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

It all started when I was five and he bent me over and said
here’s what it’s like
to fuck a man

I set the example of
safety in malice.
what I deserve?

what is fair?

She held up a shiny pocket knife.
“Woa!”
I skipped over.
“Where’d you get that?”

“Right here, on the side, underneath a stryofoam cup.”
“What if someone comes  back for it? A guy once ran through my yard running from the police. It was scary.”

She ignored me.
“I don’t think they will miss it.”
“What if it was used in a murder?”

She cocked her head and gave me the look. The look 

I practiced and saw so much: the that is very unrealistic Ava look.
“Well,” my interest suddenly peaked. “What are we gonna do with it?”

And before she could answer I hopped up and down and spun around clutching the filthy straw in my fingers and almost singing, “I have an idea! I have an idea! I have an idea!”
Then I ran right up to her face, so close I could feel her breath smelled like Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and placed my hand gently on top of hers, on top of the knife, looking her in the eyes.
“I know the perfect sacrifice for our magic ghost spell.”
I was so close I could feel her swallow without touching me.
“Do you trust me?”
We stared at each other and she let a little grin spread across her face. I could see the yellow of her teeth, the snaggle tooth, the remnants of her cereal. It didn’t bother me.
“Follow me,” and I grabbed her by the wrist and led her back towards the ditch.
I began running partly to show her how fast I  was and partly out of excitement to share my secret world with someone. Adelmira was dirty already. Most of my friends, while they will come to the edge of the ditch with me are hesitant about how carelessly I kneel, almost wallow, in mud.
“You’re going to attract bugs to you,” Anna said once
“Wow, you think they will think I’m the ground and like climb into me, into the mud and try to get inside of the dirt that’s on top of me? And try to make a house there?”
“What?!?!”
Adelmira seemed better, like she understood that nature was cooler than anything else that happened, even virtual reality.
“I know a good spot,’” I leapt over a stick feeling suddenly sure of myself.
I didn’t know a spot, I was just going to find a place where we can sit to make things easier. Worms were everywhere here. They were going to be big and juicy too. I hopped down the bank and plopped down, on the seat of my pants without care. My mom is used to washing my pants.
“Come sit, good dog Adelmira!”
I patted the patch next to me. Adelmira was hopping but more slowly, holding the pocket knife shut in her left hand. She fell to her knees and opened the knife again.
“We,” I turned to her because I was stalling and thinking, “are going to find the perfect worm for your super magical super magic ghost spell.”
She nodded.
“Now, we have to dig them up and we’ll need,” I put my fingers on my chin and tapped, feeling a smudge of dust left behind, “at least two for each of us. Wait!”
I held my hands out as if to stop her even though she hadn’t moved or made any motions to move.
“We will make them two.”
I dug my hands deep in the mud in front of her and moved them towards me in a sweeping motion uncovering not just one or two but several, at least nine worms, in the process. She leaned back a little as if to protect herself but I was undaunted. She would like this when it’s done. I grabbed one fast, knowing they try to wriggle deep back into the dirt when exposed and I pulled it. Sometimes I ripped them in half just doing this but today it popped right out: big, fat, juicy red one.
“Mmm,” I said and let it dangle in front of her. “Perfection. This is the best sacrifice worm I’ve ever found thanks to my trusty sidekick mutt beagle hound, Adelmira.”
She smiled exposing her full snaggletooth. I placed the worm on the ground and held its two ends.
“Adelmira, you are going to slice it in half with your special pocketknife and then you are going to eat one of the halves and bury the other one.”
She looked at me for a second before doing anything.
“Adelmira, this will make you so powerful you turn into a wolf and you can fly anywhere at any time and the other half of you is here in the ground leading you.”
I didn’t know what I was doing.
“And,” I said, “then you can communicate with your cousins maybe too.”
She nodded and I tried not to laugh not understanding what was happening or if she enjoyed this game. But she did. She neatly, cleanly sliced that worm in half and very neatly pulled one side from my thumb and without even any hesitation, as if this was an act of trust between us, not about the spell, she threw her head back and dropped it in.
“Oh my gosh, Adelmira!”
I watched her swallow it. I watched her face change. I watched her displeasure and her guts and her naturally slip into submission, into docility as if she was used to an authoritarian figure forcing her to eat.
“You swallowed that the way my brother eats Fruit Gushers like it tasted good or something.”
“I didn’t chew it.”
“Did  you feel it go down?”
She nodded.
“Oh my gosh, Adelmira. You are a wolf now.”

I begin cleaning the house. This is familiar. This is how it starts: bed by nine, up by dawn, organize the house, rearrange the altars. If I had more time, I’d scrub my house from bottom to top, each corner, each piece of dust with bleach and lemon oil. I’d do nothing but mop the hardwood, make the bed until the sheets are stretched so tight you can’t just hop in, you have to peel them away, sheet by sheet like a hotel. Pillows to match. The toilet would be porcelain white, the sink and tub too. My house would smell like nothing or sometimes Pine-Sol when I’m out of time or sometimes lemon oil. Incense when I’m in the cleanse. The basement would be organized into perfect squares with everything labeled.
  I don’t want to think about home: the way the black dirt had caked and lined the fridge like it was part of the linoleum now as I watched with my fly swatter, beckoning the snake to stay still. It’s deference not quite apparent until it it poked it’s tongue out, tried to slide from behind the fridge and I worked it back into that corner waiting for a plan to materialize. There have been many snakes in my house but this was the first time one had the intrepidity to climb up my mother’s nightstand in the middle of the day. The cricket legs still live in corners and I’m always back at certain places; when Pepper, my beloved dog, ate the jumping spider cricket the one night I let my friends in for a sleepover. That night, the jumping cricket appeared.
“It’s technically called a Humpback Cricket,” I boast.

We sprayed it with Hotshot and watched Pepper eat it. I hugged her around the neck, kissed her head, told her she was brave. We watched her for signs of nausea, the event bonding us to her. Even Megan who said we didn’t take care of her enough or always talked about how my shorts were wrinkled or I needed to clean my nails more.
“Her nails are so long they clacked on the pavement!” she said.
She would meet me at the bus stop every day, sneaking out of the backyard between a slip in the fence and walk to the corner.  I loved her so severely, her parting ruptured me, still does. She’s why I doubt my sociopathic self diagnosis. Her and Genevieve. I began taking her for walks after Megan said that though. Maybe we were inefficient people or maybe everyone else is an asshole with nothing better to do than tell everyone their expectations, whistled I, the kettle. 

“We get them all the time.’
These were my neighborhood friends, not my school friends. My school friends would never be allowed to set foot in my house. No matter how many sleepovers in their three stories I attended, there was no way.  My neighborhood friends didn’t mind the smallness of my house, the bugs, the animals, the lack of charcuterie and preparation for tonight. I don’t want to think about home. I bend down to get behind the corner of the lamp and I notice a giant cricket swathed in web and a lot of little balls next to it. There is a hole in the brick and I step away with reverence.
“This corner is yours, spider. Happy hunting. Please stay in the brick.”
I don’t want to think about it but it’s all I think about it. All the little deaths sometimes mean something.

“the act of naming things”

I couldn’t find the obituary and I tried. I knew it was a long shot, the event happened in 1994 and the internet has ruined my patience. Nothing dates that far back: no scanned articles, record of newspaper or old newscasts. They were on TV. Of course, I knew the address, so I tried. I had read the paper before as a child and felt those names. A report of their death existed somewhere.  Things like this can make me mad; not angry, insane. I’ve torn apart my room looking for a necklace I didn’t even mean to wear that day just because I hadn’t seen it in awhile, balled my eyes out over a missing flip flop when I was five and my aunt had to grab me from the water’s edge as as the storm rolled in; black and electric on the bay and me, sobbing over the loss of plastic, being carried from the crest of a wave ungraciously. It had a yellow bow. I still remember it. Threw a fit over another pair of sandals years later that I let my cousin borrow at the barbeque. My aunt tried to manage this temper but she was drunk, not twelve, not still at the helm of children, their cruelty.
“They were name brand.”
“And what does that mean to you?”
She flicked the ashes of her cigarette on the top of the Busch can. This habit I would crave and perfect years later. Her slender tanned fingers, graceful, and accurate: almost always getting the ash inside of the can. 

“We don’t need ashtrays!”
Poverty was genius. You don’t need anything. Ash anywhere. Ask me how I ruined apartments. You can ash anywhere even if you’re broke.
“They mattered. Cost money.”
I was ashamed at my greed and too young to articulate meaning with impact. You can’t tell your family you’re being bullied when they once watched you pull a child from the swing set to get her to stop and listen to you. When they tried to send you to counseling about making friends, when you have lots of friends, when you spend lots of time alone too, when you are adored and feared and tremulous and screaming at the top of your lungs over a lost shoe. You can’t talk when you’re twelve or ten or eight or six or thirty-four.
“They’re just shoes.”
Just this week, I lost a velcro cuff and handmade wooden cane.
“They’re just things.”
I threw away the only two letters my father ever wrote me but I will mourn the shrinking of a sweater for over three hours which is an hour or two longer than normal.
“I don’t feel anything,” I say.
That’s a lie. All I feel is want.

want

noun

1. a lack or deficiency of something.
   “Victorian houses which are in want of repair”

I give up on the obituary but am sure that I have narrowed a few things: Dana, the little girl that has been following me or Dana, the very troubled man that has been following me.
“Your name is Dana.”
I rest my head on the enamel of the tub, let the magnesium soak. A prescription of rest all winter and guessing, noting, then the quick fall into cavern. Repeat the deep well daydream over and over.  I repeat it even though it’s yours.
“I want everything.”
My cheek hits the side and I feel a spasm leave my thigh. But what do you want, Catarina?
“I want nothing.”
Turn my neck to the other side.
“I fear nothing.”
Watch my body form an S shape in the tub.
“I crave nothing.”

Let my body settle into the form and feel a spasm leave my spine.
want
noun
2. a desire for something.

“the expression of our wants and desires”

“The act of naming things”