Tag: creative writing

been picking at my lip
again. old childhood
habit–squeezing
corner of my
mouth for minutes at a time
so it forms into a blister.
digging my nail into the blister
just for the feel of it.
sometimes poke it with a safety pin
as i stare into the mirror.
watch it get fat and black.

my mother called it“pleasure pain.”
masochism is a desire for salve,
relief from the pain  and often
finding yourself blindfolded  in a
blade-lined hallway.
  you gotta feel your way out.
the little girls say.
he’s also  saying a lot so
I just nod a lot.
besides the impulse to
jump off a bridge every
day, I am not totally sure
why I am here.

“do you have any plans to hurt yourself?”
he asks in earnest but in a way that
he never looks directly at me.

im hot and walked for miles so im
a bit stuck to the vinyl,
sweaty and squirming but otherwise
pretty, presentable and
what’s done is done.
but I don’t say anything.
just shake my head
and bite my lip.
lift my thigh slowly to
feel the stretch of skin
and pray for some other
thing to take me.

or for the little girls to stop
but they’re snickering now.

“Belladonna”

to seek me meant
pleasure in ineffability,
a loss for words perhaps
out of fear of my retaliation
and to remain hidden
from some parts of the depth
of me and from the world with
me. I prefer the furtive
curl against another.
the unutterable and silent
worship
drives this depth
and the others and
you and me
like rifts adrift
like that, the moment
I turn my head.
I like to live,
eat, sleep alone
and move the country
this way; solo,
home
a solitary war
between
picking up impulse
and
deep, deep reflection
upon impulse
control.

I’m so sensitive
though
that if I settle into
think and spread
the cards like a fan,
I’d feel it out
in five seconds
eyes closed.
show me,
she said.
show me one year
show me two years
show me three years.
flip it and
it’s the King of Cups,
again.

plus I’d pick the right
song to match.
get the numbers to flash 3:13,
my lucky bet. “duplicity”

of course i would never kill
a child.
I continued with her,
but the question was
how do we make something like
the death penalty less of
a moral argument?
and the only way to take morality
out of law is to write clauses that
outline exactly what will happen
and under what circumstances and
then without reneging, go and
enforce it every single time.

these are authoritarian things.

but I didn’t agree with any of it
so I felt like battling me
was moot but I enjoyed the spectacle
and had, for no reason, invited
a male friend to join me in
class that day.
I too was interested in
motive but we cannot prove
intent truly without
absolute confession.
and even then, we may
doubt what we hear
if it doesn’t align with
what we want.

“events #2”

she was pandering to my 
emotion, calling this episode
a real child.

she said you said kill everyone.
I never said kill everyone, I said
if the law is  x=x then it’s x.
I could see her reaching for
the feminine in me
whichas far as I could see
was straddled and leaning back.
confident enough to be the first one
to volunteer for the exercise,
which I remind her, is not
examining the morality of the law
itself but to remove debate around it
so that it may be better enforced,
without outcry and fairly.


when I finished nine hands
went up. we were a class of eighteen.
unsure of why
I volunteered for the exercise
first, and given the freedom to begin
with any declaration, why I chose to
examine how mass assassinations

could really kick things off to accept
blindly that some people are
executed. and some people ought
to be.

the argument was not over
until all counter points had been examined,
the professor said.
she was tall and smiling when
I spoke and I felt thankful for her
defense of me any time she reiterated,
I was correct in re-summarizing the
exercise for each of the
nine hands that went up,
consuming the bell with a
theoretical society that arbited
punishment blindly as the statue
alluded to also,
the society we have tried to
have now is composed of
criterion like that. 

I was eighteen and glowing
and enjoying the attention
with zero conviction about
the death penalty.
and when it came back to
her, and she presented it again
after many others had spoke,
I am sure I said,
to be perfectly frank,
we would HAVE to
kill the child in order
to make the law work.

and then I just kind of laughed
because the exercise itself asked you to
first pick a side and fight for it;
not to defend the death penalty
but to remove morality from law
having the freedom to remove all
structures of law around murder,
I could have created a punishless state
in which murderers walked free
or a Hammurabi and it is with the
same amount of callousness that I
have begun to plant
nightshade around your house.

probability being like

you probably like to touch

things like me

and thinking it

to be Queen Anne’s Lace

giving it to your girl

for Valentine’s Day.

“Valentine’s Day part #1”

my interest was
social experimentation.
it’s why I went to college.
to be educated on the ways
to manipulate small crowds
and because of my naivete,
I did not realize at first
that my interest in sociopaths
was reflection.
but I find serial killers
to be undeniably weak
in their compulsion.

they are artless megalomaniacs.
you could just as easily garden
with the same amount of torrid wonder.
learn to grow nightshade and then
plant it all over town
in places where people smell
flowers and pick weeds for each
other.
but these are men. and
they have to be known.
I’ve always had to cross my
legs.


Mrs. Shepherd said you
cannot bet on things that talk,
Ava, when I interjected to
share my observation that
the same formulas can be applied to people
when presenting with the same patterns over time.
they would be seen as a fixed event
because they have not wavered in
reliability yet.

another time I stated calmly to
my ethics class that the best way to enforce
a law to ensure it gets a message across
is to enforce it blindly.
if you believe in the death penalty
make a black and a white clause;
no matter what the circumstances,
calculated homicide will put you
in the electric chair and then they
wouldn’t quibble with the details.

the first girl to shoot her hand up
was the most riled by my
eyebrow lift and when
she presented to me a Law and Order episode
where the murderer was a child,
I dropped the brow and lifted
the mouth and I said
then kill the child,
bitch.

“events #1” or “effect of varying events”