I guess some things you
can’t forget and
I couldn’t stand the sight of me
so I watched the willows
perfect their melancholy
some days

when I walked to the edge
of the city and back.
they carried it naturally
and I tried passing windows
without looking at my face.
it’s dark at four and
forget about the moonlight,
or a headlight
or my sun lamp.
my body sees no glare or
person and
my head is drawn
in hoods.
I am their winter rival.

my pores were lined with bentonite,
steam and suffered
prayer; a nihilist effort’s
worth    my skin was
exfoliated but my heart
was still blood-thirsty
in knots.  Nana’s rosary
draped across my wrists
and most of my fingers stayed crossed
becoming a space containing little breaths
of God.

I scrubbed the dirt from every inch
of my scalp,
the bridge of my nose,
under my elbows,
my kneecaps.
any crack that light could fit
I tried to rinse it first.
sometimes I took the long way to the store.
29 degrees and someone drew a giant sun
blanketing a tulip garden
on the side of a wall in an effort to,
I only assume,
preserve summer and cure their own
raging seasonal affective disorder.
I focused on the colors.

tried to pay attention to the subtle shift in greens
as the stems got closer to photosynthesis:
the yellow stamen, orange petals,
tint of turquoise in the grove of trees
hovering in the distance,
the way everything tilted towards the right
on instinct
with no speaking masters
and no shadows beneath them.

I leaned left towards your block
focused on feeling the weather change
in my tights and mock
wool mini skirt
in hopes it would
cure my malingering,
would halt my bloodlust,
my persistent inner child
pleading with her hands out
looking for touch and I am
suddenly spades out in your dead garden and
running forward,
something pinned between
my teeth:

lines, the way that
pauses form a book,
my thirteenth draft
to you.

“Saturn returns”

I go to meet you
with my hand
smudged with ink,
a bad habit of mine.

this is winter 2014 and
I had things to remember:
about seven or eight phone calls to
make, the weaving of
committees plus incidents to report,
plus how much I stepped or made
or consumed and the beep of friends
in need
like the outer rim of a leech,
stuck to hip and
wasting me.
when I saw the melting
phrase, a faded scrawled “pw”
near my thumb
which meant paperwork.

I had to submit five more
things tomorrow but I was here to
get my scarf back actually.
focus on just reporting
earnestly my feelings.
I walk boldly
up the walk and
then upon seeing
you, tall,
I just scatter
every thought into the air.

grab the scarf
and go.
we are at
love is patient.
I am in my car and
gone.

“richochet”

a moving, a dizziness, a solemn regard for grief  and heaviness. stuff is not a replacement for love.  i suddenly had too much stuff. i wanted everything gone. sublimation is moving quickly from feeling the comfort of a baby blanket years ago enter the room then waft into tears you are dying to choke out but instead just transpire into thoughts. respire. perspire. they vanish or they become the tendril wrapping you. nothing has ever comforted me. I would not describe myself as a “comforted” person.  i wanted the plain white room. I had a recurring vision of dying at 34 and I’m convinced more and more I don’t have to. I’m convinced it was suicide.  I wanted to move slower, slower than time and just watch things drift away. i felt certain on fleeing, the heaviness of leaving my stuff behind, knowing I might have to. these would be flashes of a minute. I reminded myself how much time I had left. about six more hours of this. it had only been the first hour, the coming up.  what have I been thinking? but the deep voice that is both mine and not mine came in: it’s not what you’ve been thinking, but what you’ve felt instead.

before this started, I had pulled tarot downstairs. the cards themselves meditative in their presentation even without digesting meaning  I was remembering the four of swords though I had pulled the eight. the queen of cups. wheel of fortune. ace of swords. to become the witch, become the sword. I was really trying to focus on one thing. wondering what media would help. remembering the time I tripped with all my guy friends at nineteen in their dirty apartment as some of them did coke on the table.  I grappled with cheating on my boyfriend with one of them. as I began to trip, I saw nothing but scary faces and ran to the shower. then back in my friend’s bed. one of them came in to grab me and said it’s just a trip, it will end. he coaxed me into the living room telling me of the time he spent half a trip in a closet and put on a surfing video for me to watch.  the way they were gliding across the water set to music; syncopated, sunny, and far away. unreal. surreal to me, their grace. I used to swim. a lot. I think about that as my eye falls on my favorite painting. I think should I be watching something. 

the painting says “Instruction” on one side and then the artist has taken wide strokes of her brush and painted a stream of red all down a letter, a letter to a love, so you cannot see what the original sender said.  then on the other side painted in black letters, “alter your behavior quickly.” an enlarged phrase  the artist picked out, magnified, this piece of advice. later I read the whole phrase again. I read the whole letter for once. then I let it swarm me. watching nothing. flittering. almost devastated by being forced in this bed, my parents a short distance I can’t touch–ripped from them, having grown so accustomed to being with them once every other month.

the letter says: “once more I advise you, if you have any regard for your quiet, to alter your behavior quickly. for I assure you I have too much spine than to sit contented with this treatment.” 

where am I? on an orange quilt, and in my summer backyard and hugging my father, oxygen tube in his nose. pawing at myself and obsessively; clandestine with my needs then suddenly running. contented with my lip growing fat from the pointy ends of others. the pointy end of me.

When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time alone. Physically, in my room, closed off. I spent a lot of time screaming to get attention then hours of escape. M walls were dark purple and had glow in the dark stars on them. The carpet was pink. Furniture wooden and white. Except for my dog Pepper, sometimes my cats, no one was allowed inside during my games.

I was twiggy, small, fidgety, neurotic. My clothes were rumpled. My room would go from extremely disorganized to housekeeper neat. I rearranged the furniture constantly. There was nothing static here. I used to lay on my bed when I was done twirling around the room, or jumping up and down, and begin to color my face.  I would pick one corner of my mouth and focus on that. Start by pinching my lips- hard- with my fingernail. For as long as I could leave it there; the pinching and until it turned black.  The goal was fat, purple-black, visible and if I took a safety pin to it; the sting would be overwhelming.

Over and over, sometimes letting that ssst out because it caught me off guard. The tingle. Then the relief. The sharpness. Then the satiated sigh, replete. Balmed. The sitting for one minute til I touched it again. After a half hour of this, I would run to the bathroom to see how grotesque it looked. Then I would proceed to watch myself pinch it in the mirror with the pointiest part of each nail. Poking it more. Pinch. Release. Wait. Pinch. Release. Wait. Check mirror. Sometimes I would hold it for a whole thirty seconds until I wanted to scream. If you could get past thirty, you can get anywhere.

Then I ran to get the safety pin.

“the lip game”

“and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.”

my hand is smudged
with ink;
marker actually,
I lick my finger tip
and check again,
try to rub it, realize I had
written it in Sharpie
before I stick the tab under my tongue.
this is
a bad habit of
mine:

writing to do lists on
my hand
with whatever pen I was holding
so I wouldn’t forget.
I saw the melting
phrase, a faded scrawled “pw”
near my thumb
which meant paperwork.
it was already Saturday.
(this is 2018 to keep up.)

there is one heart on my left hand
to count the hours between when I took the
dose to now.
everything is obscured by
the fractions
of stories,  I am looking for
something that can
only be found by my favorite
scope of talent:
my eidetic memory,
my propensity to travel
from one section of
the ground to another,
my ability to walk backwards.

the first hour is the hardest.
my stomach sort of lurches
realizing the first wave has already hit
this is acid so it’s harder.
I take half a tab so
my doors won’t melt
but still I need to get out of a place
that is wall to wall carpet and
packed with scribble,
pillows, cat hair, journals,
the air of segregation as
I chain myself to my five mirrors
not to be heard from for a whole year.
I grab eight stones and empty
everything else out of my bookbag.
I bring one water bottle.
I begin to walk with no
sound, letting minutes
weave themselves around my body as
I patiently walk down the
three flights  trying not
to be appalled by how crooked
the building was
or my sore knees or
the temperature of my men;
a reaching tepid.
I ignored the chipping bathtub
just to make it out the door.
I am remembering when I had bed bugs.
there are things I will miss
I think as my skin leaps.

other  things I’m naming:
ways to feel unsettled in transition.
states, or
how to move between things and
home also;  the way the birds landed
on the trees outside my stained-
glass window,
the way the pink light cut through
the room and all the green on my block
in summer which meant
blackbirds, blue jays, cardinals,
plus skateboarders.
my short dresses catching
on the points of fences.
I am opening the door to warmth
and it shreds me.

I spend forty five minutes
sauntering in presence,
pinching the skin of my purlicue.
tedium, ennui
or indifference.
how much space
reverie takes in my brain vs.
results. What do I want?
a soft nothing
like my jaw opening on
a pillow, feeling the satin
on my thighs and just
gawking at the glitter on my ceiling,

another thing I will miss.

my leisure:
the growth between getting
and having.
people never change.
I am stuck
somewhere on a trail
walking and wanting not endless
provision, but the
allegory made more
palatable.
by the time
I walk into the graveyard
hoping to see deer,
I am mired deep in belief
that it is a dead sister
I am seeking,
ignoring my real
brother’s name.

I take the sharpie
out to mark the second hour
at the gate.

“the first wave (grief)”

why must you be obtuse?
can’t draw parallel lines
to crossroads. listen,
who has come to me:
a child.

demanding i throw change on the
floor, guess their name. visions
of me on an island
and this man laughing in
my face.

The fifth one i call is

who i pay homage to in the
corners of the night
is really no one’s
fucking business.