level, saying quietly that he has made the same mistakes as we do, he has experienced the same pitfalls that we stumble into, and he has understood our suffering. How Christ-like. He makes an appeal to our intellect, trusting that in our maturity, we too will understand the evils of drugs (or socialism, or alcohol, or welfare, or rebellion, or various other values too liberal for the refined mine). And lastly, he invokes patriotism, proclaiming that to be a productive member of society, we too much share his views and values. Feeling self-actualized and self-important, we rise to our feet and applaud.

Although I had not intended to discuss counterculture, an opportunity for a useful aside conveniently presents itself. Consider the word itself; it linguistically implies its opposite, making an arbitrary distinction between what is generally recognized as culture and its antithesis. Let us return to the example given above: the politician who (hypothetically) publicly admits to having partaken in recreational marijuana. Sitting on the boardwalk that skirts between culture and counterculture, he dipped his toes into the tempting waters below. He gazed into the waters to catch his own reflection and he fell in love. But a learned scholar as he was, he did not fall into the trap of Narcissus; instead, he took a step back, as to admire his reflection from a fuller angle. And from there, on his pedestal, his pulpit, his pillar, his stage, he began to preach, stronger than ever.

The fundamental defect of this dichotomous model is that both extremes mutually support one another. The waters of counterculture only reflect the color of the sky, after all. Just as a rebel without a cause is a no-good rebel, the politician’s platform is incomplete without his denunciations. The two extremes push and shove, shout and curse, point fingers and accuse. Where are we left after this perpetual battle of tug of war? With abraded palms and hoarse voices from screaming across a chasm we can’t bring ourselves to cross.

What option are we left with? We have shown how success in the face of criticism is the greatest triumph of them all, and that Skeletons in the Closet are little more than political toys. What has established itself as culture’s antithesis is simultaneously a reflection and a negation of its rival. I am tempted to propose a campaign of indifference and absenteeism. There is nothing more detestable than apathy. Instead of offering words of encouragement or words of dissuasion, offer no words at all. What motivation will the soldier departing for war have if his mother ceases to weep? The elimination of excited emotion and criticism quite effectively quenches fiery rebuttals.

But the practice of silent defiance and absenteeism is a very precarious one. Who is to say that in the absence of the dissenters, protestors, and critics, the void they leave behind will not be filled by the politicians and their propaganda? Will not the politicians’ propaganda grow even louder to make up for the silence of the critics? I worry that indifference makes us more vulnerable than ever. They have not been taking heed to our loud protests; we have only been shouting back in their own language. I’m curious as to when exactl, they would hear our silence.

I am afraid that this leaves us little farther than before. I am tangled in a paradox where our words cease to say anything at all, yet where silence, although impregnated with significance and purpose, leaves us defenseless. Where do we go from here?

Abject

2010-11-02T22:29:00.000-07:00

I was seventeen the first time I did it for money. They put me on a podium and mispronounced my name. The judges handed me a check and my name in ink on a certificate. I had become a commodity that they took under their sheets to devour late at night. My English teacher was proud. Augs beamed when I showed her my anthologized self and she ran her index finger down the spine of the book. Open me, buy me, won’t you? I will sell myself to you.

They congratulated me over the morning announcements. I was sitting in biology class on fish dissection day, ambivalent. My creationist biology teacher wanted to know what my short story was about. In fewer words, I told him that I had written about the tragic inevitability of the quotidian and the ravages of routine. The story was about a city overseas that I wouldn’t visit for another year and a half and hapless crowds of people whose comings and goings on the sidewalk marked the hours like clockwork. The protagonist was a lackluster engine salesman; when his artist girlfriend left him, she stole his espresso machine. He drank his coffee with cream and vanilla and didn’t know his girlfriend’s favorite flower. It was painful, predictable, the kind of story where the reader will mope a bit at the conclusion because they feel they’re supposed to, but unsure as to why. I was dissatisfied with the piece. It was shallow and it was cheap, but the judges for the creative writing contest at the local college bought it and bound it all the same.

The anthology was thinner than I had hoped, less regal, less stout. It felt limp and lifeless in my hands. When I tore off its skin, the contents were all where they were supposed to be: the fibrous pulp of memoirs, the fat of fiction, the coiled entrails of poetry winding in switchbacks across the page. It smelled like fresh ink. Words floated in the murky translucence of cheap paper and titles were stuck on like masking tape on preserving jars. I found a misplaced comma as I sorted through the bowels of my short story. I wanted to gouge it out with a scalpel.

When I read my own writing, I am often overcome by a horrifying nausea like at the first whiff of chemicals upon opening a sealed dissection bag. The sight of something so recently alive paralyzed in parallel lines makes me retch. Dry heaves claw up my gullet and threaten to expel themselves in inky splotches all over the page. I am compelled to delete, to shred, to erase the evidence of my insides exposed. Nonfiction is the worst. I lay myself down on the surgical stage, spread-eagle, palms up as I come at myself with forceps. I can see my toes; my feet are splayed like Da Vinci’s Vitruvius. Under the penetrating gaze of my writer-self, I want to find my insides clean. Clean. Clean. So clean that there won’t even be blood when I peel back my plasticized skin and pin it to the table and the page.

Writing is not butchery. It is vivisection.

I can’t stop doing it. I carve up my skin with razor blades. Adorning my past with adjectives feels like giving a name to a dissection animal. Is it sick or is it humanizing? Or perhaps the grotesque is edifying in and of itself. I tear myself to shreds to extract a memory tumor from my brain. I place it on the table, prod it, poke it, peek inside to see what I couldn’t recognize while it was still in my body. I learn about it and then put it in a jar on a shelf with my books and try not to open it again for fear of the smell.

My mind and my body can’t seem to coexist. When I write I often forget to eat, to drink. My mouth turns to cotton as I speak out of my fingertips and not my lips. I huddle inside a moment of suspension, confusing what’s real and what I want to be real. That shadow scurrying through the black hedgerows looks familiar and I fall in love again with characters I’m sure that once I knew. I dig up bygone lovers and try to remember what rain felt like sizzling on our sunburned skin. I revitalize our barren seasons, but it’s Another who relives them. My surrogate self vicariously inhabits my memories so I don’t have to.

I cannot stop writing my own autobiography, but when bits of it scare me, I become she, and an arbitrary third party buckles under my trauma, not me. Once, while blacked out in a bed in France that smelled like lavender, I explained to the paper what had happened to her. In the morning, when I woke devoid of recollection of the night before, the page told me the curious story of a girl thrust against bathroom tiles that smelled of piss and of smoke and stuck to her skin. On her purpling flesh there was bruising in patterns that followed the path of those anonymous hands. They prowled like the conquerors of a strange new land that was never theirs to explore. I slice her story into to a six-stanza poem. Her dismembered body floats in poetry, without a name, without a face. She can’t possibly be me. I have moved on; she dangles in disbelief. But I am she as you are she as you are me and we are all together.

When I write about France and its lavender kisses, I am tempted to only reconstruct the landscape that I love. I muffle the misogynistic mumbles of men and replace them with the whispers of a lesbian lover. I take the snipping sheers of poetic license and excise the poisonous parts of my memory until I barely recognize my voice in the paper-mirror. Although I remove all that makes me wretched and rotten, my body is no cleaner than before. Scalpel cuts still leave chalky scars, mocking my attempt at self-healing. My endeavors to cleanse myself leave me carved up and disfigured. My body becomes a battleground, pitted with deep-dug trenches. I cease to respect it; I objectify it, abjectify it. My body can be sold like my writing. Open me, buy me, won’t you?

I expected the girl who had been violated on bathroom tiles to wither and die on the page where I had left her. I had excised her experience from my memory and those pathetic six stanzas shouldn’t have been able to survive once severed from myself. I hated her. In the poem, she is reduced to a number. She becomes the unfortunate numerator of a fraction of the population, the dirty minority placed on a pedestal above the innocent denominator. The Assaulted. The Abused. The Victim. I make her as much of a stranger to myself as she was to him—that anonymous Moroccan man who followed her to the bathroom of the bar and barricaded her exit with his big hands that smelled of turmeric and shisha tobacco. She hadn’t consented to this.

***

Upon my return from France, my own country and my own body felt foreign to me. The English tongue gagged me. I stopped eating. I stopped speaking. It was me that was shriveling up, not her. Upon finding me huddled like a fetus on our bathroom’s tiles, my parents decided to take me to Canada. Any international border would do.

About halfway through Pennsylvania in the backseat of my family’s van, I started writing. I didn’t stop until Montréal. I could hardly write coherent sentences. I was reading Kerouac at the time and my desperate lines roamed like Sal Paradise, trying to find some concrete destination or someplace to call home. But that filthy girl kept creeping up on me, no matter where I wandered. She limped across my lines. She didn’t wither and die like I had expected her to. The words remained as bloody and bold on the page as they were when I first wrote them, blacked out in my bed in France. And much to by petrified surprise, they began to have a heartbeat of their own.

In the feverish writing that I expelled during my expatriate escape to Canada, that girl with the purpling flesh was depicted over and over again. She appeared in one story as a whore, in another as a lesbian, and in another as a victim of sexual assault. I couldn’t create enough fictionalized surrogates to keep up with my successive repulsions and repressions of that memory. My mother suggested therapy. My therapist called it post-traumatic stress disorder, which I vehemently denied despite my blackouts and nightmares and displacement and guilt. I avoided public bathrooms for months, but I still crawled back to France a year later, to that city that loves me yet damns me.

***

A summer evening the next July—the twenty-first, to be exact—I was sitting on the banks of the Rhône in Avignon, writing a short story about an encounter I once had with a prostitute in a bus stop. Each evening around ten, a camp of white vans sets up in the parking lots outside of Avignon’s ramparts. Prostitutes sit in the driver’s seat with their legs splayed on the dashboard, a red light dangling from the mirror to illuminate their cleavage and inner thighs. By midnight they drift into the bus stops and stand with their hands on their hips, their broken bodies angled in fluorescence. I used to trek through their territory on my walk home from the bars. Eventually, I grew used to the heckling, to the violating stares and gawking from café terraces, to the beer bottles hurled by boozy boys perched like vultures on the rampart walls. But I was alone once—a mistake. A prostitute wearing leather and bangles like chains howled at me in French and in gibberish. I gagged at the thought of the toils and snares that had made a wretch like her. I left her to her nightly predators.

I wanted to redeem her and to respect her body in a way that she had forgotten how to do, so I tried to write about her months after the incident. But the story was rudely hacked off in the middle of a word. As I was writing, a stranger sat down next to me on the banks of that river and told me that my eyes looked magnificent in the evening light. The tired refrain of hollow lust commanded me to gather my things and leave, but my Jeep was parked a fifteen minute walk away, and I was yet again, mistakenly, alone. There is a picture of me on his digital camera. He captured my profile without my consent as I looked away to the horizon, trying to ignore him, trying to remain calm despite his hungry eyes. When his searching fingers seized my neck I screamed at him in French and in gibberish and ran.

The story I had been writing remains unfinished. I was writing myself in circles, objectifying her every much as the men had, deconstructing her body in details, eroticizing her fingernails, her ankles, the zipper on her bodice. The last full sentence reads: “It was an outfit for fumbling fingers to remove in the dark.” The prostitute’s story is my story is ours. I hope I never finish it. It’s a case still left open for consideration. I have not yet buried that woman in her stereotyped paper grave. A sentence without a period still holds hope for redemption.

***

When I left France for the second time, I wept on the train that hurtled me north away from Avignon. I had fallen in love with a country that left purpling bruises on my skin. Upon my return to the United States, it was cloudy in Ohio and uncharacteristically chilly. My parents did their best to make me feel comfortable. They let me talk when I needed to and more often left me to my silence. I unburied my journal from the year before from where I had shelved it among a cemetery of dead authors. With the morbid fascination of a mourner at a wake, I peeked inside. That girl was still there, a forgotten orphan in her spiral-bound cradle, abandoned but still alive.

Sometimes when I sit at my keyboard she inhabits my fingers, begging to be remembered for what she is—an ostracized organ no less vital than the spleen. I can’t heal without her; I bleed without clotting, I harbor bacteria in my blood without being able to filter it. I lay myself back down on the surgeon’s stainless steel, open up my chest cavity, and put her back inside where she belongs.

Two Men on a Bench

2010-10-30T08:47:00.000-07:00

"Tell me what you see," said the blind man to the deaf man, but the latter did not respond. The blind man heard a moan from his neighbor and thought to himself, "He must be blind, like me."

The deaf man was watching the lips of his comrade, falling in the unshapely grimaces of a man who has never looked in a mirror and watched himself speak.

"What do I look like when I speak?" asked the deaf man of the blind man, gesturing with his hands in the only language he could formulate, but this latter did not respond. He continued to stare straight ahead, as though deep in thought. The deaf man sighed audibly at this lack of response, although he couldn't hear the breath between his lips.

What misfortune, thought the blind man, listening to his neighbor's breathing. Two blind men on a bench with nothing to say to one another.

He reached out and took his neighbor's hand.

Deflower

2010-05-17T16:51:00.000-07:00

Through the paneled window of the classroom door, the gentle curve of Miss Lily’s forearm could be seen, and her slender wrist, poised at the chalkboard, and her willowy fingers, grasping a piece of fresh chalk. A silver bangle slid off her wrist like an unsuccessful manacle and rested half way down her forearm where the sleek line of the limb broadened, just before soft angle of the elbow. Chalk dust powdered her delicate fingers with white, making them ashen, pale in contrast with the smooth, sun-bronzed flesh on the back of her tiny, almost infantile hands.

Her rouged lips parted slightly, like a small child’s in anticipation of a lollipop, forming a perfect “O.” A sea of first graders gazed in awe as Miss Lily drew circles on the chalkboard.

“Looonely,” said Miss Lily, reminding her students of the letters and sounds that they had learned in kindergarten, but had left behind in the languid summer days. “Moooan. Ooown. Can anyone tell me another word that has an ‘O’ sound in it?” She pursed her red lollipop lips into another circle.

Five fingers appeared sheepishly in the air from the back row.

“Yes, Michael?”

“Umm . . . nooo?”

The freckle on Miss Lily’s left cheek disappeared into a dimple as a smile blossomed across her face. “Yes! Very good. Any other ideas?”

The first graders fed off of Miss Lily’s enthusiasm, and were excited now too, spewing word confetti from jabbering mouths.

“Go!” “Home!” “Don’t!” “Show!”

Miss Lily drew the long, straight line of an “I” next to the white circles on the board.

“What about ‘I’ sounds? For example, spyyy. Miiine.”

“Bye!” “Cry!” “Die!” “Eye!”

It was only Miss Lily’s second week at Kidron Elementary School, but her students fawned over her already. They stared at her with wide, amorous eyes, absorbing her with a sycophantic gaze. At recess, the girls tried to braid her long, auburn hair while the boys tugged at her skirts for her attention.

From the hallway, through the window in the door, Principal Richard watched as first graders clambered from their miniature desks and rushed to the front of the room as Miss Lily announced the end of the day’s phonetics lesson. Groping at her feet and ankles, they encircled her, like bees on the open face of a sunflower or moths swarming around a candle at night. Crouching on their knees before her stool, the first graders looked on as Miss Lily cracked open Snow White and they clapped their hands and all chanted in unison when she got to the good parts.

“Mirror, mirror on the wall . . . “

* * *

At lunch, Jan Donnelly, the school’s secretary, sought out Miss Lily in the library. She peaked her deflated puff hairdo out from behind the stack of Hardy Boy mysteries and Miss Lily nearly choked on her carrot in surprise. Jan was a purple nails and hair spray type, with a mouth as big as her fist that she always crammed full of tic-tacs and mentos. She hated children, but had adored Principal Richard since they graduated together thirteen years back; she kept her position as the elementary school’s secretary simply so she could watch which students’ mothers he kept suspiciously long in his locked, windowless office. She marked them down in a notebook that she kept in her desk drawer, under her mints.

“He likes you, ya know,” Jan announced, flopping into the chair opposite Miss Lily’s.

Miss Lily looked up bashfully, blushing. Jan forged on despite the rosy tint blooming on the young teacher’s cheek. Miss Lily huddled a little, feeling fragile.

“I’m not sure I understand. To whom are you referring?”

“Well, Dick, dummy,” snapped Jan. She puckered her glossed lips and violently sucked her mentos. “Principal Richard! You must have noticed the way he looks at you. He comes back to the office after hallway rounds drooling so much that I swear I’ll have to mop one of these days!”

Jan leaned forward on the table and her cleavage spilled out of her v-neck blouse. Miss Lily slumped and shifted uncomfortably under Jan’s covetous stare, and she averted her eyes, examining instead the collection of Berenstain Bears books.

Undeterred, Jan launched ahead, her lecherous eyes widening. “And whenever he gets back from staff meetings he locks himself in his office for, like, twenty minutes. And we all know what that means.” She snorted and kept on sucking.

Miss Lily wasn’t sure what to make of Jan’s assertive declaration, but she felt threatened by it, and crossed her legs and pulled her cardigan a bit tighter around her shoulders, instinctively covering her protruding collarbones and the tender skin at the nape of her neck.

Principal Richard, though barely thirty, hadn’t aged well. His facial fat puddled around his chin, and grizzly bushes of chest hair poked their frizzled heads out of the top button of his dress shirts. When he wore a tie, he used it solely to wipe his armpits of their forever expanding sweat stains.

“But I shouldn’t say that, it makes him sound perverse,” Jan continued, punctuating Miss Lily’s awkward silence. “He coaches youth softball and supports the booster club and all that. He’s harmless— he wouldn’t hurt a fly. Really. He stopped fishing the way normal folks do it because he hated skewering maggots and worms, and now he just fly fishes. Cuz they don’t use real flies, you know.”

Miss Lily didn’t know. She was preoccupied with the horrific image of Principal Richard’s characteristically sweaty personage guiding a young girl’s hand on a wooden bat, teaching her how to swing strong and hit the ball.

Jan extended her pudgy fingers and plucked a carrot from Miss Lily’s plate. Between crunches, she asked, “What’s a Saratoga city slicker doing in bumblefuck Kidron, Ohio anyhow? I mean, there’s nothing here except for two hardware stores and three Mennonite churches. Hell, if you want alcohol or sex or anything you have to go the whole way to Akron, or ravage the Amish kids on rumspringa, and that’s just a drag.”

Miss Lily sighed, and looked away ruefully. “Well, there was a small situation that I felt that I needed to get away from, and Kidron seemed like a nice place to escape and relax out of the public eye for a while.”

Jan pounced. “I bet it was a man, wasn’t it? Oh, this is good. I’ve heard about those big-time horse race gamblers up in Saratoga. They treat their women like their horses. If ya don’t put out, you’re out the door like a horse with a stitch in its calf on the backstretch. Yeah, this is real good stuff.”

Silently, Miss Lily moved on from her carrots to her celery. Jan looked beyond Miss Lily’s right ear as a stocky shadow darkened the doorway.

Leaping up from the table, Jan exclaimed, “Honey, now’s your chance!” She bounded to the young teacher’s side, and whispered in her ear: “The fastest way to his heart is jelly beans. I know it. I’ll tell him to give you a call tonight.” Miss Lily crumpled, like a morning glory at the approach of the noontime sun, folding its petals into itself. Then, leaving her half-finished lunch on the table and Jan amongst the National Geographics, Miss Lily pushed wordlessly past Principal Richard’s gut in the doorway and tumbled into the hallway, then fled to her classroom.

At the end of the school day, Miss Lily bustled out the door before the last echoes of the bell had dissipated, narrowly avoiding Principal Richard’s bug-eyed attempts to flag her down to invite her to that evening’s softball tournament game. She had grown accustomed to taking the two-mile journey home by foot, but now she regretted it. The walk took Miss Lily by the ballpark, down to the crossroads that served as the village square, and past the Town and Country store where crotchety old men sat gathering dust in rickety rocking chairs in the afternoons, smoking pipes, talking about the year’s corn harvest, and jeering at children as they walked home from school. The old men whooped and hollered at Miss Lily’s smooth, lean calves that peaked out from under her sundress as she scuttled past, but went back to grumbling about the uppity New Yawker once she had gone by. Miss Lily had paid a dying farmer an exorbitant sum for an old farmhouse at the top of Emerson Hill, and allowed prime soybean soil to degenerate into a field of wildflowers.

Beyond the farmhouse’s westward facing front porch, Kidron valley stretched out in a patchwork quilt of fields. On clear evenings, the crack of a bat punctuated the sticky early September air as little legs sprinted in diamonds to the cheers of parents and Principal Richard. But Miss Lily sat inside, where the air was still and damp, behind closed doors and thick window glass, and slowly took the phone off the hook. From the softball field, where Mr. Richard’s team jumped into each other’s arms and clapped hands, celebrating that evening’s victory, Miss Lily’s house could be seen, blazing in the already darkened Eastern sky, then suddenly, like a candle, the lights snuffed out.

* * *

When Miss Lily arrived at the school the next morning, she successfully snuck past the office, but found Jan lurking by her classroom door. She followed the young teacher into the empty classroom.

“I tried to call ya last night but the phone was busy for hours. Who were you talking to for so long, huh?” Jan didn’t skip a beat to wait for a response. “No doubt that New York man. Is he gonna come down here and try to find you or what? Don’t tell Dick about him, by the way. He’s a nice guy but he’s a bit of a jealous type and it’s the envious ones that make the most trouble.”

“There’s no New York man, Miss Donnelly.”

Jan’s nose scrunched up into her closely set eyes and her bottom lip sagged stupidly. She jutted out her chin, perplexed. Then, like a baby doll whose plastic eyelids open and close when you shake it, Jan’s eyes bulged suddenly.

“You cheated on him, didn’t you? And you’re escaping his horrific, erotic wrath! That’s obviously it. No one comes to Kidron because they actually like it here.” She snickered in the falsetto of a sixth grade boy who has just learned the word “fuck,” and giggled at her own risqué fantasy. She was lingering in the doorframe where the first graders had taped up fall leaf cutouts, and looked like a floozy in a toy store. Miss Lily was becoming nauseous with disdain, and slumped into her desk chair, feeling faint.

“You feelin’ alright honey? And what’s up with the snowsuit?” Jan breached the threshold of the doorway, penetrating into the classroom, and reached out to tug on the sleeve of Miss Lily’s modest sweater. “It’s hot as blazes in here! You’re going to melt like a popsicle on the sidewalk by lunch unless you strip that heavy thing off.”

“I think I’m getting sick. I woke up this morning with the chills, and I’m afraid it might be terribly contagious,” said Miss Lily meekly, and she feigned a delicate cough.

Jan scoffed but moved a step away. “I’ll get Dick to fix something up for you,” she insisted. “He’d just love to show his sympathetic side.” She slunk out of the classroom with a wink.

Halfway through math class, Jan’s animated face appeared in the window of the classroom door, and she knocked with the enthusiasm of a carpetbagger selling cosmetics in rich suburbs. Miss Lily begrudgingly opened the door, and Jan thrust in, a mug of tea in hand.

“From Dick,” she whispered in Miss Lily’s ear as she swept past, placing the steaming mug on her desk and producing honey packets from her pocket. “And he sent some cough drops too. You’re lucky to have a sweet guy like him after you.”

Miss Lily said nothing in response but ushered the secretary out the door, claiming the pressing importance of basic addition. She let the chamomile tea set until it was too cold to drink and gave out cough drops as prizes for correct math.

On her walk home that afternoon, the rusty men stationed outside Kidron Town & Country didn’t hoot at Miss Lily as she hurried past their chairs and into the store. She was looking wet from the humidity, dripping almost, and her shiny hair was deflated, and her wide legged pants hid her sculpted legs. They shook their heads and wagged their drooping chins and commiserated, “They must not have humidity up there in Sar’toga.” When Miss Lily emerged from the store a few minutes later with a full bolt of dark blue calico fabric, they wondered if a city girl would know how to sew.

* * *

When softball season ended, the panel of old men on Kidron Town & Country’s front porch noticed the abrupt absence of their favorite object of observation. Miss Lily had stopped walking to work, knowing that Principal Richard would no longer be occupied directly after school with little girls, bats, and balls, and the walk left her feeling exposed, vulnerable. Principal Richard’s team had cleaned up the tournament season victoriously, but Miss Lily hadn’t heard the cheers from the ballpark. Instead, she was holed up in her house, sewing dark blue curtains in the pantry, the only room that didn’t have windows. The farmhouse’s wide-eyed front windows stared vacantly into the sultry night, and inside, Miss Lily pricked her fingers on needles in the dark.

Below, in the valley, the ballpark’s lights flickered then went out, and in the sticky Indian summer night little girls were treated to post-game hot dogs. Miss Lily’s phone rang and rang after the victory, and her caller ID lit up with the elementary school’s office number. She called the phone company to have them disconnect her home phone, and waited on the line until she heard the dull beep of solitude.

Miss Lily searched for Principal Richard’s address in the staff directory, and wrote it on a slip of paper that she taped to her bathroom mirror, along with his phone number and email address and the names of his closest friends and family. She poured over maps of the little village, marking streets that the man would likely be on, and at what times. With operative diligence, Miss Lily shadowed Principal Richard’s routine, from his 6:45 cup of coffee and cinnamon toast at the downtown Bliss Café, to his afternoon pit stop at Kidron Town & Country to jabber with the men in their rocking chairs, and to the houses of his friends, where he played and lost at poker. On Tuesday, it was Doug’s, where the wife served chip dip and didn’t let them stay past ten-thirty. Thursday’s Bud Light and football explained the lack of Friday morning meetings. On Sundays, he fished. Miss Lily tracked his movements, and put ostensible stars on the map to demarcate his stomping ground.

When Miss Lily knocked on Jan’s door while Principal Richard was away at an administrative meeting, the secretary was delighted to usher her in. Autumn parent-teacher conferences were fast approaching, and Miss Lily had become morbidly obsessed with the contents of the notebook that Jan kept in her desk drawer. Miss Lily could no longer stand to look at her first graders without knowing which of their mothers had grasped the worn leatherette of Principal Richard’s belt, or burrowed their lips into his glutinous neck.

“Getting jealous, huh?” said Jan with a wink and a nudge.

Miss Lily flipped open the notebook, and read aloud with a trembling voice. “January 28th, meatball sub day, Ms. Hampshire (formerly Mrs. Withrich), suspicious scraping chairs sounds and a misplaced woman’s watch. April 17th, English as a Second Language testing, Miss Ruiz (mother of Amber Ruiz), candle-induced fire alarm, blamed on faulty microwave popcorn. June 3rd, Field Day, Mrs. Wilson (head of PTO Classroom Mothers Committee), missing order of popsicles, whipped cream, and waterslide lubricant.” Miss Lily flicked through the pages with the voracity of a teenage boy peeping at a stolen porn magazine in a gas station bathroom. She simply couldn’t stop reading. Jan looked on with pride, and her lips twisted into
a proprietary smirk.

* * *

When Miss Lily’s Honda pulled into Lehman’s Hardware’s parking lot across the square from Kidron Town & Country, the white heads nearly spilled out of their rocking chairs with surprise. For weeks, they had only seen her car zoom through the intersection and head up Emerson Hill even before the busses had come by. They missed her cleavage and sundresses and calves and small hands. Although the autumn weather was still warm, Miss Lily appeared wearing black dress pants and a turtleneck, and her hair was tied back in a bun. Bug-eyed sunglasses hid most of her face. Miss Lily emerged from the hardware staggering under the weight of a stack of square-cut mirrors, and drove off again, leaving the old men rocking and wondering and watching as her car snaked up Emerson Road to her house on the hill.

The hoary old men had been right—Miss Lily couldn’t sew. The unfinished curtains lay crumpled in a pile in the pantry, where she had sat for nights on end, bleeding on the fabric as she clumsily attempted to make neat stitches in the calico. Miss Lily was beginning to feel claustrophobic in the pantry amongst her dwindling supply of canned vegetables and now nearly empty stock of fresh fruit. If she couldn’t block out the penetrating night and its peering eyes, she need some way to ensure her security within her own house. Miss Lily banished dark alcoves and blind corners, and set up mirrors to illuminate every nook. While standing at the sink, she could now see into the shower, and from the kitchen table she had a view of the back porch. She lined the baseboard of her bedroom with mirrors, so she could chase monsters out from under her bed without even having to get down on her knees.

With a simple trick of light, Miss Lily was replicated a hundred times over. She caught a glimpse of her facial profile while turning a corner, and her own reflection followed her up the stairs to her bedroom. In this new house of mirrors, she was fascinated by curves of her body that she had never seen before. Pulling off her turtleneck, Miss Lily found an indentation in the small of her back, where her spine met her slender hips. Undressing in the mirror, she examined her hamstrings, the backs of her kneecaps, the curvature of her neck. Miss Lily wondered at the translucency of her skin, now pale and powdery, ashen from the abrupt lack of exposure to sunlight. Her limbs, once lean, were now skeletal, and her elbows jutted out at broken angles. Miss Lily pursed her unglossed lips, and watched herself unsuccessfully flirt with her reflection, but was afraid to touch her fragile skin with fingers now coarse and worn.

Miss Lily’s bedroom window framed her body as she turned, around and around, on tiptoe like a ballerina in a music box. A newly born Narcissus on a pedestal, Miss Lily was absorbed in scrutiny and examination. Although the black night thrust licentiously against her closed windows, Miss Lily could not see out into the night. The stars blinked, unseen in the velvety sky, and the season’s last fireflies flashed invisibly in the dark. From an anonymous tree, an owl peered through the darkness, searching for his prey, and hooted mournfully in the midnight stillness. Night crawlers slithered through the field of wildflowers and poked their serpentine heads out from under the front porch. Moths with dusty wings flew kamikaze missions into the closed windows and fell with soft thuds onto the roof. The vine of a moonflower crept up the columns of the porch, and unfolded its petals, opening like a full-mouthed snowy kiss to the moon, and invited the thousand eyes of the night to the glowing house on the hill, to watch.

Note to the House-Sitter

2010-05-10T20:00:00.001-07:00

14 March 2010
Sunday

Maria:

Please do not make yourself comfortable. Or if you do, I would ask that you re-fluff the pillows upon leaving the couch. The muslin cotton throw pillows sit at a 60 degree angle to each arm of the couch and the slightly smaller yellow ones rest on top of that, at a pleasantly skewed angle that appears both spontaneous and aesthetic. Symmetry is imperative. You will find a protractor in the top drawer of the bureau in the dining room, next to the tubes of Tide-to-Go. Both can be used accordingly, although I would prefer that the occasion not arise where their utilization should become necessary.

I suppose you can eat, provided that you do the dishes. I’m sorry, but you will have to wash them by hand. I disposed of my last dishwasher because it continually left streaks on my glasses and plates, despite the overzealous promises of detergent commercials. I keep latex gloves under the sink. Please discard them after every use. If you must cook, I would ask that you promptly and thoroughly throw out all leftovers in the garbage disposal; eight-legged armies are attracted to the stench of decomposing food like warriors to the scent of blood. If a spider should appear in my kitchen or elsewhere, kill it immediately. Have no compassion for God’s mutant bastard child. The little beasty must and will die. And do not dare to drink alcohol in or around my house.

I understand that you will be busy attending class during the day, but there are a few chores that I would like you take care of around the house. It is absolutely necessary that you water my hyacinths. I will be showing them in a few weeks as an example of winter bulb forcing at the Spring Flora Expo, and I want to take any and all precautions. If my reputation should deteriorate among the Ohio Creative Design community, my freelance flower arrangement business will be irrevocably damaged. Please understand the gravity of this situation. Maria, I am counting on you. The temperature in the back sewing room must not exceed 55 degrees—leave the door closed at all times to prevent heat from the house from entering. The pots should be rotated 180 degrees every two days, to ensure a straight stem. Leave the pots on the sewing table, in indirect sunlight. On Tuesday, add one tablespoon of half-strength household plant fertilizer to each pot. The fertilizer can be found under the bathroom sink, with the OxyClean and Peroxide and Ammonia.

In addition to the upkeep of my hyacinths, and any other small household tasks that you should find necessary in order to keep the house in the state in which you found it, there are one or two small errands that I would like for you to complete throughout the week. My dry cleaning should be ready on Wednesday evening. If you receive a somewhat indiscernible phone message from a man with a thick Indian accent, it is more than likely Mr. Arundhati, calling to tell me that my clothes are done. If he asks about the stain on my bathrobe, tell him it was wine. Also, garbage collection day is Thursday. If at all possible, keep watch for the garbage truck, and bring in my trashcans immediately after they are emptied. The Johnson boys have a tendency to steal them, fill them with bricks and/or dog shit, or light their contents on fire.

While on the subject of the small devils that live next door, I should warn you of a few things (besides incinerated trash). The Middleburgh Intermediate School bus arrives at approximately 3:04 on Monday–Thursday, and tends to be delayed slightly on Fridays. Once the two twats get home, their negligible mother gives them sugar and casts them out to the backyard, where they yell and scream and hammer things and generally make a childish ruckus. If they should shout unpleasant things over the fence (ie: “hag,” “fag,” or other rhyming words), ignore it. Do not egg them on, and do not appease them. If they throw baseballs at the birdbath or the gnomes in the backyard, do not throw them back.

I’m afraid my humble abode doesn’t offer much entertainment. The collection of leather-bound 19th century novels in the salon is not for reading, it is for display. I dust their jackets weekly, usually on Wednesday. The books for actual consumption are kept in my bedroom, in alphabetical order on my bookcase. Although my DVD collection is significantly smaller, I would ask that you likewise maintain its organization. You will not find embarrassing home videos, or sex tapes, or boxes of love letters, or filing cabinets of classified family secrets. If you are looking for voyeuristic amusement, you will find none. I can, however, offer you free access to an extensive hoard of Julie Andrews movies and a complete collection of Jane Austin novels.

On Friday evening/Saturday morning, at between 1:55 and 2:05 A.M., you will receive a distraught call from a man named Jimmy. If it is not too much to ask, please make arrangements to pick him up at O’Neill’s pub on Republic Ave. Deposit my wayward brother at his tenant on 186 Montgomery St. and please verify that he has his keys. It’s just a short 5-mile drive, and he shouldn’t be too bothersome. Ignore the stench of cheap Merlot—there is Lysol in the glove compartment. If he tries to bring a cup or a bottle into the car, I absolutely forbid it after last weekend’s spill. If he notices that you are not me (a detail which he very well may not discern), do not tell him where I am. Inform him that I will be back next week, and remind him that he owes me $120 for upholstery cleaning. If you should feel uncomfortable with this request, I have also left the number for the taxi service on the counter. Call around midnight on Friday night, and give them the same instructions as I have detailed here.

I have left my contact information on the counter. As I will be running around all week finalizing decorative and floral arrangements for Alie’s wedding, my cell phone is the best bet. If need be, you can also contact the hotel and leave a message for the Miller wedding party. I will be back from D.C. late Sunday evening, the 21st of March. In preparation for my return, please strip the sheets from the guest bed and change the towels in the bathroom. Fresh sheets and towels can be found in the upstairs hallway linen closet. Travelling fries my nerves, and there is nothing more soothing than a tidy house.

Maria, I thank you genuinely for your help. I am thoroughly excited to see my baby sister get married, and your generosity and diligence make it possible. Just please do not neglect the hyacinths.

Best regards,
Helen Miller

Vivisection

2010-05-09T11:08:00.000-07:00

I have sprouted glassy feathers, and someone is plucking them out of my left arm, one by one. This must be what a duck feels like at the butcher, bound up, strapped down, stripped naked, and shivering. Although I always assumed they were dead beforehand. Why am I not dead yet?

She is coming at me with forceps, and when the blunt tips press into my flesh, I become acutely aware that I cannot move my arms. Coarse fabric digs grooves into my ankles and wrists. My shoes have been removed. I can see my toes, my feet; they are splayed like Da Vinci’s Vitruvius, and my palms face the ceiling. Someone has slit my shirt down the center and it is stripped away from my chest, spread out to my sides like delicately removed skin from a corpse on an autopsy table.
This is not butchery; this is vivisection.

My skull throbs and pulses and I blink my eyes in the fluorescent light, running in parallel lines above my immobile head. When Jeanne took me to the Anatomy Amphitheater at the university medical center on Wednesday to practice for her presentation, I joked with her and lay down spread-eagle on the surgical table on stage. Far above, flies ingloriously committed suicide, flying kamikaze missions into the buzzing fluorescent lights. She yelled at me and told me not to ridicule the medical profession.

“It’ll save your life one day, you know!”

Jeanne was always chastising me—for my crooked tie, for my liquored breath, for my mussed hair, for my unpolished shoes. Even so, she wanted me to come to her dissertation presentation. I promised I’d sit in the back and not make a fuss. But I wanted to touch the table where the bodies lay.

I didn’t want to be the body.

I force my eyes open and widen my mouth into the perfect oval for a blood-curdling scream. I’m not dead yet! But stiff pads press into my temples and I cannot tilt my head back. No oxygen reaches my lungs. The woman in white is still depluming me.

The straps around my wrists tighten as I tense my muscles and try to move them, and the woman looks up, startled. She wipes her white smock with pudgy fingers and stares at me with terrified green eyes from under wisps of ginger hair.

“You’re . . . awake! They said you were unconscious and it’s just a short drive and, and . . . uh, what’s your name, sir?”

She sets her forceps down with a clank and loses her balance. The table lurches and my weight shifts painfully onto my left side. The tubes attached to my arms are swinging rhythmically; I realize that I am moving. We have just turned a corner. A siren is whining in my ears, ringing, exhausted.

“Will I be late?” I croak. Moving my tongue to speak I notice that my teeth are warm and sticky. There is a hole where my
front tooth goes. Wincing, I bare my sanguine grin.

“We’ll be there soon, don’t worry.” She tells me I’ll be alright, but her tone is unconvincing. She scuttles about my horizontal body with her tools. From her deep pocket she produces gauze, and attacks my forehead with a wet rag and peroxide.

“What’s your name?” the woman in white wants to know. “Can you tell me who you are? Do you know how you got here?”

When I don’t answer, she tells me an elaborate tale about rainclouds and puddles, skidding and brake lights, windshields and steering wheels. The details tumble hurriedly from her mouth and plop like raindrops somewhere beyond my consciousness, sending ripples through my nerves as she swabs my forehead with alcohol. She dictates like a police report, without adjectives, without feeling, although her eyes widen as she speaks, as though she is frightened by the very story she is reciting. An eastbound, silver Honda CRV skidded through a red light on icy pavement and broadsided a maroon ’98 Volvo heading northbound on Westchester Avenue at approximately 10:10 Friday morning. The driver of the Volvo was rendered unconscious upon impact. Significant bodily damage was inflicted upon both vehicle and operator.

I have a Volvo. My uncle lent it to me after I maneuvered my Nissan into a ditch after a particularly heavy Saturday night out. He never liked the color of that old car.

“Do you know where you are?” asks the woman.

I am not in my Volvo. My Volvo’s plush upholstery smells stale like cigarettes and its wide backseat smells sweaty like sex, not sterile like bleach and steel. I keep condoms and registration and a map of the Midwest in my glove compartment, not tubes and forceps.

The woman in white is leaning over me, pulling open my eyelids. I am briefly blinded; she must be searching in my brain for something. I wonder what she sees.

I have a sneaking suspicion that I will not be on time for Jeanne’s dissertation presentation. It starts at 11.

“Will I be late?” I ask again. My words are slurring but I can’t help it. My lips won’t open fully, my teeth aren’t set straight. My tongue lags behind in the back of my throat, and I fear I might vomit on the woman in white.

Jeanne will assume that I had been drunk, that I’d gone overboard on a Thursday night again, that I hadn’t woken up to my alarm. But I wasn’t. Not this time. I swear.

“Will I be late?”

My body lurches to the right, and the woman in white nearly tumbles on top of me. She is shaking my shoulder, harder than I suppose she should.

“What’s your name? Stay with me, honey, I want you to tell me your name!”

I want to be Jeanne, but I am not. I press my eyelids shut again. They are sticky and cool as they sweep up and down over my swelling eyeballs. My contracting esophagus compels me gag, to expel from my stomach this morning’s breakfast, last night’s nightcap, yesterday evening’s dinner. I want to rid my body of its contents, of its toxins and alcohol and cigarette smoke. My lips sag open and spittle collects on the corners of my mouth like unused excuses.

“Will I be late?”

When I lie, feet out, palms up, spread-eagle under Jeanne’s penetrating gaze, I want her to find me clean. Clean. Clean. So clean that there won’t even be blood when she approaches me with forceps and scalpel and pins.

Helium

2010-04-26T21:10:00.000-07:00

Peter’s red balloon had stopped to chat with the whispering leaves of the poplar tree before floating away in pursuit of the soft September afternoon sunshine, its yellow ribbon trailing lackadaisically behind. Earth-bound Peter looked to the sky in lamentation, and tugged on his father’s flannel shirtsleeves. Jack Hamelin was tall, and Peter was convinced that if his father stood up and stretched out, he could retrieve the red balloon that was shrinking into a speck in the sky. Peter was afraid it might disappear entirely into the clouds if his father didn’t reach out soon and seize the yellow ribbon that was trembling in the breeze as though afraid of heights.

“Peter,” said Jack, not looking up, not looking down. “I need to explain something to you, and it might be difficult to understand right now.”

The yellow ribbon had gotten tangled with a curious raven, and briefly bobbed, suspended in blue. Peter leaned back on the park bench where they were sitting, engrossed by the action above.

“Your mother and I,” Jack continued, “we’ve been going through a lot of rough patches lately.”

The raven flapped away, squawking nevermore, and the red balloon resumed its path to the sun. Peter swung his legs from the bench, his Converse brushing the tips of the grass and sending feathery bursts of dandelion seeds into the air.

“I know things haven’t been the best at home these last few months—it’s not fair to you, Peter.”

Fair. Fairness was the virtue of the month for September in Peter’s kindergarten class—after August’s Truth but before October’s Compassion.

“In a few weeks, your mother and I are not going to be living together anymore.”

The red balloon vanished entirely behind Jack’s left ear.

“Son, your mother and I are getting a divorce.”

Peter contemplated the now empty sky and rearranged the syllables of this new foreign word in his mouth. It had taken Peter longer to learn how to read than his peers; while they grappled cardboard books with sticky fingers he constructed words out of building blocks with letters and sounds painted on the front. He put the sounds of the word “divorce” together and took them back apart again. Die-verse like awful rhymes in a poem about death. Divers like in the summer Olympics, leaping from high platforms into the watery abyss below. Da Force like Yoda used in Star Wars to make his enemies tremble with fear. The syllables of the word tumbled senselessly on his tongue.

When Jack looked down at Peter, the boy had tears collecting in the corners of his eyes. Jack briefly thought that his son had actually understood what he had been told, and he gathered the little boy into an embrace. Peter snuggled his nose into flannel and smoke.

When he looked up from his father’s grasp, Peter’s forehead was scrunched in contemplation. His mouth opened into the prefatory grimace that precedes the inarticulate questions that formulate in children’s minds. His lips pulled apart, exposing two gaping holes where teeth should have been.

“Where do lost balloons go when they float away? Do they ever come back?” Peter asked his father.

Jack looked down at his son’s watery eyes, pleading for comfort in the only way a five-year-old knows how. “Lost balloons carry dreams to little boys at night,” he responded, and Peter wondered what red dreams looked like.

“Would you like some ice cream?” asked Jack, consoling his son in the only way a thirty-two year old man who had never intended to have children knows how. He even let his son splurge with a chocolate-dipped waffle cone, and Da Force drifted from Peter’s mind and joined the ranks of the red balloon amongst the gathering clouds.

“Superman with SPRINKLES!” announced Peter proudly to the aproned ice cream man, and pointed eagerly to the waffle cone in the window. He took a wide lick and stuck out his tongue to show his father the melting rainbow in his mouth.

By the time Peter had devoured his ice cream, sprinkles, and cone and all, he wanted to know what Da Force was.

Jack hesitated. “Well, when two people love each other very much, they decide to spend their lives together, and they get married.”

It was mostly true—Jack remembered loving Hannah. In high school she had kept printed portraits of Wollstonecraft and Woolf in her locker and kept her mousy brown hair cropped close to her head. Regardless, she was elected May Queen in the spring of her senior year, and her slender, boyish hips and hollow cheeks photographed well. She spoke about gender equality in her speeches, and Jack found her naïve feminism endearing and strangely erotic. Jack did not share the same fiery activism as his wife; he was simple, but sincere, and the unattainable feminist found him charming. Hannah didn’t believe in marriage, but the two fell sloppily in love when they both turned twenty-one, and married the year after.

“But then, sometimes, two people grow up and grow apart,” continued Jack, struggling with the concept and the wording.

While Hannah had completed a master’s degree in Social Work and went on to rescue little girls from abusive parents, Jack stayed home and raised Peter. Although the East Side of Cleveland kept Hannah busy with humanitarian work, the deteriorating city was not big enough to accommodate yet another enthusiastic but mediocre musician. Jack had dreamed of being a drummer, and although he thrived in the classroom and in the quiet, secure studio, he lingered on the periphery of the self-destructive lifestyle of his more liberal peers at Oberlin. He brought them water backstage when his classmates’ bands toured northern Ohio, and picked up broken drumsticks, and repaired frayed cables. When his friends skipped class to arrange chaos in parallel lines, snorting white through Washington and dousing their artistic fervor with wine, Jack would lend them his carefully scribed lecture notes. Having smothered his own musical passion in college, Jack gave up and instead trained to be a fireman, extinguishing other people’s fires.

“Then two people who were once happy together begin to fight a lot, and sometimes they just can’t work it out. And at this point they decide it might be best to separate,” explained Jack.

Separate. Like corn from mashed potatoes. Or lips, and fingers, and legs. And boys and girls bathrooms.

“And although they used to care very much about each other, they let their love go, and it just . . . drifts away.”

Peter wasn’t sure what love looked like, but if it were anything like helium, it would float away like an unattended balloon and make your voice squeak when you suck it in. But everything comes back eventually—dogs that run away, boomerangs, mosquito bites, letters to the North Pole, and even lost balloons. Da Force didn’t seem so bad.

That night, Hannah came home late from taking care of other people’s troubled children, and while they waited for her, Jack and Peter sat on the floor of the living room listening to old vinyl records and drumming on the carpet. Despite his own abandoned attempts at musical eminence, Jack still harbored a secret desire that his son, although not terribly bright at schoolwork, could be instructed in classic rock. While Peter pounded the floor with unintentional syncopation and wailed like Robert Plant, Jack glossed the greats—The Stones, Zeppelin, Floyd, Hendrix—referring to them by their surnames only like old friends, the kind you’d call up and invite for dinner. Peter liked Ringo’s beats the best since they were easy to follow, and he always requested that his father put on The Beatles first. They made it through the 1960s and had moved into the early 70s before Hannah arrived home. Hendrix was unexpectedly suffocated by her furrowed brows, and the house fell silent and still.

At the dinner table, Peter sat between Hannah and Jack, and watched the tennis match of growing resentment between his parents. He observed in subsequence his mother’s slicked back bun and his father’s wavy layers, her gin and his cognac, her tightly drawn lips and his scornfully squinted eyes, her calculated bites and his hungry mouthfuls. Hannah had made Peter’s favorite meal: barbequed pulled pork sandwiches with baked beans and fresh strawberries on the side. But the beans were runny tonight, too hastily made, oozing across his plate until the strawberries were puddled in sauce, and seeping into the corner of the sesame seed bun. Peter tried to build a wall out of his knife and spoon to keep them separate.

Like boys and girls. Mothers and fathers.

When Peter pushed away his plate having barely touched the baked beans, Hannah grew suspicious.

“Not hungry, Petey?” asked his mother, thinly veiling sharp agitation with the soft professional tone she used with her clients.

“Daddy let me get a chocolate dipped waffle cone AND sprinkles at the park today after school! And a red balloon but it floated away. . .” Peter stuck out his tongue again, hoping the rainbow was still there to show his mother. She told him to close his mouth, and turned violently to Jack.

“Ice cream, eh? Are you trying to bribe him? Get him on your side?”

“Me? Strawberries aren’t even in season, Hannah. And you don’t eat pork!”

Peter had been enjoying Da Force until his mother abruptly ordered him away from the table to take a bath and go to bed. When he protested, Jack fee fi fo fumed him, telling him that the giant at the top of the beanstalk would smell him out and turn him into a soup unless he was squeaky clean. Peter sulked upstairs.

When Jack still hadn’t come into Peter’s bedroom to read him a story two hours later, Peter decided it must have been the bubble castle he left popping in the bathtub. His mother especially hated when he did that; she would stoop to her knees on the tile and attack the tub with yellow-gloved hands and mumble angry interjections about rings and porcelain under her breath.

Peter lay on top of his blankets, watching the spider that had been slowly making its way across his ceiling navigate the canyon between two tiles. He waited for his purple raisin skin to unwrinkle and waited for his father to appear at his door, with the big book of Grimm’s Fairy Tales they had been devouring one by one for months despite Hannah’s disapproval. Secretly, the stories frightened Peter, although he liked the cadence of his father’s voice and the whisper of a page turning. Tonight, Jack had promised his son the tale of the Pied Piper, but he never came. Da Force had lured Peter with promises and ice cream and walks in the park, but led him to naught but lukewarm bathwater and bedtimes without stories.

From downstairs, Peter could hear the gruff sound of his father’s reading voice—the one he reserved for the villains’ lines or bits about monsters—although it was faster now, louder, more syncopated, echoing up the stairs and bounding into Peter’s open bedroom door. Hannah’s harsh tongue chased Jack’s fiendish words with a whip and a tongue-lashing. She rebuked Jack’s retaliation with the same sharp, reproachful tone she used when Peter pinched her in the car or when he asked her embarrassing questions about body parts in public.

“You’re a fucking selfish feminist poser!” snarled Jack.

Barbequed pulled pork sounds squelched against the wall.

“And you’re a child playing fireman!” accused Hannah.

Something crashed.

The sound of Hannah’s heels on the kitchen floor was riveting. It moved from left to right beneath Peter’s head, cyclically, backwards and forwards like Zeppelin records on his father’s turnstile.

Peter was dozing off to the escalating sound of the grim drama downstairs, but he was afraid to fall asleep. Usually, his mother would come in and flatten his tousled hair, wavy like his father’s, kiss him good night, and wish him sweet dreams before switching off the light. Lying awake in the buzzing fluorescent glow of his overhead light, Jack was afraid the sweet dreams wouldn’t come.

Since it seemed as though his mother wouldn’t be coming up to tuck him into bed, Peter resolved to call for his dreams himself. He would be a big boy, taking charge. Peter made a clearing in the Star Wars action figures that were arranged on his dresser, and clambered up the knobs on the drawers and sat among them, a pajama-clad Gulliver amongst miniature ewoks and storm troopers. He leaned out the open window, stretching his head far into the darkness, leaving his decapitated body stretched out precariously on the sill. Satellites and airplanes and constellations above were confused for wandering balloons, scouring the neighborhood roofs below, searching for little boys waiting for dreams. Cicadas hummed in the trees, their songs shrill with helium. Peter waited for the yellow ribbon tail of his red balloon to stretch across the night sky, but this time he would leap out and snag it, although his father had failed to do so earlier. Peter wasn’t afraid of heights like the quivering yellow ribbon seemed to be. He just wasn’t sure if he had enough love in him to be able to float.

The Stranger

2010-04-23T11:55:00.000-07:00

When I met Sheila for the first time she was wearing a crimson stocking cap, a silly looking thing that must have been knit by my mother-in-law. It had red balled tassels that hung down at her forehead like a head wound, obscuring her eyes. She refused to take it off. When Tamara tried, Sheila wailed as though wounded, waving her tiny fists in the air in the most obstinate show of anger that a five-month-old infant could possibly muster. My wife had told me in letters that Sheila had quite the temper, although she certainly didn’t inherit it from me. She would hold her breath until her little plump body turned purple, and then tighten her muscles in a sort of defiant rigor mortis. Sheila was throwing a fit at the airport the day I met her, and when I reached out to kiss her pale forehead, pushing aside the tassels of the hat, she was lying stiff as a board in her mother’s arms.

Tamara and I had been married for two years before I left for Iraq. At the time we were childless but still happy, and when the fat letter came with the inescapable date and time of my departure, we rationalized that it was as good a time as ever for me to go. We knew this would happen. She was the kind of strong military wife who sent DVDs and pop culture magazines to soldier-husbands overseas, to remind them what swimming pools and neon lights looked like while they were surrounded by an invariable sea of sandy grey. She could handle distance, and blood, and fear. When I finally returned, she threw a huge party—my in-laws and my father and my brother and their wives all came over, with hamburgers and smiles for grilling and Happy Family photographs. She kept the crepe paper and banner up for days after the party, and framed the picture of my father shaking my hand at the airport and placed it on the mantle, as if to remind me that I was home, and in case I forgot that he was proud.

My father, although never in the military himself, had been in the police academy with my commander, and had the same fierce pride of a military man. Lt. Col. Chessani and my father were both strong men with wide shoulders that passed time talking about artillery and hypothetical military strategy. When I was young, my father made it an annual tradition to take my two brothers and me to the Dayton Air Force Museum. We would speed North across the Ohio River in his cop car, and to give my brothers and me a thrill, my father would sometimes turn on his lights and zoom through intersections illegally. We made it to Dayton every year in record time. On the way home, giddy with testosterone and babbling in a militaristic lexicography, we would stop at the Wolf Creek Gun Club, and pretend to be marines, shooting down imaginary adversaries that popped wearily back up after every round of fire. Although I was the youngest of three boys, I always had the fastest and most accurate shot of us all. I imagined myself as a sharpshooter, and I think my father did too. He beamed when I brought home enlistment papers for the Marines after my senior year of high school.

When I left for Iraq, Tamara didn’t know that she was nearly two months pregnant. She told me the news shortly after, and I wasn’t there to hug her gently and kiss her forehead, like I wished I could have done. I was in a small tent where sand whipped between my cheek and the phone and got between my teeth when my jaw dropped at the word. I wanted to shout, and grin, and cry, and stamp my feet and dance, but Chessani was counting minutes and observing me, so I simply nodded slowly as if she could see me, and whispered that I would be home soon.

She decided to move back in with her parents when she found out that she was pregnant. The house we shared felt too small for her expanding belly. Every day she sat at her parents’ old kitchen table, counting days and counting stretch marks, and writing letters to tell me about the size of her stomach and the daily news. She watched television at dinner and read newspapers in the bathtub, and wrote me things about my own division—the 3rd Battalion of the 1st Marines—that even I didn’t know. Tamara’s letters read like an adventure novel, and she made crawling through dirt on my elbows and standing guard under the incessant sun sound heroic. But I didn’t want to read about my own life—I wanted to hear about her insatiable cravings for watermelon (the evidence of which was dribbled on the stationary) or listen to her complain about sewing elastic into her jeans. I saw round, barren hills explode before my eyes in Iraq, but I never felt my baby kick.

Tamara started to worry about me soon after I returned home from my deployment. She was afraid I wasn’t bonding with Sheila like I should, and that our only daughter would grow up with a stranger for a father. At night sometimes I would creep into Sheila’s nursery, and watch the flannel ducklings on her pajamas rise and fall with the steady rhythm of her breathing. The moonlight was spilling onto Sheila’s crib, casting her figure in a white, phosphoric glow. In the strange light her skin peeled away from her small frame and lay in disjointed shadows, sloughing off her fingers like gloves. When I went to pick up her segmented body I was surprised how pale she was. My brazen hand, callous and hardy from wind and metal rifles scorching in the sun enveloped her ashen cheek. We were not of the same flesh, she and I.

She woke at my touch and her wide black eyes stared past my own with no hint of recognition. She drew her thin lips into a ghastly frown, turning down the corners of her pleasantly plump cheeks. A cobweb of spittle stretched between her gums when she tilted her head back, filling her lungs with oxygen before the inevitable scream. Tamara came running when she heard shrieks, punctuating the silence like bullet holes, and took Sheila from my arms. She knelt by the crib making shooshing noises, and I crept outside to the porch.

After a few weeks, the colorful crepe paper and the banner came down. My father’s eyes in the photograph mocked me from the mantle as I sat in front of the television in the afternoon. Tamara stopped listening to the news at home. Her eyes begged to know what we, the 3/1, had done, if the reports were really true. Had soldiers from my unit really forced citizens from their blazing homes in the Jolan District, then butchered them with calculated precision on their doorsteps? No, Tamara, we did not. I was there, I saw it all.

While storming into Fallujah I fancied myself a hero, finally a true member of the “Thundering Third,” and when the Arab rushed at me from the door to his home, gun in hand, I aimed and shot with the same deadly precision as I had at old Wolf Creek. I was surrounded by my brothers as they rushed past, muttering curses and crying prayers through dirty masks.

The amount of blood surprised me. The Arab wobbled and fell back, like my limbless rubber enemies of old, but he didn’t stand back up. A red doppa grew from the crown of his head, oozing into a keffiyeh on the doorstep where he lay. Young children dragging toddlers by the forearm and women carrying infants were spewing from the entrance of the house, rushing over the Arab, over his expanding bloody cap, over his still, swollen chest. A little girl with bare feet tripped on his outstretched, empty hands, and knelt over his purple face shrieking “Abi!” until her mother came and swept the child out of her father’s blood. Fiery tongues flicking from the doorway to the house lapped at the puddle collecting on the doorstep.

The leaves on trees don’t change color in Fallujah, they just wave to the shamal in the summer and bow to the heavy rains in the winter. In early November, the palm trees were shaking off the dust of the dry season’s prevailing winds and preparing themselves for the torrential downpour of the next five months. In 2004, we set fire to the trees. Their tips glowed in sanguine reds, and sulfuric yellows, and burnt oranges. We brought them autumn, and we brought them freedom. That’s what Chessani told us.

Once home, I took to spending my evenings on the doorstep, picking out familiar sights in the landscape—the cracked concrete slabs in my neighbor’s driveway, the scattered glass of a broken beer bottle in the gutter, the fat, grooved tires of the cars lining the street. Barren tree limbs groped at smoky winter clouds and somewhere a siren wailed. I was comforted by the drone of an airplane above, and by the whimpering of a chained dog in a kennel nearby. Inside, a child wept.

Ennui

2010-04-16T07:31:00.000-07:00

I don’t want anyone to know that the real reason that I’m sitting alone at my cluttered desk at 3:47 on a Tuesday afternoon, contemplating suicide, is because I am bored. Boredom, although I’m sure it has killed lots of people, is simply not an acceptable motive for suicide. Unfortunately, pistol loaded and pen in hand, I cannot think of anything more exciting to write.

My wastebasket is littered with crumpled pieces of stationary that I borrowed from work on Monday. The letterhead is mocking me, and even in my most inspired moments of desolate prose, my suicide note reads like a pre-pubescent attempt at melodrama. My boredom leaks through my pen and onto the shallow lines.

If it can be judged from my utter failure to compose a suitable farewell to my family and friends, my life will be posthumously remembered as tedious. I have always been a diligent student, and a loyal employee, and a faithful husband, but after roughly 36 years of existence, I’ve come to the conclusion that diligence, loyalty, and faithfulness hardly amount to success.

My inexhaustible dedication to academia during my undergraduate studies merited me a grant for graduate work in New York City’s supposedly flourishing magazine industry. I had earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism at a respectable yet relatively unheard of college in rural Ohio, and my Director of Studies himself shook my hand and patted my back in a paternalistic way, congratulating me on my “superior placement.” Dr. Briggs will never know that the internship and later the full time position that I soon landed with Ornithology Monthly had nothing to do with my magazine publishing prowess nor my particular interest in birds. Taking note of my impeccable grades in university level Latin, my boss had simply hired me as a copy editor as a solution to certain loyal readers’ irate responses to the repeated misspellings of scientific names.

But even my unquestioning devotion to my bat-brained boss at the magazine could not grant me job security, nor could it save me from the inevitable embarrassment of having to list “Ornithology Monthly, copy editor, 1996-1999” under “Work Experience” on my resume. When the magazine went out of business three years after I started working there, I conceded to take a temporary position as a mail carrier in a nearby New Jersey suburb at the suggestion of my then fiancée, Amy. The former postmaster of said town had perished suddenly when the mail truck slid off the road on an icy day in a desperate attempt to faithfully deliver the daily mail to summit of the town’s single hill. The town council, comprised mostly of the city across the harbor’s failed politicians and seasoned veterans of local affairs, voted overwhelmingly to return to the quaint tradition of delivering mail on foot in order to preserve the lives of its mail carriers. The ordinance has not been overruled since I accepted the job eleven years ago, and each day, I walk with my mailbag to the top of the very same hill that killed my unfortunate predecessor.

It would be unjust to blame the hill itself for my current state of affairs, although as I again toss crumpled US Post Office stationary into the corner, I can’t think of anything better to write. I want to detail the absurd tedium of dragging a full mailbag to the summit of this goddamn city on a hill, only to see my efforts tumble to the valley below each evening, where the next day’s gossip and news and letters collect in piles, waiting for my delivery.

This morning I did not go to work for the first time in six years. The last time I missed unannounced was in 2004 when I had to rush Amy to emergency room, as she was suffering the miscarriage of our daughter that was never born. We have not tried to have children since. I cannot blame missing work on a son having the flu, or a daughter’s field trip to the Metropolitan art museum, or a niece’s theatrical production of Little Women. This morning, I just wanted to sit at home and eat buttery popcorn for breakfast (Amy hates when I do that—she swears I always leave oily fingerprints on the freshly cleaned counter) and watch Paul Newman dig holes and then refill them in Cool Hand Luke.

Before leaving early this morning for work, Amy, in her infinite kindness, cut out today’s Charlie Brown cartoon and left it by my orange juice, like she does every morning. She says that she sees a bit of my faithfulness and dedication in the personage of Charlie, and always reminds me “Hey, you got your little red-headed girl,” and then blushes, her cheeks matching her rosy hair. Today, Lucy again dupes Charlie Brown, and for the umpteenth time, he flings ungracefully into the air and lands heavily on his back with an exasperated sigh. It pains me to know that I must have left buttery fingerprints on the thin paper when I replaced yesterday’s strip in its privileged place on our refrigerator. I’m sure Amy will find them and lament my choice of a last meal.

I’m sorry for eating popcorn for breakfast, I begin to write, then pause, scratch my temple with the barrel of the pistol that I have been playing with in my left hand, and decide it might be best to finish this ordeal without leaving a note. I collect the crumpled stationary that missed the wastebasket, then take out the trash, and return to my desk chair.

The phone rings.

It must be Mr. Walton, at the Post Office, calling to reprimand me for my absence.

“Hello?”

Amy is on the other line, asking if I’m sick. Too timid to call my home phone and confront the possibility that I simply stayed home from work without an excuse, Mr. Walton had instead called my wife’s cell phone, figuring that something must be wrong. I assure her otherwise, and when she hangs up she tells me that she loves me.

I am now ready. My desk is tidy. But as I clasp the pistol, a horrific thought paralyses my trigger finger. In my mind is a pathetic image of Amy with her little stainless steel box of cleaning tools, scrubbing away at the office carpet with a toothbrush to get the congealed blood from the beige fibers. I decide to move to the bathroom, which Amy had specifically lined with easy-to-clean tile, hoping that one day a daughter would spill nail polish on the floor or drip hair dye in the sink.

I sit on the toilet with the lid down, but am uneasy with my reflection in the mirror on the opposite wall. I do not look like a man about to commit suicide. My cheeks are slightly flushed and my tawny hair has retained its characteristic sideways puff from being exposed to eleven years of windy walks. I notice for the first time that the skin under my eyes has become slightly leathery and brazen from staring endlessly into the sun as I ascend the hill day after day.

I remember the argument that Amy and I had when we first decided to move to New Jersey. It had been her idea. She hates subways and pigeons and taxis and the smell of steam emitting from manholes in the sidewalk, and for her, a move across the harbor was perfectly logical. What she loves most about New York City is its skyline in the sunset, blazing in golden hues as the sun dips beneath the horizon. From our small but Western facing front lawn, she can stand and watch nature perfecting the art of alchemy each evening.

At the time I disagreed. I was instead looking down at the harbor, and the roof of the post office in the valley, and the winding roads that snake up the side of the hill, knowing that I would have to walk up them, but never imagining that I would do so daily for eleven years of my relatively short life. It was a frigid New Jersey February evening when Amy and I climbed to the summit of the hill for the first time. She pointed with a slender finger to the distant skyline on the glowing horizon, but I was too busy looking at the freezing ice creeping across the harbor like stretch marks on a pale liquid belly. I suppose I haven’t looked up since.

From the living room the clock reminds me of the advancing hour. Amy will be returning soon and it is too late to do anything now. I will have to go out and buy a fresh newspaper, and erase the evidence of my morning’s misdemeanor. Tomorrow I will return to work, and I will drag my mailbag like a boulder that I have been condemned to push daily to the summit of my hill before it tumbles endlessly back to its base. I’m not sure what forever feels like, but at least in this tedious mortality I am daily the champion of my hopeless hill, and standing at its apex, New York City stretches out below my feet.

Familial

2010-04-16T07:29:00.000-07:00

Papp dropped her off at the diner at a quarter to four. Despite his best paternalistic intentions, begging her to instead come home with him, she swore that her sister would pick her up from the diner on the way to her Big City Office Job. But Eva didn’t have a sister, or a mother for that matter, and she preferred to forget her father. Besides, now she had a new one—a tubby middle aged white man who wore neither his age nor his fat well. His jowls kept time in jiggles as the van pulled into the diner’s parking lot, empty but for three scattered cars, waiting eerily in the neon glow of the restaurant’s sign like abashed solicitors outside a peep show.

The Big City lights did not reach this far out into the hills, and the fluorescent diner burned brightly, attracting road side night dwellers as insects are drawn to street lamps in the dark. Papp became suddenly aware of the advantages of the darkness as the headlights switched off and he smiled, his neck fat stretching taunt across his chin, making his wide grin look shallow and his lips thin. She looked away from his bared sallow teeth, feeling devoured by his gaze. Her stomach was grumbling but Papp was drunk and she knew that even if she turned away and ignored him she would soon feel his grubby fingers on her skin, reaching through the sticky space between them and finding their way to her hipbone. An unreciprocated yet delighted giggle bubbled deep from his stomach, followed by a ghost of that evening’s brandy, dead and fermented yet haunting his chest cavity. She waited for the worn cotton of a five beneath the elastic on her underwear, then sprung into the neon night, leaving Papp alone in the dark to his own devices.

“Daddy loves his Baby Girl!” cried Papp from the window of the van with a brandy-scented hiccup.

Leaving Papp, Eva tried to dismiss the incestuous hunger she saw in his jaundiced eyes, bulging as though strangled about the neck. But behind every incest lies a kingdom waiting to be inherited, robed in red but built on the prophecies of gods. When she felt most violated, most polluted, she fancied herself mythological. If Oedipus had been a girl, Eva mused, her mother would have perished of utter shame, wagging her mournful head the whole way to the grave, and her father would have fucked her with disturbing desperation each night in the wide backseat of a van. To the unimpressive soundtrack of squeaking springs and skin sticking to fake leather upholstery, Whiteness overcame Blackness, and Lightness consumed Darkness. Eva longed for the day that Papp, upon the sickening realization that he had railed his Daughter, would hang himself with a stiff rope, fulfilling at long last the tragic, Oedipal prophecy. Granted, Oedipus gouged out his own eyes, disgusted and ashamed at what he had done, but at least this would save Eva from the sight of her shambled life and the bruises on her thighs. Faint hints of predawn light teased the black horizon with blotchy, yellow fingers, and Eva scuttled across parking lot wishing for blindness.

Eva’s mother had, in fact, died prematurely, although not from shame of her obstinate daughter. Her eventual demise was hardly anything to merit mythological retellings. She simply withered away from overwork, worn away year after year by the demands of far too many hungry boys, so that by the end of her slighted days she was a frail and osteoporotic skeleton, threatening to break beneath the increasingly heavy demands of her men. Eva’s father was ashamed of his wife’s emaciated form.

“Don’t you ever go hungry, you hear me Baby Girl?” he preached endlessly, thrusting the rough wood of a hoe into her hands, forcing his daughter to work even before she could properly walk. “Hunger is the worst of all earthly ills,” he believed, “because if you’re hungry, it means you’re lazy. And God won’t save the idle.” And so Eva worked, but tonight her stomach growled nonetheless.

From the darkness of the diner’s doorstep, Eva could see Màna strutting in the fluorescent light with her tray in one hand and a coffee mug in the other. Her smile evoked an innocent pride, as though she were a maître d’hôtel in a lavish restaurant, and as though the mounded plates of sweet potato fries she was balancing on her elbow were no less than tiramisu. Eva was glad to see her. The rotund Greek woman had a ringing laughter that was disproportionately delicate compared to her thick body. She looked toward the diner’s door at the sound of the dinging bell with the same eager expectancy of a mother awaiting the late return of her wayward daughter.

Màna rarely asked questions of Eva, she just brought her a plate of grits with melted cheese, and asked if she’d like some coffee. Eva nodded, not looking her in the eyes. On weekdays when Eva had slow nights, Màna wouldn’t make her pay. When the girl insisted, the Greek matron would protest, and if nothing else, slip a handful of after dinner mints into her pocket or an apple in a brown paper bag for Eva on the way out the jingling door. Màna joked, “You’re too thin, Baby Girl,” placing her hand on Eva’s cheek, dwarfing her chin and cheekbones alike with a single olive palm. Though touched, Eva would slink away, as though shame were a contagious and fatal disease that could be spread upon the slightest contact. Eva was afraid that if she allowed Màna to pity her, she would infect her with indignity.

The evening had been for the most part slow; before Papp had come to pick her up, she had but a sole client. He was a sturdy man that reminded Eva of her brothers, with dirt beneath his fingernails and grease smeared under his chin, as though he had worked his way out from under the body of a car and slid right under her own black underside. He paid well, and Papp had been drunkenly gracious and generous. Tonight she would pay back Màna in full. Màna would be proud of her Baby Girl, strong and self-sufficient. Eva drank her coffee in silence, listening to the faint click of insects zooming to their death in the fluorescent lights above.

The door chimed with the entrance of a new customer, and both Màna and Eva looked up with anticipation. Sometimes she dreamed that one day a real-life sister would walk through the door on the way to her Big City Office Job, with soft, slender hands, a modest, grey pencil skirt, and perhaps even a fashionable bob haircut. But Eva did not have a sister. Instead, she saw the visage of her brothers, the same slicked back hair and skin blackened under grime. Eva quickly averted her eyes, looking into the neon night, avoiding yet again the wide grin of a drunken man, the taste of his yellow teeth familiar to her tongue. A pair of grease stained mechanic’s overalls sauntered past, and Eva could not bring herself to lift her fork to her mouth. Màna had disappeared with a pot of coffee, attending to her men. Eva left without paying, hungry.

Where Bluebirds Fly

2010-02-13T08:03:00.000-08:00

Heaven is a place between earth and sky
Where bluebirds fly and bluebirds die
Wheeling and circling and pining for land
But unable to descend to the world of man
So spiraling and wreathing in search of love
Bluebirds fall—it’s death from above
Reigning fire burning below
Heaven is a place that only we know

Fallen angels dropping feathers shedding clothes
The earth has a spine—une femme en repose
Toiling in her crevices men waste their days
Searching for gold in oxford gray
Ordering chaos in parallel lines
Snorting white through Washington, doused in wine
But they walk in vain circles—we see them from here
They’ll never know that their earth is a sphere

Atlas shrugged and the world tumbled through static
Call me crazy but don’t don’t call me an addict
I’m just finding patterns in black and white
Finding God on the corner at the traffic light
Stoning the government, tearing down Berlin
Walking earth’s backbone, sewing seams in my skin
But pulling out the stitches I find the enemy within
It’s not for me to cast the first stone—I am not without sin

Is a numb man tortured if he cannot feel the chains?
Does a mute man suffer if he does not complain?
Has a bluebird, fallen, forgotten how to fly,
If his toes touch the ground, though his mind still scrapes the sky?
Is sin, if called by any other name, still as delicate, still as sweet?
And is the loss of one’s marbles still considered defeat?
What more is the universe than what we perceive it to be,
Even if we cannot love that which we see?

But don’t ask these questions, take off your wings
Through this metal detector, then you may collect your things
Pack your bags but leave your liquids at home
Stay in line, know your birthday, shuffle onto a sky bird of chrome
Abandon fields of lavender, you can’t bring them on here
They don’t belong on the land of the stolen frontier
Just tune in, turn off, close your eyes, go to sleep
So you won’t see the approach of Empire Garbage Heap

Our feet are rotting in the roots of the cynics
Hating the world that they in turn mimic
We are wheeling and circling and pining for land
But the company we long for is not that of man
It exists only in a place between earth and sky
Through which angels fall, but do not die
Reigning fire burning below
Heaven is a place that only we know.

Outrun the Gun

2009-12-12T22:33:00.000-08:00

I saw a body die tonight,
The first I’d ever seen;
And though it writhed like I thought it would,
Twisting under neon lights
Making blood lines on its skin,
Weep, though I knew I should,
I simply could not do.

There is something thrilling in the ecstasy
Of a body’s final drawn out breaths -
Screams almost and
Pounding beats
Still rhythmic, though frantic,
And harmonies,
Slowly sawing through heart strings,
Vibrating at the touch of dextrous fingers.

And though a hundred pairs of eyes regard,
Like students with mouths agape
At a cataclysmic corpse spread bare
Under the hot lights of the surgical stage,
They can do nothing to stop the grinding metal of death,
And cannot outrun the gun of destiny -
Already bought and already loaded
Already shot and already exploded.

Bass drum bullet holes
Tearing through t-shirts soaked in sweat
And raining on fingers outstretched
In awe or in admiration
Of that which stood dying there,
Swaying to the death music
Of a final dissonant symphony,
Extinguishing with a chord
So sweet you could almost taste it -
Saline like sweat on shiny skin,
Bejeweling the body before laying it
In its lonely and lightless grave.

Though long since waned and
Long since exhausted,
There is something exquisitely lovely
In the pale shiver of a dying body,
Drained and destructed
When it breathes its final quaking breath,
Falling like vapor diamonds on open lips,
Gasping a guttural hymn,
And singing, quite softly,
“Hallelujah.”

Death sounds like silence,
And then Death sounds like static,
Filling the space once occupied by Life,
With a quiet reminder to we the remaining,
That we must go on living,
And somewhere, in the white space
From a speaker in our heaving chests,
A drumbeat, or a heartbeat,
And the crowd let out its breath.

Finding What Came Before

2009-08-27T13:59:00.000-07:00

You must have come before me, dear
I’ve found your skin on the chair
Draping there, dripping flesh tones
Giving body to the skeleton rocker
Swaying in the silent parlor
Moved by your sudden absence
Creaking are its pale and lonesome
Wooden bones.

You must have come before me, love
I’ve found your hair all in the tub
Squirming there, running down rivers
Like snakes in muddy spring
Nameless effusions of wordless sin
Hissing beneath the shower
Where you remember shedding your
Scalèd skin.

You must have come before me, boy
I’ve found your heart in the garbage
Rotting there, or ripening perhaps
Remembering fermentation: grapes
Yesterday, wine, tomorrow, blood
Blame it on the vineyards,
Grape vines climbing, choking your
Deadened veins.

1 + 1 = 3

2009-07-18T10:37:00.000-07:00

She was destined to write, for when asked the sum of one and one, she always responded three, and everyone knows that authors simply cannot calculate. She did not understand the concept of singularity, and for her, the opposite of a number was never its negative. She built her house to be asymmetrical, as she did not believe that one side could be perfectly replicated. She taught her daughter that one could divide by zero, and take the square root of a negative number, and multiply a number by one to get a result twice as large. And for her, a square peg could fit into a circular hole.

Dimensions did not matter, she said, for if one pushed hard enough, that square peg would slide right into the round hole, no matter how dry. When a family of three was presented with one conflict, expecting only three responses was ridiculous. A mirror image, no matter how perfect the reflection appeared, would still always be backwards, and therefore symmetry did not exist. Even imaginary numbers deserved to be square rooted, and the opposite of positive eight should not be predestined to a negative existence. And, she said, when one whole man and one whole woman are placed into a neutral solution for long enough, there is no way in hell that the sum of their addition will be two.

But, she mused, it is the logical who build cities and the illogical who piss in their streets, and the mathematicians who never fail to prove the equation leading to the conclusion of sanity, and the authors who fill said equation with adjectives, leading to nothing but a declaration of irreconcilable insanity. And, of course, it is the sane - the level headed, the sword bearing, the strong breasted - who write history, and the rest - the open minded, the lovers of the verb and the anecdote - who write fiction. And no matter how close fiction is to the truth, it is still, by definition, false. Oh, how she loathed the constraints of genre!

For it was not the writer of fiction who plunged herself into the strong chested historian, it was the other way around. Her subtleness was wrapped around his hard facts. And fact, according to the historian, was engorged with blood, and wars, and explosions. Fact would thrust between the pages of a novel until its sharp point was pressed against the novel’s spine. Fact could shred, fact could tear, fact could rip the soft flesh of fiction. The world would erect statues of fact, its outstretched arms groping the sky, while fiction crumpled. The writer of fiction was powerless when the writer of history opposed her. She would be subject to him, pressed into the sheets of paper, flattened there, defiled there. He was the conqueror, she was the conquered. He wrote history. She was destined to disbelieve the existence of chronology, and to write poetry.

"How can you disbelieve in the existence of chronology?" asked the historian of the author, when they were both young, and inexperienced. She was five, he was thirteen. They were playing at marbles, his large shooter driving into her own. They would spread when it hit them. He would always win when they played at marbles, for he was stronger than her, or at least that’s what he said. And though she protested and said that strength had nothing to do with winning at marbles, he would come up with some other excuse. He was older, he was a boy, she had eaten the last biscuit the morning before. Whether it was his strength, or his age, or his gender, or his feeling of entitlement, he would always win, and he would always deserve it. She stopped asking why. He was smarter than her, he said. It was only the stupid who didn’t believe in history, and who didn’t believe in chronology. She did not understand how a two-dimensional line with dates could possibly represent one's own perception of time, but she was too young to know the words to protest. He would laugh, and take his shooter and bang it against the soft glass of her own small marbles.

...She was five, and he was thirteen, and though their ages added up to the age of consent in most countries, she couldn’t remember saying yes to anything he said. It was winter, she remembered, but it was a winter like all others, and therefore could be placed in countless places on his chronology. Come make a fire with me, he asked of her, and she went. They went to the woods to make the fire, and melt away the snow around the circle with the hot red flame. Come closer, he told her, beckoning her nearer to the fire. Let it into your skin. But soon the fire grew cold, the red hot flame was replaced by an ashy ring, and she started to shiver. When they finally shoveled soiled snow on the fire to put it out, and walked back to the house, she asked why she was being trailed by a red path in the snow. He told her that it was the heat dripping off of her flesh. She thought this sounded quite poetic, and she did not ask any questions. She woke the next morning to snow between her sheets, and fire between her legs...

The writer of fiction did not believe in chronology because though the historian’s time line swore that the little girl grew up, and became a soft woman, and became a blushing bride, and became, as we so call her, a writer of fiction, this writer of fiction, this bride, this woman, remained a little girl. Each morning she would wake to snow between her sheets and fire between her legs. And each morning, as her pen hobbled across the white page, she again dragged the bloody memory of her lost innocence across the snow of her childhood, no longer white. Memory had condemned her to wallow in shallow metaphors, barely disguising that which she would never forget. She limped in circles on her page.

Historians do not deal well with circles, for circles do not fit well onto two-dimensional chronologies. How to plot her mornings, when each morning she took her tea with milk and sugar, and each morning she walked through her gardens, and each morning she wrote a line or three of poetry? How to plot her mornings when sometimes the only difference between them was the adjective she used to describe the sky, or the freshness of the air, or the clatter of the birds? No, history does not do well with adjectives. History does not care about the difference between azur and aqua, nor the difference between brisk and crisp, nor the difference between cacophonous and choral. According to history, the writer of fiction woke, ate, and wrote. According to history, the writer of fiction barely lived at all.

History tells us that the writer of fiction killed herself, and if one consults chronology, one can understand why. How could one lead an existence of nothing but waking, eating, and writing? But in fact, or in fiction, rather, it was the historian that killed the writer. The writer of fiction knew far too well that one plus one would never equal two, and she told this to her daughter, the product of said mathematical impossibility. For even a relationship with zero love, zero emotion, zero passion, could still divide two legs. Yes, a square peg would fit in a round hole.

In Learning How To Die.

2009-07-05T20:30:00.000-07:00

Must literature necessitate a character
Asked the author of her muse,
For if she never loved another man
in her remaining languid days
She would not much complain.
She had spent her years fingering sheets
Spreading them smooth beneath her hands
Then drawing her pen across them
Remembering in so many words
the way a woman shudders
When she is made to feel.
And tremble she did - tremble at the sight
of purple mountains
Rising above her like the strong chest of a man
Or tremble she did at the sight of yellow tendrils
Stretching across the pale flesh of the dawn.
But when in the barren desert of life she stood
It was not man who caught her falling sweat,
But the open amorous lips of a red tulip
at her ankle
Sprouting form the life that spilled from her pen.
For where there is blood, there is clearly life
And she bled black like St. George’s monster
Leaving little rivers of ink behind her open veins.
And though she flirted with cancer in search of a feeling
Or danced with death in want of a verb
Or seduced the delicate sympathies of suicide
If only to produce a metaphor
even more real than its inspiration
At least in learning how to die -
or so she told Peter and his golden gates -
She had learned how to live.

A Photographer and His Model.

2009-06-24T23:27:00.000-07:00

Blink.

He stared through his single wide eye at what he perceived to be reality. And if that which he perceived to be true truly was, in fact, the truth, why, the truth was beautiful, and full of splendid curves and colors in which one could drown. Through his eye, truth was in form, and in proportion, and in composition. His eye blinked, and truth was captured. He would take it with him wherever he wandered, the 3.5 x 4.25 rectangle of reality in his pocket, collecting lint as pockets do. And when the world seemed too harsh and reality had lost its luster, he could pull out the truth that he had two-dimensionally imprisoned, and remember that all was not, in fact, lost. For as long as he could touch the truth, and see the truth, then he could simultaneously hide from it.

She contemplated death by starvation. She wondered what it would feel like. Perhaps like nothing at all. Perhaps like a scorching blade of grass under the hot August sun. Perhaps like a leaf at the end of autumn. Perhaps like an icicle as winter melts away. Perhaps like a flower when the May showers stop falling from the sky. Regardless, it would feel like the end. Although the end, she thought, is more like the beginning. For the summer burns into fall, and the trees incinerate under the equinox moon. And autumn withers into winter, and winter melts into spring, and spring explodes into bloom, and suddenly the summer has arrived again. Perhaps death by starvation wouldn’t feel so badly, for if blades of grass sprout from her bones too visible, or if leaves blanket her translucent skin, or if icicles drip from her ears like silver rings, or if flowers are nourished from her stagnant blood, then she has created beauty, and that is all she cared to do.

He saw the world in angles, in parallel lines, and in proportions. It was all science, and it was all math, and if he perfected his knowledge, then he could reproduce the world on sheets of paper, plastering man-made walls with replicated beauty. If he could perfect the parallel line, he thought, then he would be happy. For if he could perfect the parallel line, then he would be perfecting the already perfect, and in that, he would be God, or more. God created the universe, and the world, and the man about whom we speak, but it would be said man who took this universe, and this world, and warped it. His eye would not sleep until the man behind it could take parallel lines, and bend them, yet still never allow them to touch.

She contemplated death by suffocation, and wondered what it would feel like, or how one one would go about doing it. Ropes were too callous, they left marks on the neck, and the neck was too gentle for one to leave rope marks. She did not have the will power to hold her breath, nor to hold a cord, nor to leave that car door closed as death itself leaked through the cracks into the windows and into her collapsing lungs. And if one does not have will power, why, there is nothing more loathsome than a failure. And what of water? Water could be cold, and water could be hot, and water could be salty, or fresh, or dirty, or infested with tiny little microbes that would eat her body from the inside. Perhaps the lines on her neck would twist into calligraphy, and tell the story of her last moments, and the blue that would tinge her cheeks would compliment her eyes, and when the sunlight flashed through the thin layer of water covering her still lips, why, she would truly be beautiful. And if she had created beauty, then there was nothing left for her to do.

He began with buildings, because they are square enough, or rectangular, at that. Or so he thought, and so he hoped. But he realized that no matter how hard he tried, he could not capture their design with his eye. For one line would be too big, too slanted, too full, too curving, while the other was too thin, to straight, too meager, too crooked. Or, just as his eye opened a little wider to accommodate said lines, a man’s head would peak out of the building’s window, or a sparrow would fly across the facade, or the sky would be at a contrary angle. So he went farther away, he fled across fields turning only once in a while to see if perhaps the distance that he had travelled would finally allow his eye to see parallel lines in the buildings that crept farther and farther away on the horizon. It seems as though he turned in vain.

She contemplated death by chemical. Would they put the name of the chemical on her tombstone as cause of death? If so, she would love to pick something with an exotic name, like saxitoxin, but she worried over where to find poisonous shellfish. She could gnaw on cigarettes, and ingest acetone, and arsenic, and nicotine, and hydrogen cyanide, but she doubted that yellow teeth would be attractive upon her death. There was the flaking paint in her grandmother’s home, or furniture polish, or laundry detergent, or gasoline. But as she thought of these things, she couldn’t help but feel like an inanimate object, one that had never seen life, or love. Her back that she had trained to be so straight would be nothing but a rotting wall. Her arms hat she had learned to poise so beautifully would be nothing but the curved knob that decorates ancient chairs. The clothing that hung so loosely on her slender body would be nothing but overly starched sacks of fabric. And the heart that every once in a while she let love would turn into a machine, like the motor of an automobile, turning, always, but feeling nothing. She did not take well to this thought, but yet death by chemical intrigued her. If she consumed bleach, would she finally be white as the Scandinavians, who were all the rage this season? Perhaps then, in the whiteness radiating from her stomach, she would be beautiful.

He felt like Christopher Columbus, searching for the flat end of the earth that he so believed truly did exist. But unlike Columbus, who feared for his ships and his crew, he and his eye longed to find it, to see the water of the earth falling off the sides and to see the continents slowly slipping downstream towards that definitive end. And at this mystical place, he swore he would find parallel lines. For until he found the edge of the world he would be plagued by God’s cruel joke in making the earth a sphere. But one day he would stop walking in circles and reach the fatal end of his journey, plunging down off the edge of the world, surrounded by buildings and animals and humans and mountains. He wasn’t sure what he would find at the bottom of that chasm into which he and the continents would fall once they finally floated their way to the sharp, straight edge of the earth. Perhaps there would be monsters, as Columbus always swore there would be, and they would gobble him up. But he wouldn’t mind being eaten alive by a million open mouths, for in arriving there, in being gnawed by their sharp teeth and deformed by their acidic saliva (or so he imagined it would be), he would finally have testament that he had become more than God. For Godhad created the universe, and a world, and each was a sphere, or so the astronomers thought. But in arriving at the stark and end of this sphere, the man, equally created by God, would have surpassed the whole of God’s creation. Or so he mused.

She contemplated death by metal. There we various types of metal, of course. There was cheap metal that she could find buried in the ground, or depicting a coca cola sign, but that would leave rusty viruses in her coagulating blood. There was shiny metal, but that would lose its sheen when it touched human flesh. There was blunt metal, but it would be a shame to lose its perfectly rounded tip forever within the burning acid of her stomach, or within the bundles of nerves in her brain, or within the tiny respiratory chambers of her lungs. No, what she preferred of all metals was thin metal. Simple. For with thin metal she could write novels in red ink, or draw pictures on her thigh, or simply draw rivers of blood on her wrists. Yes, that’s what she preferred. Because in those rivers of sanguine she could swim, and she could drown. And later, when they would search for her beneath the rivers that had covered her arms, and then her chest, and then her neck, and then her lips, they would know in fact that she had lived, and that she had loved. And there is nothing more beautiful than the life of one who has loved.

He did not find the end of his own world, where the oceans and the islands and the continents all rushed over a giant cliff that signified Columbus’ greatest fear. Instead, he found the end of someone else’s world, and for the first time, his eye realized that what it perceived as reality was only one of many realities. He and his eye found parallel lines, one day. He had been walking, looking at buildings, zooming his eye in, zooming it out, crouching down, standing up. But eventually his eye grew weary, and the cement was ready to swallow him and cast him down into the depths of God’s cruel sphere. But at once his eye found, again, truth. And if that which his eye perceived to be true truly was, in fact, the truth, why, the truth was beautiful, and full of splendid curves and colors in which one could drown. His wife, lying quietly on their couch, had arms poised like those of ancient furniture, shiny and polished. Her neck was long but crooked, like that of a swan with its graceful head bent to look at its own reflection in the water below. The angle was unnatural, but he and his eye loved it, for never before had they seen such a color, or lack thereof, rather. She was as white as the year’s first snowfall, as a dove on its day of its inaugural flight, as the bravest daisy whose head announces the return of spring among the mud of melting winter. She was as white as a lemon scented load of freshly bleached laundry, but for two rivers of red that decorated her forearms like ribbons on Christmas packages. And in them, he finally found his parallel lines. The eye shuttered as it blinked, and the man did too. For in blinking, the eye had, as was its custom to do, captured the truth. And in imprisoning the truth, the eye had untied those bright red Christmas ribbons, exposing that which lay below. The prying eye searched beneath the river that covered her arms, and had dripped on her chest, and had crept up her neck, and had rouged her lips, and it discovered that though the sight was, by far, the most beautiful thing it had ever seen, the truth was not, as it had once thought, quite as impeccable. The truth was that though she had loved, all that had loved her in return was a single wide eye, and this simply did not suffice to live.

In the blink of the eye, he found that truth tasted like salt and like death, and quietly, he and his perception of reality died, both, alone. The eye sputtered and groaned, and the its mouth below spit out a small rectangle, 3.5 x 4.25. And thus she was immortalized.

Late.

2009-06-02T16:18:00.000-07:00

Here begins the part of my life where I discover truly who I am, nineteen years late. Here arrives the moment where my life begins for the first time, nineteen years late. The memories to which I held so dear for nineteen years are packed away, organized in boxes, labeled in black ink that bleeds through the cardboard.

I’m sorry, dear friend, that you’ve become number B12 on Box 14, in the back left corner beneath my brother’s bed, but there’s simply nothing else that I can do. Perhaps I’ll take you out of your box one day, dear friend. Everything will be as I left it. I meticulously organized it as to best aid the memory, as to best preserve the moment, as to best precisely recall the dates and the times and the people. But I forget the way the air smelled, and the way the grass felt, and the number of steps it took me to walk to your door. Old friends, I apologize for encoding you, but I can’t remember the way it looks when you smile.

And new friends, all you who I have not yet known long enough to put in boxes, what has become of you all? How time flies for me while you are still living the same lives you had been living before, on the other side of the ocean, on the other side of the river? Who will you be when I return? Who will I be when I return?

I cannot think of that. Not right now. There is a voice that pounds in my ear. There is a drum there too, and the faint sounds of a piano in the background. Is that all that’s left of a stable life I used to know - the voice of this reasonable man, moaning a melody so melancholy through my stereo? He claims his sanity, if only to prove it to himself. And I too, I claim my sanity, and I claim my happiness. Do you believe it? I do.

I didn’t used to believe in it. I couldn’t. Not in that place. Not in the place where rivers burn under a polluted sky. Not in the place where I worked so hard to learn of the past, all while I destroyed myself in order to forget the present. Not in the place that banished me for what I thought, and what I think, and what I will always think.

Oh, I could get angry. I could blame you and your incompetence, Mr. President. I could shake my fists at those who made me that way. I could shout and yell at those who were never there for me, no matter how much they falsely claimed their unconditional love. Oh, I’ll show them. I’ll change the world from this side of the ocean. I’ll learn more than I ever did before. I’ll succeed, and spit in their faces.

Or, the voice and I could stay together, forever, alone, sane, happy, and alive. Do you believe that we could do it? I do. Perhaps you will never believe it. I don’t think pictures can encapsulate it. I don’t think words can express it. Maybe I should stop trying, stop trying to express a fact that is, in fact, inexpressible. Instead, I will write nonsense. I will write if only to ridicule myself. I will write what you will never understand. But where will I go in the midst of this chaos?

My words sound so sad, this I know. But can’t you see it? Can’t you see? Can’t you see that I’ve changed, that I’m alive now? Of course, you’ll say. Of course you’re happy. You smile. Of course you’re alive. You always have been. But you’re wrong! Smiles don’t prove emotion, and heartbeat doesn’t prove existence. How to prove it. How to prove it. How to prove it.

Will silence work? Or perhaps words? Lyrics? If I can compress my life to airport regulation checked baggage size, surely I can compress my emotion to the lyrics of a song. Surely. Or surely not.

I suppose I’ll have to suffice with the voice coming through my earphones. He can speak for me. He moans, but am I the only one to hear his heartbeat behind that awful sound? Perhaps he is not in pain. Perhaps he is not sad. Perhaps he is not dying. Perhaps it is just the opposite. He is alive, and he is happy, and no one hears it. And that, my friends, is even worse.

One can scream one’s pain, and the world will cry to the sounds of one’s bleeding. One can croon one’s lust, and the world will giggle under sheets to the sounds of one’s breeding. But happiness? How does one say that? I simply do not know the words.

For now, I will resort to silence. And perhaps one day, I will smile, and you will hear that music that I’ve never known how to make - music in a major key, music with a happy melody, music that doesn’t make you cry tears of sadness, but tears of joy. All those who I’ve buried in boxes beneath my brother’s bed will come out of their dusty memorial graves and look at the one whom they so often scorned, whom they so often ignored, whom they so often questioned, and they will know.

I am sane, I swear. And I am happy. It’s just nineteen years late.

Everything But the World

2009-05-15T04:07:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I was flesh, and I was blood,
And I was a heart beating
Beneath the fragile cage of bone
That somehow protects my heart
From everything but the world.

Today I am a number, you made me
The unfortunate upper half of a fraction
That no one wants to believe

Yesterday I was

Heads shaking, so sorry, so sure
That they will never be there
Among the dirty minority

I was flesh

Pressed against tiles that smell
Of piss and of smoke and stick to my skin
Turning purple beneath your grasp there is

I was blood

Bruising in patterns like paintings
That follow the lines of hands that wander
Like conquerors of a strange new land

You took my heart

That was ever theirs to explore

And it’s not beating.
And it’s not beating.

Tomorrow, I will be flesh, and I will be blood,
But there will be a stranger trapped inside
That fragile cage of bone
That somehow protects my heart
From everything but the world.

I Will Sell Myself To You

2009-05-10T15:30:00.001-07:00

I have no purpose but to look lovely in the light. Tell me, do I do it well? Your eyes graze the colors on my skin, and your fingers touch my spine. Open me, won’t you? I’ll sell myself to you.

You don’t want to hear my sad stories. You don’t want any tears on those sheets so thin. So let me paint you pictures in your mind, and let me ravish you with my words. Devour me, won’t you? I’ll give myself to you.

You will choose me arbitrarily, like a can of soup from a shelf. You don’t want to know what my label says, you just want something to fill you up. Buy me, won’t you? I will satisfy you.

I want nothing more than to show you what I look like from within, but you will do what you want with me. You will turn me in your hand. Touch me, won’t you? I will move under you.

My life is not my own you know. I am what I sell, and what I sell is what I am. You will take me into your bed, and you will hide me under your sheets. Release me, won’t you? I’m dying under you.

Can’t you hear me screaming, or are you just too deaf? Instead you take me with your eyes, and I am burning under your searching gaze. Hear me, won’t you? I’m crying out to you.

I am without a voice, and for all my words I have become dumb. There is nothing left of my world, and there is nothing left of my mind. Drop me, won’t you? I can’t go on with you.

I’ll leave the world with a legacy, but I can’t say what that legacy will be. When you see my silent memory - pale pages with black lines of pain, remember me, won’t you? I did it all for you.

Am I an author, or am I a whore? My body is bigger than my mind. You’ll do what you want with me, and you’ll turn me in your hand. Open me, won’t you. I’ll sell myself to you.

The Brighter I Shine, The Darker My Shadows

2009-05-10T15:29:00.000-07:00

They love my music. They love the way it makes them feel inside when they hear it, they love the way it makes them squirm inside when they remember the lyrics. They love how they hear my notes in the night, and how they feel my rhythms in their steps. They stand before me, adoring my music, reaching their hands to the sky. They finish my lyrics for me.

So this is what it’s like to be alive - to feel the lights on my skin. I shine, I do. I am illumination, I am sun. I am electric, and I am alive.

They love me, they do. They watch me when I dance, they watch me when I sing. They watch me when I light up the stage. They watch me in the streets, in the cafes, in the subway. They all know my name. They all love my name. They know where I go, they know what I do, they know what I say, and to whom I say it. They turn glossy pages to find my face. They see me in the sky, they see me on buildings, they see me in windows. They watch me through the unblinking eye of of a camera’s lens.

So this is what it’s like to be loved - to be seen, to be watched. And watch they do. They watch when I smile, and they smile too. They watch when I sing, and they sing too. I am theirs, and I am loved.

I hate my music. I hate how it is the same as all other music. I hate how my songs are the same as all other songs. I hate how my lyrics are not my own - they are what they make of them. I hate singing songs so blue that they will cry in spite of themselves. I hate lying to them, and I do it anyhow. I hate how they eat my words, and vomit my words, and wrangle my melodies, and sing them at me out of tune. I hate walking into the light that should so illuminate me, knowing that I only become darker and blacker, and that they only become deafer and dumber. I hate the heat in my eyes, and the sweat that drops between my teeth when I sing so passionately to those whose faces I will never see.

So this is what it’s like to be a radio. I am in tune. I am number twenty three of forty. I am number twelve of forty. I am number two of forty and I am number one of forty, and I am celebrated. I am number thirty three of forty, and I am criticized. I am voted for. I am an album on a list. I am a name on a page. I am a machine full of little gadgets that sound better than the voice from my throat. I am a robot with lungs. I am iron, I am steel. I am made of metal, and I am a radio.

I hate myself. I hate searching for myself in a mirror and finding nothing but blank eyes and dark circles. I am a hole covered up with the pink powder they paint me in. When I sweat away the paint, there is nothing left. I hate the smell hairspray and I hate the smell of success. I hate the taste of liquor. I hate the taste of smoke. I hate the taste of expensive food. I hate the taste of my teeth. I hate hearing my voice so loudly through speakers and monitors and microphones, but never hearing myself within my own head. I look for my head in dark corners, hiding under covers, behind armchairs. I have lost my head. I have lost my senses. My thoughts are not my own. My life is not my own. I hate waking up in a bed that is not my own, smelling of liquor and sweat and smoke and success. I hate knowing that success is nothing but liquor and sweat and smoke. I hate hearing my name. I hate being loved. What is love when they know nothing but my name, and the words they paid me to say?

So this is what it’s like to be dead - to have piles of earth creeping into my crevices and to have weeds growing out of my mouth. That dirt they put on top of me when I breathed my last free air feels heavy like a blanket on a bed after a night that I will never remember. I will never remember, not if I can help it. I will be remembered, but not if I can help it. I will never be remembered for what I am. I am a field of weeds. I am a pile of rotting flesh. I am too young to destroy myself, but I do it anyhow. I am loved. I hate. I am alive. I die.

The End of Your World Is Closer Than You Think

2009-05-10T15:28:00.000-07:00

Dear Mr. President:

My boy killed a man the other day. Did you know that? Do you care? He wrote to me, my boy did. I had missed his handwriting – he hadn’t written in a long time. But as I read that little snapshot of information from his life, I could see him as a child, gripping his crayon so hard, forming his letters with such pride. He would hand me that paper with the alphabet scrawled so orderly across the top and a picture of the two of us, holding hands. We were nothing but two little sticks- he a blue line pressed into the paper, and I a purple one, with a little swatch of brown hair. My boy wrote to me to tell me that the man he killed had a son.

The paper was wrinkled, stained with dirt. I sat in my quiet kitchen, painted mint green, and could see him in my mind, head in hands, envelope folded in his pocket, sweating from heat, from anxiety, from pain. But once again, it’s nothing new. My boy’s a soldier, he chose it. He chose to be one of the nameless, resign his name and his family to a number he kept on a tag around his neck. He looked so proud when he bowed his head to the man in charge, receiving that thin strip of metal around his neck. The commander had a short crop of light brown hair, dark brown eyes who had been humiliated into showing no emotion, tan arms, and tough hands. He invoked a sense of security with his stature, the way he stood so strong in front of all those young boys, trembling in their seats with anxiousness. He raised his taunt hand to his forehead and faced the flag, but I couldn’t help but think of the guns he held with those fingers. The commander was the kind of man in who most would place their faith, but Mr. President, you’ve shown me how to mistrust.

In that mint green kitchen of mine, I spent hours with my son at the kitchen table he’d helped me scrub until it lost its sheen. I would sit with him as he opened the envelopes from the military men you put in charge, the ones to whom I was handing over my boy. “Choose life,” I told him countless times. But he would look at me with those sea foam green eyes of his and say, “Can’t I care just once to take a stand, to take a side?” You’ve never seen his beautiful eyes, have you?

He wrote to me more often when he first arrived over there in that strange land where the sand take the place of grass, and bullets take the place of rain. He would tell me of the other boys, the ones who shared his tent, the ones who lent him cigarettes when he would run out. Sometimes he would describe vaguely the scenery, the numbing grays and browns of the desert, of the buildings rising up from the sand, but never the people, never the living, breathing population. He was a slayer of a people he had never met. The letters got less frequent eventually, but once he wrote of a little boy who had been separated from his mother. The little boy was crying, distraught, frightened by the fighting. My boy became the enslaver of a people he was sent over to set free.

“There’s no reason for this,” he wrote, over and over on that single sheet of paper. “Where is the honor in the killing of an innocent son?” The commander, the one whose stance invoked trust, put a tough hand on my boy’s shoulders, told him to stand up, and informed him that days pass and life goes on. My son told his superior of the little boy’s terror, of the sound it makes when a newly orphaned child weeps. “A casualty of circumstance,” the commander responded.

Mr. President, you say they’re dangerous, you say they’re out to get us. But what if you’re wrong? And Mr. President, are we no better, when we ourselves disregard human value?

The ignorance of your citizens brings them to your feet. When the crowd roars at your arrival, you smile back amiably, I know you do. I can watch you on television from the chair in my mint green kitchen. You’ll wave, you’ll toss a few meaningless words to the masses, and you’ll go on your merry way to the house built for you by your forefathers. Stepping out of the shiny limousine purchased with the money of your citizens, you walk on the political ground paved by the constituents of your country. But who are they to choose? The yelling members of the throng as you emerge from the dark interior of your chauffeured vehicle stretch their arms toward you. You gain your power from numbers, but are they all not just cowards, staring through the crowd at the man they elected to make everything better in lieu of their own efforts?

I wonder what you think when you wake up in the morning. I wonder if you think of my boy, waging a war thousands of miles away, with a stretching, roaring ocean between him and you. Perhaps you think of the millions of people who sleep as well, the lives that are ultimately under your control. It makes you feel powerful, doesn’t it, knowing you have them all under your thumb, like you were playing a board game. But really, Mr. President, you’re walking through this world all alone. My words fall upon deaf ears. You haven’t learned, you never will.

A man killed my boy the other day. Did you know that, Mr. President? Do you care?

Who I Am Today

2009-05-10T15:27:00.001-07:00

Who are we, but a police officer who wants nothing better than to act, and an bilingual author who always dreamed of painting? Here we lie, together, slipping in and out of sleep, and in and out of reality, dreaming of things that we may or may not ever do. I don’t want to let him down, you say. He’s done so much for me, sacrificed so much to get me to where I am today. But where I am today, you say, isn’t where I want to be tomorrow.

I walk by an elementary school at least two times daily. I know the faces of the mothers who wait there with their strollers, and of the fathers who lean on their dented cars, smoking a cigarette before their little children can see what causes the stench in the house. Of course they know, the little children do. But as long as mother is there waiting in her hat, or father in his boots, no one will question why mother and father no longer wait together.

It is spring here. The flowers paint their delicate cheeks, the sky is blue, the trees explode into the color we all love to love. The flowers bend their gentle necks in the rain, when the sky is grey, and the clouds explode into bloom. There is pollen in the streets, making rings around puddles. And when it rains, it streams into gutters like rivers of cloudy urine. Nature’s propagation is nothing but a stagnant pool of defecation, lining the streets in yellow.

You stood by my desk, the one that has no drawers, quiet. There are pictures on my wall there, and you looked at them. There I am, smiling, wearing bright red tights and grasping tightly a friend to whom I speak so rarely now. There is the man I used to love, and I pretend today that I do not love anymore. There is the blue sky, there is the blue shirt I forgot at home. There is my mother, there is my brother. All the lives that I once lived are arranged in a mosaic on my wall. All the voices I once would hear outside my door, or whispering in my ear, or mingling with mine in laughter and in song, are silent. The eyes, they all stare at me, smiling. I wish they would say something. They won’t.

Why is it, when I hug my pillow tight to smell his scent the morning after, that I think of you? Why is it that when I push back the hair from his face that I see the red gleam of the ruby you gave me so long ago? You placed it gently on my finger, said it would be forever. But there’s no such thing as forever. There’s no such thing as forever. There is only a stream of events that may or may not connect to each other. There is a sequence of days, of movements, of emotions, of lights. You stand, motionless, in a picture on my wall. I loved the color in the picture when I shot it, and I printed it, pasted it on my wall. I look up to see you every morning when I take my tea with milk and sugar. But you’re not here with me now, and there’s no such thing as forever.

I wandered through the biggest museum in the world, alone. The greatest painters in the world hang immortalized there, in empty halls. I duck into side streets to find bookstores where no one ever goes, hoping to find this book, with that signature. The greatest authors in the world are shelved there, immortalized by a name written in faded ink. Today we love them. Today we give their paintings special rooms. Today their work is protected by lasers and security cameras and plates of glass. Today their writing is reproduced in countless volumes and inappropriate quotations and imitations. If we admire the lighting in the scene, we can forget the darkness of the artist’s death. If we fall in love with a character, we can forget the sorrow of its creator.

I don’t think I am great enough yet for my work to merit the world’s collective overlooking of my depression. I don’t think I am well known enough for twisting white lines on my skin to be considered poetic. Until then, I’ll hide all that. Until then, I’ll pretend that you can make things new just by saying I love you. You adore me, but you’re just not content.

We were lying there, slipping in and out of sleep, in and out of reality, and you asked me what I wanted to do. I want to write, I said, so simply, trying to pull the words from the depths of my sleepy mind. I want to write, I said, and I am going to write. I can’t let myself down. I’ve done so much already, I’ve sacrificed so much to be where I am today. But still, where I am today, I say, is not where I want to be tomorrow.

On the train, the country side whirred by in a flash of green. The ground whirred by in a blur of grey. The sky whirred by in an smudge of blue. That is what life is, isn’t it? It’s a palette with only three colors, starting so vibrant, so promising. And we muddle them, we blend them, we mix them, we mingle them. So original, we are. So poignant, our creations are. One day they will hang in empty halls, protected by lasers and security cameras and panes of glass. But today, there are no lasers. No security cameras will alert the authorities if someone comes too near. No panes of glass encapsulate our fragile hearts. We mix and muddle our lives, we blend and mingle our days, hoping that the end result will be worthwhile. All that comes out is a palette no longer vibrant, no longer promising. Our lives disintegrate into the colors of the sea. Green and grey and blue stretch out endlessly.

We are statues on a lawn, still and stoic in our young love’s majesty, coldly sitting looking on. The walls are caving in. We bury ourselves beneath sheets of paper. We dance in strobe lights, seeing only glimpses of each other, rhythmically. Watching you dance is like watching a children’s paper flip book. The page turns, your arms are suddenly around my waste. We slip in and out of reality. I hide beneath the blanket when the sun comes shining through my curtains. I’m too afraid to learn what reality is. I’m too afraid to look behind me, seeing my steps filling with salt water. I’m too afraid to look ahead of me, to the endless sea swallowing my days. I’m too afraid to open my eyes.

If I open my eyes, I will see that mother and father no longer wait together. If I open my eyes, I will smell the defecation of a thousand breathing beings. If I open my eyes, I will remember that forever does not exist. Perhaps I will open my eyes one day. I will open my eyes when I am great enough, when I am famous enough.

Until then, I will paint my delicate cheeks, dress myself in blue, revel in the green that is my fleeting youth. And one day, I tell myself, I will explode into bloom.

Crisis.

2009-05-10T15:25:00.000-07:00

Crisis isn’t supposed to sound like this
It should be noisy
With violins screeching on that tragic soundtrack
And tires skidding across wet pavement
There should be lights
Playing on puddles
Like children in the rain
And there should be constant phone calls
There should be that raspy voice
Coming across the line
Sounding as thought it were
A thousand miles away across the ocean
Or across the dessert
Where I wouldn’t be able to see the face
Behind the sob lurking in your throat
Saying
It was just an accident
I’ll never do it again
I’ll be let off alright
They can’t do anything to me
They will be gracious
They will be kind
And a string of other comforting words
That make my mother stop weeping
In her sweater
And make my father stop frowning
In his coat
Ready to brave to cold to rescue you
So we can all forget this
So we can forget this all
And we can rejoice
Loudly with laughter in our eyes.
No.
Crisis isn’t supposed to sound like this
It’s much too quiet here
I can’t think of way you look when you smile
And I can’t imagine your voice
Saying sister
I love you
I miss you
You’ve been so gracious
You’ve been so kind
So I’m left alone
In this big silent house
Learning in my loneliness
That silence is the sound of crisis.

I Went To a Funeral Today

2009-05-10T15:24:00.001-07:00

I went to a funeral today
One of those quiet ones
With the pastor’s voice drawling
In strategically placed pauses to place
Emphasis
On a word or a phrase
And while the family came up to speak
The pastor sat
Behind the wall of flowers
Hands folded in his lap
And his head cocked to the side
In dutiful reverence to
The dead.

We sat in the front
But if I turned I would see
A see of grey hair
And faces deep with canyons
Tracing the places each had been
Each had seen with their heavy set eyes
And I couldn’t help but wonder
If they thought as they sat
There in that church that was cold
Of the frozen earth outside
And if they wondered
Their horrific thoughts enlivened
By the atmosphere of sadness
What that earth would feel like
Nestling in the crevices
Of their own ancient and sagging
Skin.

I shook the hand of an old man today
His grasp firm but trembling
And as he looked in my eyes
he squinted a little
So he could pretend for a moment
That he was young like me
But eighteen years past the day of his birth
So far from the cold clutch
Of the earth and its jaws
Opening up in an eternal embrace.

And thought the mouth is wide
It is silent
Where in in life
Each day is a new harmony
To the strain one had been singing
Death is the eternal rest
The melody
Abruptly
Ending
And as I stood next to the man
Who shook my hand
And we sang together
Making harmony as the living do
And we came to the closure of a hymn
That everyone knows
But I couldn’t help but think
Of what it means to say
Amen.

Metal Doesn't Feel

2009-05-10T15:23:00.000-07:00

Cold
Metal doesn’t feel
That badly when
It brushes ever so
Gently against the
Vein that no one
Ever sees the inside
Of
But for the head of
That curious silver explorer
Making its trek across
Deserts of red so
Torrid and barren but
For the small gushing
River dividing life from
Death and the buzzards
That feed there on
The remains of
Memories forgotten and
Opportunities misplaced like
Shattered Christmas ornaments
That no longer gleam
So brightly as they
Once did and have forgotten
What a smile means when
It is found like
An orphaned child
Alone and attempting to remember
What it felt to
Be alive and not drowning
In that desert of
Red and suffocating
Heat.

Dance I Would. Dance I Won't.

2009-05-10T15:21:00.000-07:00

My Umbrella Knows Not

This umbrella won’t keep me warm and dry today, but I’ll hold it anyhow. It gives me comfort, somehow, to have the cold metal under my fingers, fogging with my warm breath as I hold it near. My feet bravely embark upon the puddles shimmering in the street lights, and there they splash the water already troubled by drop after drop of rain. I love the way it looks when my shoe steps there. I love to count the rings that expand from the tiny impact. I love to see how the circles distort when I move. I would love to stay there, bathing in the warm glow of the street light, shivering in the cold blanket of the February rain, and dance. The rings make the best patterns when you dance, and dance I would, like a child in the rain, playing in puddles. Dance I would were it not for the voice of my mother in the back of my head, telling me I’ll catch pneumonia, or some other catastrophic disease with letters you don’t pronounce. Dance I would, were I not holding an umbrella, pretending it kept me warm and dry. Dance I would, were I not myself. Dance I would.

Dance I won’t. I’ll walk on instead, glancing between my black clad feet to see the circles that my shoes make when they move. I can see myself looking back, haloed by the umbrella above my head. It makes for a romantic silhouette, the umbrella does. In the blue night I am outlined by the gold of the street light; the umbrella a black shadow above me, my slender body curved beneath it. When I look at my shadow, I can pretend I am a lover, standing in the streets of a romantic city, like Paris, or New York, or London. He will come, I know it. He will come splashing through the streets that have turned into rivers in the time of his absence. His head will be turned down, his collar will be turned up. He will be looking at the circles his feet make in the puddles, but he won’t be counting the rings. He will be counting the steps he must yet take until he might see my slender golden silhouette, poised beneath the street lamp, waiting for him. There I would wait until the streets turn from rivers to lakes, and from lakes to seas, and from seas to oceans. And there we might drown, me and my umbrella. It doesn’t really keep me warm and dry anyway. But I won’t drown. He will come.

If he doesn’t come, I might cry. Although no one would know, because a shadow cannot cry. I would remain a stoic silhouette, never flinching, never budging. I might weep. But no one would ever know, because this umbrella does not keep my face dry. You would not be able to see the tears, because what difference is there between rain and tears, but for the salt that whets my lips? And no one but I will taste it, until he comes. And then he will drink in the ocean that pools on my tender lips, chapping in the cold, waiting for him to come. And wait I would. Wait I would were it not for the places I must go, and the places I came from. Wait I would, were it not for the people calling my name. Wait I would, were you a really coming. Wait I would.

Wait I will not. I will continue on, letting my feet make circles as I walk in a line. As I walk, the rain falls faster. My umbrella does an even worse job of keeping me dry, but I don’t mind, because I love the way it sounds above me. It sounds like feet stomping. It sounds like drummers pounding. It sounds like lungs breathing. It sounds like hearts beating. In all its sadness, it sounds like life, and I forget what that sounds like sometimes. Life sounds like rain beating on an umbrella. Life sounds like gentle footsteps, disturbing a wet leaf. Life sounds like branches bearing the weight of a thousand tears from the sky. That’s what life sounds like. But to live it, what does that feel like?

The rain does not give me answers, it only gives me chills and a quiet tune to which I could dance, but don’t. Rain does not tell me where to go, nor does it tell me where I’ve been, it simply asks me why I am here, right now, right now, right now. Right now the circle in the puddle grows. Right now my shoes leave their mark. Right now I breathe. Right now I live. Right now, I forget that that I said I would wait as a delicate silhouette in blue and gold under the street lamp that doesn’t cast out as much warmth as I would want it to. Right now I travel on to the beat of a tune to which my life is the only harmony.

I count the steps I have yet to take until I reach a place I do not yet know. When will I know? I ask the rain. But the rain does not give me answers, it just tells me to dance to the quiet tune in my ear. Dance I would. Dance I would, were I not.
Right now, he sits smoking a cigarette. He is not waiting for me. Had I waited for him, no steps would have been taken, no steps would have been counted. He does not have an umbrella. He sits, content, watching the way the smoke is punctuated by the rain. I watch the way my breath is punctuated by the sound of a heart beating. I do not think he hears it, but I do not know how.

I find I do not know much at all. The rain does not give me answers. It only gives me chills, and my umbrella does not keep me warm. Somehow there you sit, smoking in the rain, and I shiver more than you do. Who told me that an umbrella would keep me dry? Who told me that I could stop rain and sadness from pounding on my head? Who told me that I could control the trembling of my hands, and the shifting of my feet, and the beating of my heart?

Today I will risk death at the hands of a letter you do not pronounce. Is it not better to be killed by the silent ‘p’ than by silence itself? Were it not for the rain, where would be the music that sounds like feet stomping, and drummers pounding, and lungs breathing, and hearts beating? Were it not for the rain, how would I know what life sounds like? I forget what that sounds like sometimes. Today I will remember.

The rain will turn the streets to rivers, and the rivers to lakes, and the lakes to seas, and the seas to oceans. We might drown, but not me and my umbrella. We’ll let the umbrella take care of someone else for once.

Coming to Hell Through a Big Mouth

2009-05-10T15:19:00.000-07:00

How can you view the world
When each pond’s
An open secret
An open mouth
Waiting to spout
Ways of dying
Coming to Hell
Through a big mouth.

And what should you do
When you can’t help but wonder
How lilies look from under
That desolate space
Hoping that transparency
Can somehow erase
The way it feels
When you hold the sky to your face.

Shackles old around your ankles
They get heavier tonight
And feel what it’s like
To be losing your faith
But don’t you tell me
There’s no escape
Don’t you go losing
Losing your faith

Don’t you go losing
Losing your faith.

Transparency can’t erase
The desolate space
Between the lilies and you
When you hold the sky to your face
And don’t you dare tell me
There’s no escape
Don’t you go losing
Losing your faith.

I Give Thanks.

2009-05-08T10:59:00.001-07:00

I give thanks for closed doors
And whispered conversations
Over jellied cranberry sauce
It’s jiggling surface speaking
In tremors of words unspoken
As knives scratch china
Eyes cast down
At its embellished corners
The faded golden trail
That decorates overdone turkey
Far more intriguing
Far easier to deal with
Than the trails of frowns
Long ago screaming
Disappointment and frustration
Hate and heavy love
Without ever saying
A word.

I give thanks for closed doors
That I might not have to see you cry
Though your eyes give you away
And your slow deep sighs
Fogging the glass of wine
Poured from a bottle
Open for too long
Blood red but fermenting
Like vinegar
Burning our throats
Like the words we refuse to say
I forgive you
And mean it
Instead we stare in silence
Our lips parted about the cheap crystal
Hoping that perhaps the more we endure
Of wine that tastes
Of years passed long ago
The more we just might
Be able to
Not forgive
But forget.

Walk Away

2009-05-08T10:57:00.001-07:00

With So Many People To Love, Why Do I Worry About One?

There’s nothing like coming to the painful realization that someone actually hurt you, someone you never thought you’d care for somehow made the small numb part of your heart feel again, made it hurt again, made it cry out again. And there’s nothing like the realization that they no longer care about you. Not an ounce, not a gram. Instead, all that’s left is the cold shell of a friendship that was never really there. Maybe that friendship would have lasted if you hadn’t kissed me that evening, that evening we sat on the roof and pretended like the night had no end. We ignored the time, ignored the blaring signs that one day we would fall from that paradise the roof was to us. Because that night there was a beautiful sunset, and watching allowed us to ignore everything else. We watched it in its entirety - it was one of those early fall sunsets, one streaked with blood red ribbons. It was chilly, and you held me in your arms.

Your arms have a smell, you know. I don’t know if you know that, but they really do. I feel like I’ve been impregnated by the scent because in the mornings I sometimes think I smell it, and my insides begin to kick. Perhaps once I would have loved to feel that emotion growing inside me, taunting me with the prospect of something I would unconditionally love. But our relationship has never been that tangible. Now when I smell that lovely scent that once I cherished, all I feel is nausea.

You told me there was nothing to fear, nothing to fear as we stepped over broken glass and slept on broken glass with alcohol coursing through our veins. It made us warm in that cold cold building that contained our love. It made us feel alive in the room with the broken tiles that echoed when we spoke. And when we laughed it was syncopated with reverberations.

Is that all I was to you? A reverberation? An echo of something you used to love? Did my voice remind you of something you loved in your youth? Is that all you wanted me for? Were we destined for failure? When you heard me sing, the way my hands felt on your back was all you saw. When you saw me slowly tear off my shirt, the way my breath felt in your ear was all you heard.

We did fail. We saw it coming, but it didn’t make it any less painful. When we sat there in a circle passing around escape in a blunt we looked at each other through cloudy eyes and decided that yes, we did hate each other. There’s that sickness again, there’s that pain. I had forgotten what it felt like.

I can’t say I loved you. But I can say that I hated you. I hated the way you looked past me. I hated the way you ignored how well our voices intertwined. I hated how you refused to be my friend when all I wanted was to hear your voice again, like I used to. Will I ever admit that I loved you, even a little? No. But I know that someday I’ll look back at the pictures of us smiling together in the sunshine, you wielding a sword, smashing a pineapple on a picnic table. And I laughed that day. I laughed so hard. And the sweet sticky juice dripped down my chin and I’m sure you tasted it when you kissed me.

Tell me, did love it? Did you love the way I tasted? Did you love the way I felt under you? I’m sure you did. But how much did it bother you that I wouldn’t let you go farther? When your tongue traced the indent beneath my ribs, and the channel that runs down the center of my stomach, how much did it hurt you that I made you stop? How much less did that make you want me? Or perhaps it made you want me all the more. I’ll never ask you. I’ll never know.

All I can know is the way you treated the other girls who yielded to you. And at least I can say that despite your loathing for me, I’ll never be like them.

LIke the two of us, you and all of them failed. You told me the stories, you told me the conversations you had with them. You took them to that place we all imagine, that magical place between heaven and hell, where the angels sing songs in your head, and the devil mocks your sin. I never let you take me there. I don’t regret it.

But we did plan a trip together. It wasn’t a trip to ecstasy, as much as you may have wanted it. It was a trip to the land of skyscrapers that look like crooked teeth against a grey black sky. It is the place where neon lights take the place of the sun, and where music leaking from underground allies is the soundtrack to the city. We were going to go there, together. We would make that music, we would instill ourselves into the city’s background noise. We would laugh, and we would kiss, and we would sing. And we would get a following.

People would come to see us in that ally where we started to play. People would come to see us in that cafe that let us play as its connoisseurs sipped lattes and mochas and other drinks that ruined the bitter taste of the coffee buried beneath the sugar. People would come to see us in that venue that took a chance on us. People would know our name. People would yell our name. Our name would mean something to those who loved our music. Our name would mean something to those who loved our lyrics. And the important thing was that it was our name. It was not my name. It was not your name. It was our name. Our name. Our name. And what has that become? Where has that gone? It’s passed to nothing in the midst of our downfall. It’s vanished into the space that keeps growing between us.

I tried once to close that gap. I had been made strong by the atmosphere, by the serum of confidence that flowed in my blood. It did not matter that later that night I would forget all about you. It did not matter that the next morning I would not want to rise from the ocean of my sheets. It did not matter that the next day you would reveal to me how uncomfortable I made you feel. At that hour, that minute, that second, all I wanted was to feel you again, feel the way you moved in my arms.

But you shifted so awkwardly, so uncomfortably. What exactly does that mean? I’ll probably never know. We don’t communicate well. We knew that from our very beginning. You told me to call you more often, I thought you should call me less often. You always wanted me to stay, I always told you I needed to go. You thought I thought things about you I never thought about you, and I would never even consider thinking about you. But you’ll never know that. Our thoughts never coincided.

Although we both know that you’ll be with someone else. I’ll be with someone else. And someday you’ll walk away from them too as you did to me. Will they write of you, as I am now? Will they think of you in the same way I do now? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Perhaps you find it easier to simply not think about me. You never think about the way my hair smells when you bury your nose in it. And you’ll never think about how my head lolled to the side in your father’s chair. You don’t want to think about it. Because there’s nothing like coming to the painful realization that you were actually hurt by someone.

I don’t think you ever intended to become attached to me. Our first night together, we laughed with Elizabeth C. Baker in her decorated ballroom. And although we sang and giggled and rolled with bare backs on broken glass, Miss Baker witnessed our first breakdown. And we realized that night that we would never last. Shouldn’t you have detached yourself from me then? Shouldn’t you have started running away? Shouldn’t you have started hating me then and there? We were a ticking bomb, just waiting to tear our relationship to shreds. It was just a matter of time. Is it just a matter of time again?

Perhaps, in time, you’ll be able to look again at me like you used to. Maybe my heart will jump again like it did when you looked into my eyes by the moonlight, nothing but thin wisps of fog between us. You told me then that I was beautiful, or my voice rather, although you would have liked to say that my face was too, and my lips, and my hands, and my hips. But you couldn’t. Then, there was another. Always another. I was just another another to you. I really think so. I’m another in your past. I’m another you kissed. I’m another you walked down the street with, hand in hand. I’m another you took care of to the best of your ability. I’m another you loved to talk with. And I’m no longer. And sometimes I think that’s alright to be just another. Hating is easier for a logical mind to handle.

But how much credibility do thoughts really have when your heart screams the opposite? The heart does not have vocal cords to allow it to communicate. The mind does. And so I say I hate you. I say you’re immature. Do I mean it? Doubtful. Because when I sit in your room in the chair we both used to fit so comfortably in something hurts inside me. It’s a muscle I didn’t know could be sore. It’s a part of my heart I didn’t know could feel. I don’t know where it comes from. It scares me a little. I want to go take that escape between my fingers, between my teeth. And then maybe I won’t remember. Maybe I can erase that feeling. I can cut that little part out of my heart. I can pretend it doesn’t exist.

But then I hear his voice. That strange, scratchy voice that we both loved. You were so excited to hear that I loved him too. You have the poster from his band’s tour on your wall. You want to get their lyrics written in ink on your virgin skin. I assured you it wouldn’t hurt. Not that much anyways. Oh, I lied.

And I’m sure you lied to me too when you said you wouldn’t hurt me either. And just like all those needles in your skin hurt so, so much, you hurt me so, so much. I don’t want to admit it. But I just did. And it hurts me even now to admit it. Perhaps what makes it bearable is the fact that I hurt you too. And we can be together in our respective pain.

How is that? How can we only be together in hatred? In pain? In hurt? In disrespect? We can’t. We can’t go on like that. We can’t be together. Or at least not now. Maybe one day we can. Not today. Not when the sun rises on barren trees. Not when our hearts are still barren for each other. Not when our music is still barren. No feeling there. No love. No connection. Just tension. You can feel it in the air. You can taste it.

It tastes like peanut curry. And bananas. No. We can’t be together. Because when I think of peanut curry, I think of you. And bananas make me think of you too. And blue moons shining so rarely in the night sky. And chinese food. Do you know you ruined chinese food for me? Black beans too. Tequila. Porcelain under my clammy grasp. Brass hooks in my fingers. Quilts tucked expertly in. All of it.

Your name is written in the stitches of the shirts you loved when I wore. Your fingers trace the rips in my jeans. I shudder. I smile. Oh, I hate the smile that creeps onto my face. I can’t have it there. I need to erase it. I need to forget it. I need to forget how it feels when you run your fingers through my hair.

No. I can’t have you. I don’t want to have you. I don’t want to miss you. And I don’t want to love you. I don’t want to think I ever could have loved you. This is my way of saying goodbye, because I can’t do it face to face.

When Words Say Nothing, And Silence Says Everything

2009-05-08T10:56:00.000-07:00

When I see the rain, I think of you. I think of how you used to hate it, hate how it made dime sized splotches on the fedora you wore to work. The rain ate up the light, you said, you said it made everything so dismal and dull.

I always loved the rain, loved how it smelled against the hot pavement. The rain makes you appreciate the light, I said, I said the way it smells forces you to remember your other senses other than sight.

You took me to a waterfall one day, one day when we were still so giddy to see each other. You took me to the ledge, led me blindly. And I tripped on your shoes, or on my own shoes, or perhaps on nothing at all, because your hand still felt so lovely in mine.

Our hands fit smoothly together when it was my turn to lead you, lead you to a place neither of us should have been. Had we been caught, I would have laughed, laughed at how our silly romance could be so easily contained by rules and regulations and boundaries. But we weren't caught, weren't caught but still contained.

The road between your doorstep and mine wore down my tires, wore them down to treadless black circles spinning endlessly on the unchanging grey beneath them. And though I travelled that grey path time and time again, time and time again we found ourselves no farther than when we'd started.

We disagreed on the importance of silence, the importance of space between words, the importance of no words at all. You frustrate me with your silence, you said, you said it seemed as though I was holding something back from you.

I never meant to hurt you, though hurt you I still did. And although I was sorry, I'm sorry I never said. While you always claimed I should speak, speak to express my mind, mine was not one that could easily be spoken of.

I'm sorry means nothing, means nothing of consequence, and consequently I never said it. Sometimes I wonder if you'll ever know, know that in my silence I'm screaming apologies, apologizing for the way I treated you. You'll never admit that I did you wrong, wrong as I may have been all along.

There are so many things I should have told you, should have showed you. Should have is the key phrase, the phrase that deems what is generally acceptable in a situation like ours. But I don't regret it, don't regret my silence. I know my silence spoke more, more than any of the words I ever said.

In my silence you can watch my eyes, and in my eyes you can watch my soul. In my silence I cannot lie to you, lie to you and tell you that everything is fine, everything is alright. In my silence I can kiss you all the same, all the better. And in my silence you can still know that I care, care about you, and care about us.

But we disagreed on the importance of silence, silence and rain. While you saw a dreary day as the absence of light, light shone through the cement ceiling of clouds to my perception. And while you saw my silence as a lack of words, words could never have adequately described my feelings at the time.

Better to be silent than to be meaningless. Better to learn to love the rain than to live in a perfectly sunny, arid, and lifeless land.

These Kids Today.

2009-05-08T10:55:00.000-07:00

These kids today,
with their raised fists, screaming to the idols of the stage that they will change the world -
change the world with the cars their parents bought them,
racing from this event to that event, calling to SAVE THE PLANET
before driving one hundred and twelve miles in a box on wheels
whose gas mileage is less than most of their ACT scores.
The ACT never asked them how to think,
never demanded that its takers comprehend the way life truly works.
But nevertheless, in number-induced elation, they could wave the papers that ensured their entrance to this program or that school in their friends’ faces.
Change the world indeed.

These kids today,
whose dreams are so lofty,
soaring beyond the opportunities their parents had.
So privileged they are –
to be able to jet around the earth on this humanitarian mission or that peace project.
“This’ll look great on our resumes,”
they say to each other,
eying out the competition to their prestigious placement in elitist communities;
or perhaps, scoping out the most favorable distraction to the horror they were sent over to help.
No one expects the good kids
to fight bitterly,
to lust passionately,
to trip heavily on the stuff they bargained from the dirty boy down the street,
to find Lucy in the sky in the dorm rooms on which their parents spent thousands a year to provide.

These kids today,
infected with hatred –
for their parents,
for the government,
for the kids who sits all alone at lunch time, only to consider suicide at the age of sixteen, because he can taste the hatred of his peers in the turkey and swiss on rye his mother packed him.
They pissed in his pudding yet again.
And simultaneously they’ll smile, they’ll wave,
they’ll accept that award with a grin on their face,
hiding the fact that the essay they wrote about their alcoholic uncle
was a complete and utter lie.
Uncle Brian lives in Savannah, Georgia and owns a health food store.
Uncle Brian pays for their education.
Uncle Brian doesn’t know that the lonely boy who sits alone at lunch
never came back to school.
No one knew his name.

These kids today,
with their wild hair and black clothes,
dreaming of becoming the rebel that everyone secretly loves,
dreaming of being different for once.
They’ll huddle together in their groups and dream together,
never realizing that in their rebellion they’ve become yet another number,
another statistic to be presented to their younger sister, younger brothers.
The dead and shriveled, tar filled lungs they all once shuddered at the sight of
have begun to grow in their own chests.
Suddenly they’re yet another nameless face in yet another trend –
and tragically, they don’t even realize it.

These kids today
swear to dethrone the president,
to stand up to social injustice,
to boycott the corrupt industries,
to start a revolution with their
voices,
words,
petitions,
marches.
But suddenly they’re distracted from their noble causes by the unmistakable scent
of the perfume of the girl who lives three doors down,
and the feel of her lips when they brush against the tender skin of the neck.
And the dying masses,
the screaming victims of genocide,
the weeping, abused women,
the hunger stricken countries,
the unjust war,
and the climate catastrophe –
all are millions of miles away from their suburban slice of heaven.

And the funny thing is –
or tragic, rather –
is that one day they won’t be kids anymore.
They’ll be sporting their shiny shoes on the gum stained sidewalks of Manhattan,
they’ll be talking on cell phones attached to their ears as they create a bit more wind
in the already breezy Chicago,
they’ll be holding umbrellas in Seattle to the rain whose acidity was the result
of the SUVs they drove to SAVE THE PLANET rallies.
And when they stand together to rock the vote,
as they always swore they would back in the day when they could
hide from social injustice under their parents’ roofs,
it will be these kids today
who will rule the world.

Jesse.

2009-05-08T10:52:00.001-07:00

I’ll name him Jesse. Black pants. Black shoes. Black shirt with the name of a band no one but he knew. Black guitar case left open on the street next to his foot tap-tap-tapping to the beat of his own creation. An Alvarez – with five strings. The E-string dangling uselessly past the head like the metal-core bands of the grungy basement scene. It was raining – he didn’t mind.

He decided he wanted the fedora he was wearing when he was sixteen years old. He was in the process of robbing a guitar store called the Blue Eagle. His E-string had broken, and he needed another. The man behind the counter caught the not-so-sneaky thief. He stared at his black shoes shuffling beneath him over the blue tile as he was dragged by his ear to the back room. He felt like a little kid again – a feeling he loathed.

His mother used to pull him by the ear, wrench it like a limb out of its socket, treating the cartilage like a removable appendage. He used to yell, to scratch her away. Then he decided to pierce his ears, because he knew then his mother would never touch them. It worked.

The man in the back of the Blue Eagle wore black pants. Black shoes. Black shirt with the name of a band he had started, a band everyone had heard of. The man wore a fedora. With a feather. He let the boy go with a nod and a wave of his cigar. He was indifferent to the boy’s minor misdemeanor. A thin stream of smoke followed the path of the man’s dismissal. The boy left and never came back. But he went home and told his mother he wanted a fedora.

His mother used to wear hats. Big ones. Elaborate ones. Purple ones for Easter. She would sit in church each Sunday on the fourth pew on the left, behind the man with the golden spectacles. She always thought he was handsome. He’d comment on her hat, on her purse, on her gloves, and she’d smile adoringly before he turned back to the front. Meanwhile her son snuck to the bathroom where he smoked cigarettes and wondered what it would be like to play in a band everybody’s heard of.

And he would come back, smelling of burnt leaves, of cheap tobacco, of a carcinogen he was not yet of age to inhale. His mother knew. She had a nose, and it functioned. She touched his long hair gently, tucked it behind his ears. She frowned when she told him he looked just like his father. And then she would adjust her hat, and turn back in the direction of the man with the golden spectacles.

The man with the golden spectacles drove a black Lincoln and arrived for church eleven minutes early. The women with the big hats always greeted him, hugged him, kissed his cheeks like the French. The man with the golden spectacles didn’t remind the mother of her son’s father. This man would never leave – she’d never see the back of his black Lincoln drive away, so that the numbers and letters of his license plate would be forever imprinted on the inside of her eyelids.
She would shut her eyes for prayer in church, see that combination bathed in blood, and open her eyes to see its descendant staring not at her, but at her hat.

He swore he’d never buy a hat – but he really liked the fedora.

His mother always left church before the man with the golden spectacles so she would never have to see him go. As she walked out of church that morning, she kissed the man goodbye on both cheeks, as the French do, and turned to see instead her son drive off, wearing the fedora he found in his father’s closet.

He rarely ventured there, but when he did, he loved the way it smelled. It smelled like old smoke. While he despised the man whose scent was infused into the very threads of the carpet, he couldn’t help but think of the time his father gave him his old Alvarez for his 14th birthday. The old man had forgotten not only his son’s birthday, but how to play the out of tune thing. The boy was to ecstatic to care.

He stole the fedora from the top shelf, where his father had left it by accident in his hasty retreat from the house that now smelled of Summer Breeze Lysol. The hat added stark angles to the silhouette the mother saw as she watched her only son drive away.

He never formed a band that everybody’s heard of. Instead he sat on the floor of his unfurnished apartment, holding his Alvarez in his arms like the child he hoped he would never have. His long hair fell over his face since his mother no longer tucked it behind is ears with the gentlest touch she knew how to give. He would fall asleep each night cradling Judas, his guitar, in his arms. He named it thus for the betrayal of his father, and the betrayal of his own.

And so he sat each day, on the corner of the street where the Blue Eagle once stood. The man with the fedora had long since died, clutching his cigars, clutching his cane. Sometimes the boy wished he could thank the old man, the one who exemplified the single act of true forgiveness he had ever witnessed. The boy would never forgive his father, and the mother would never forgive the son. Instead she would sit in church in the fourth pew each Sunday, with the drawl of the pastor in the background, and watch the man with the golden spectacles. She bought herself a nice new yellow hat – she knew he loved that color.

The boy wore nothing but black. His mother had once hated it, but now it made it easier for her to forget him and the guitar he blasphemously named Judas. When she thought of him, his morose attire allowed her to finally diminish his memory into shades of grey. She could don a purple hat on Easter Sunday and not once think of her son, the reincarnation of the man she once loved, the boy who had shared her pew for 18 years of his miserable life.

On the corner in the town far away, he found that to live without the love of a mother is to live without guilt – or at least he liked to convince himself of that. He still dressed in black, and he couldn’t help but think of how his mother had hated it. When he put on his fedora it somehow still smelled of his father, although intermingled with his own sweat, his own smoke.

He wondered if his mother would recognize him now. He thought sometimes no – his hair had grown too shaggy, his face had grown too old. But then he’d catch his reflection in a puddle in the street after a sudden rainstorm, and he’d see his father. He would wince as he once did when his mother pulled his ear. He saw in himself the man his mother fell in love with, the man she once saw standing on a street corner in Johnny Cash’s characteristic all-black, drumming along to a tune of his own creation with his feet. When she leaned in close to tell him that his playing was inspirational, she could smell the smoke in his hat.

“Where’d you get it?” asked the boy’s mother to the boy’s father, long ago.

“It was my father’s,” he replied.

I saw him on the corner, in all black. He was playing for no one but himself, but I couldn’t help but notice. It was raining, but he didn’t seem to mind. But for the broken E-string he would be alright with his fedora and his guitar.

“What’s your name?” I asked the boy with whom I would one day fall in love.

“You can call me whatever you’d like” he replied.

I’ll name him Jesse.

The World Is Not Flat, Columbus.

2009-05-08T10:51:00.000-07:00

I stood in the rain, letting it drip down my face, intertwine with the threads of my hair, soften the calloused leather of my hands. I stood in the shower, waiting for the water to get so hot that it would numb the tender skin of my arms. It's best to cry while in the shower, because it's easiest then to pretend that you're not. As I stood in the shower that day I felt what it's like to entirely drain one's tear ducts. But I'll never tell - you'll never know.

It was raining that candlelit evening two months and three days ago. You came and met me at my car with an umbrella - but who thinks about umbrellas when you're making the tiny hairs on my neck stand on end? We sat on your floor, our backs against your bed, and I told you that your picture frames were crooked. You asked me what life would be like if there were only straight lines.

Your room was decorated in shades of red. You apologized for the untidiness, for the small degree of chaos, for the black lint in the carpet. You picked nervously at it as you looked back at me, waiting for that word of encouragement, the smile that let you know you were forgiven for the laundry basket sitting in the center of your floor. I told you everything was alright, since your red sheets smelled of you when I buried my face in them.

The doctor's office was decorated in shades of white, screaming superficial sterility through the twice daily windex-ed window. The woman to whom I was supposed to release my life's information was overly tan and left faint yellow tobacco stains on my documents as she gave them back to me. I told her I liked her pink nails that could inflict significant damage to an unsuspecting patient. I thought her occupation choice was appropriate - when she simultaneously contracted both skin and lung cancer, she wouldn't have far to go. Her fellow cubicle-mates just may care enough not to chip her nails during treatment.

She gave me back the pieces of paper that would one day allow my medical insurance to scoff at me when I asked for assistance, and sent me on my way to the rectangular white box whose atmosphere was intended to comfort the hurting. I couldn't help but think of the red tape that framed the lily that I made you, and of the red blanked that ended up on your floor.

The bathroom in the doctor's office was equally white - perhaps even more so. As I lay face down on the bleached tile I realized quite tragically that the world could never consist solely of straight lines. Even now the floor was warping beneath me, taking the preconceived notion of 180 degrees and bending it beyond recognition. And as I stared into the swirling vortex of the toilet I felt my skin stretching and pulling across my stomach, such that it would never be flat again.

I left the bathroom newly decorated in shades of red. And I left the doctor's office that disguised murder with a white lab coat.

Two months and three days ago I lay awake listening ot the sound of your breathing. Tonight the drumbeat of your heart pounded in my veins. I woke up to kicking and screaming inside of me. As I lay there alone in sheets that didn't smell of you, I wondered what it was like to be that little one that swam in the world that was my belly. If it cried I'd never know - it would never tell me.

And dear Bobbie, nor could I ever tell you.

I stood in the rain, disregarding the umbrella, because who think of umbrellas when they're waiting in front of a death clinic for the one who can make the hair on the back of their neck stand on end?

And I stood in the shower, weeping, because where better else to cry?

And I buried my face in the red sheets that smelled of you, because with you, the world could never be straight again.

Art. Is. Resistance.

2009-05-08T10:50:00.000-07:00

Art.

The expression of feeling through some sort of visual or audio medium. The bearing of one's soul through a paintbrush, through a guitar string, through the stretched tight head of a drum, through a shaft of No.2 lead. The creation of something that can shake the world, or be left under a bed, or be burned with the garbage on trash day. The capture of the world as we know it, or as we knew it, or as we wish we could know it. The manipulation of emotion through color, and sound, and light. The bible of the uneducated masses, the savior of the intellectual few. The energy of light captured by film, the sound of the unspeakable as portrayed on paper. The world through the eyes of a child, through the eyes of our subconscious. The greed of the senses for something tangible. The way to break a heart, or to heal the soul. The manifestation of our wildest dreams, of our sweatest muses, of our most terrifying nighmares. The slave of its creator, the mastor of its admirer.

Is.

Existence on Earth, existence in one's mind. Life being lived as it should, life being lived as it shouldn't, life - regardless of the way it's being spent or wasted.. Description of him, of her, of it. That which comes to pass. The reality of pain, the reality of love. The essence of being. Truth, whether or not we like it.

Resistance.

To stand up for what you believe, to stand up for what you don't believe, simply because everyone else is. To hold your ground, to break new ground. To have an opinion, to have someone else's opinion, to make up your own opinion. To win, to lose, but never to tie. To fight back, to start the fight. To be condemned for your nonconformity, to condemn other's for their conformity. To have a voice, to have a song, to have a scream. To not be afraid of what may happen to you, to be terrified of the world if things don't change. To have the ability to look into the future, to have the have the insight to look the past. To join a movement, to start a movement. To never back down, to always push forward. To be be steadfast, to be open to change. To riot, to yell, to burn. To refuse to be repressed, to break from oppression, to overthrow. To support the opposition, to be the opposition.

Art Is Resistance.

Find your voice. Raise your voice.