The house had a smell: cigarette smoke, but our rooms smelled of vodka and stale potato chips.  My mom was always coming in to open the windows and turn on my fan. Everyone smoked but my brother. Everybody drank. Now, the house smells of smoke only near the front window when my mom allows herself a cigarette. Though it’s mostly scented candles and there is a rhythm, the oxygen tank in the corner near my mother’s plant collection, sort of breathing itself announcing presence at all hours of the day. It’s not a beep or a hum or a whirr but a steady electronic heave and fall that I hear as I lay in my brother’s room staring up at the psychedelic spinner that he got from Spencer’s Gifts years ago: black with white checker boxes and if I plugged it in, it would spin. I never plug it in. I watch it though, every time I’m here. I remember when he got it. I remember when he painted his room black, I painted mine dark purple.
It’s hard for me to sit still so I get up suddenly, abruptly and constantly. I walk into my mother’s room. I need to walk, pace. I did this as a child: walked up and down the hallway, walked into the den, danced, hopped, twirled around and then back into my room with the music loud, door shut, hopping up and down. Do people change? I really can’t tell. I am looking at myself in my mother’s giant mirror above her bureau, another reason I hang out in her room when she isn’t here and I hear something. I turn to the direction and also notice my mother’s trolls on the floor. She collects them. Not the little cartoon trolls with the diamonds in their belly button, although she has those too, but these big scary mannequin trolls that would have freaked me out as a child. They look like trolls from The Labyrinth; real trolls, happy but you know they have a nefarious world somewhere too. And they are all a brown hue. I liked the colored trolls. “General Hair” my dad called him: a troll we took out every time we played Risk. 

He was beloved, our mascot.
“General Hair! General Hair!” my dad would repeat, sipping Wild Irish Rose prepared to lose again, every time.
“You’re kind of the worst at this, Dad.”
My brother and I were ruthless in Risk. It’s hard to stay one place. How do you not let grief destroy you? I can’t answer or cry or sit still or come to any meaning. I’m in my mother’s room noticing two of the larger trolls are on the floor previously having been on the bench next to her other dresser. They would not have fallen by themselves.  I squint. That’s what I do when I’m fathoming concepts, squint. Then I see it’s black body slither towards the bureau.
“Oh fuck. Dad!!! Dad!!!!! There’s a snake in mom’s room! Dad!”
I didn’t scream though. It was, I’d say, two feet long in actuality but I described it as three feet to animal control, and only a foot away from me. I had walked right by it and it laid low for a minute. That is what I mean: the surprise. It laid low for a minute then took off knocking the trolls off the bench.  That meant, it was on TOP of furniture. That meant, it was slithering over her stuff. It was the middle of the day in August, sunny, cool in the house. I didn’t scream. I wanted Alex to know that. I don’t scream anymore but I still called Dad. I didn’t leave the room either. I watched it. I didn’t run away when the snake got in the house and I didn’t plan to leave it.

“Oh my gosh, Adelmira. You are a wolf now.”

She grinned and I half expected to see the worm crushed against her gums, growing eyes and smiling. Hello, executioner. In half and still alive.
“Ok, Adelmira, now you have to bury this one.”
I was still holding the tail and the body was wriggling. This was my fascination. It moved.
“It’s moving!” she exclaimed.
“Yeah, it’s still alive. Worms can live like that. The other half is alive inside of you.”
Her eyes were big but she took the other half gently. She held it up to examine it writhing in the wind.
“Do worms feel pain?”
I laid each one neatly in a row on my picnic table.
“Answer me, worms, do you feel pain?” 

I began to shake the can.
“Does he feel it?”she asked me.
“The worm? It’s not a boy, it’s nothing, it’s a hermaphrodite.”
“What does that mean?” she asked still holding the worm in the air

I giggled, “It means it’s both. It has sex with itself.”
Her eyes got wider. I said the word ‘sex.’ Not as bad as the time I accidentally said “fuck” when the VHS tape would’t work in front of my mom. I learned it from Dad. She giggled too and then we both laughed uproariously in synch like this was just so easy and normal and good. Friendship that is. If only it were always like this.

“Bury it!”
“Where?”
I pointed to the spot right in front of her.
“In you and in the ground. Here i’ll help.”
I scooted forward on my knees feeling the thread stretch, my knee raw from the constant kneeling in the dirt. I took both hands and formed a claw movement and stuck my fingers in first then pushed down to get my palms in and tore up a huge chunk of dirt and grass. The soil near the water was always soft. I knew we’d see other worms, rollie-polies, maybe some beetles. Excited to show off this micro world, I tossed the dirt to either side of me and nodded my head in the direction of the hole. Five worms wriggling and a millipede.
“I ate one of those before.”

She nodded towards it without saying anything.
“That one,”I pointed to the millipede. “It tasted like dirt.”
“So did the worm.”
“Shh!” I held my dirty finger up to my mouth. “He can still hear you! Oops I mean IT can still hear you!”

We laughed together and she held the worm higher in the air, peering up at it above her, squinting.

“So long!”

She dropped it without looking. I leaned forward, both my hands and knees on the ground, mouth open. It landed in the center and the millipede sped up, heading towards the grass towards Adelmira. I became mezmerized by its movement. What do giants look like? It rushed into the blades, into some hidden hole or place. What do giants look like, insect? I held the millipede in my palm before I brought him to my mouth.
“Cool,” I heard her and turned my eyes back to the half eaten worm.
We watched for a few moments in silence as it wriggled, missing pieces surrounded by whole worms and cool earth.
“Bury it,” I said.
And she did as she was told.

“there is no such thing as still lives”

–erica jong

She grinned and I half expected to see the worm crushed against her gums, growing eyes and smiling. Hello, executioner. In half and still alive.

When my brother was alive, it was easier to catch snakes.
“Alex!” I slammed the door and screamed. “Alex!”
I ran to his door and began knocking furiously. My brother was furtive, hidden behind a locked door most of the time.
“Hold on!” he yelled.
“There’s a snake.”
“There’s a what? A snake? God,” I heard him mumbling, heard glasses clank, heard him shifting things in his room.
My brother and I were both secretive and nearly identical in appearance. We peeked through cracks before opening doors. We hid things: bottles, papers, drawings, notes, food wrappers. We both had our separate lives that took place in a 8 x 12 box. When he opened the door, I rushed him.
“In the den, I don’t want the dogs to hurt it or eat it, hurry!”
He followed me and I continued jabbering.

“I didn’t know what to do, it’s not that big but I saw Dakota swipe at it and Sasha is in there too.”

The den was where our TV was and when we had been younger, our video game consule and exercise bike that we both enjoyed. It was like an annex to the rest of the house. My parents said someone had built it after the house had been built so there was a separate door you can lock and a slight step down. My brother once accidentally slammed that door on my bare big toe when I was younger and I wailed more loudly than when the wasps attacked me. I always think of that when I see the door. My big toe was black for a week.
Our house is already small so I can’t imagine the house being built without a den. It would feel more like a shack to me. I always was grateful for that: the separate room with the door that closed where I could blast music and later would live in that room when I had to move home one more time and my dad had moved into my bedroom. The washer and dryer was next to it where we stored all of our snacks and board games. It held the hot water heater too which was centered around cobwebs and active spiderwebs and hidden only by a curtain. I did not like to have to turn the water on and off but I had to do it all the time or the tub would drip and the kitchen sink would leak onto the floor. To say there are a few problems is a delicate way of exposing your status in the caste.  The den led to the back door. Between the floor and the wooden back door was a gaping space that my parents had tried to stuff with a towel. It had been like that for as long as I could remember. Slugs, spider crickets, crickets, spiders, beetles and snakes simply crawled right underneath, and when Michaelangelo was alive, our snapping turtle, I would scoop the crickets and beetles up and throw them in the tank. Spiders I let build homes everywhere. Spider crickets and cockroaches freaked me out so I usually screamed and made my dad or Alex deal with it unless I had Hot Shot nearby. Snakes, no matter how small, I would not touch.
“Make sure the dogs don’t hurt him! I saw Dakota try to snap at him,” I repeated frantically.
I was obsessed with everything staying alive except for flies, cockroaches and spider crickets. They were disgusting. My brother opened the den door and I stood back, interested in the interaction and afraid. It wasn’t the biting I couldn’t take, it was the surprise, how they move, they way they sway and suddenly. I’m easily startled. Snakes are fast and their slither intimidates me. Alex said I ruin everything by screaming and he’s right. I don’t like to be caught off guard. My brother had grabbed the broom that he kept in his room. Despite his secrets, he always had a neat room, obsessively cleaning it even as a child. Once he approached it, shooing Dakota and Sasha away, I ran back into my room suddenly terrified this would all go wrong. I was twenty, living back at home temporarily after moving out of the Oceanview bay house with my girlfriends,into and back out of my partner’s apartment and sort of waffling in general.
“But making Straight A’s,” I told Jake holding my shot glass to his, letting the smell of rum fill the air, throat tightening on instinct.
Things burned me and I set myself on fire anyway. It only took five minutes and my brother returned, passing my door without stopping in as was our new adult custom: passing each other but not with any gaiety or friendship.
“Snake’s gone!”
I ran out quickly before he locked himself back in his chamber.
“Are the dogs ok? Is the snake ok?”
“Everyone’s fine! It’s outside!” he yelled through his already shut door.
The house had a smell: cigarette smoke, but our rooms smelled of vodka and stale potato chips.  My mom was always coming in to open the windows and turn on my fan. Everyone smoked but my brother. Everybody drank.

the weirdest thing that ever happened to me was you.

“Live! And have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind.”

-gwendolyn brooks

“Grace can take you places hustling can’t.”

i appreciate this blog and the interactions. no one cares about poetry as it’s not visual and not immediate. you have to make people see it and make it visual. i think that’s what ive been trying.

will finish the blue book