Tag: creative writing

at least I give you transparency.

even when I’m moping,
I’m dancing
in songs of satin,
rippling with sob
and shimmering
deep    bright,
stretched for miles
like the sky and with the
same opacity.
I am combusting
publicly, usually:
a flood of recourse and
you are
drowning,

immersed
in capillaries bursting with
crisis
and then immediate clarity.
my hands let go of the
flood I’m cradling.
you watch me move
like a snake across your
ceiling draped in shifting
constellations
you have no choice but to
memorize and I’m wearing
the crescent as a crown and
your ears like a gown
and full of crypted
warnings.    me,
I’m a dream

cat
stalking rabbits
in the garden, or
waiting for the night
by the river for the
muskrat, leashed a black
gator to my belt for extra
guard, and then
later on your doormat
pushing the heads of mice
all around.
each night I go to God and ask
for favor.
I hand them back their most
prized possession as the only
way to get it:
a page,

one line;
one at a time
wrapped in
flakes of
shrimp like little treats.
my barbarity, I desperately
want to play psychopath
and you told me you were
starving for affection.
you also told me
I am the coldest
woman you’ve ever
met; catching your
goldfish, frying them up,
using your
own tank like
that. when they said I get one
favor, I asked for dreams.
I always ask for dreams.
not mine, I make clear.
let me walk through walls.

let me see.

“the aquarium”

0

I remind you over text
and apropos NOTHING
you make sure to emphasize
to someone that my style is
abruptly
and in all caps
that I enjoy the slam of
doors, interjections,
a hand tight around my forearm
 and learning the local
culture before intercepting about
the fine print of the law,
 how to skirt
a shadow, what a savior
secret arsenals
I present the trunk machete,
then the painted switch blade.
 I mean no harm
simply seething as I walk about
tracing panes, cracks in
paint and you hold me anyway
and in a way that I oblige;
loosely.

if I’m anything stasis
it’s anxious so
I at some point,
I have to be blindfolded,
only feeling
the way the soil holds the bones
of those we’ve learned to mourn
in private:
eternally and quiet
with an airy tightness and security
like the rosary barbs the
knuckles when it’s altar
or when its storm and I’m all fist.
the way the heavens hold the pious,
the mob holds the riot,
or the torch of arrival and
the way the ocean holds all that
falls below that deep blue
surge of sea.
a gentle immensity
lifts me in my
fits and that’s the way you
see me still;
intense and poignant,
pointed in her comments
but rather distressed about it
all so generally forgiven
for her onslaught.

 

squall hits and I
 drag you under to show
what made me.
you’re surprised by my
physicality and stature,
my apt command
of rooms
 so far
only seeing me flit
and not sticking around
to see me pull out
the skewer and demonstrating
all the ways in which a weapon
works.
and in front of
everyone like I feel most
comfortable in combat,
agitating and leading
 regimes before.
like I’ve never once
had an apprehensive
 thought.
and tall.

 

“furor”

0

the skulk,
scent,
need for slow chase.
salivation with a .
wide open stance,
arms spread,
lips like decanter,
trickling:
it is with love that I do this.
oh, you always say that.

*snaps* to wake
up.   tips a holy red,
I begin to grow inches and
 let my naturally long nails
trail the arms of strange
wool peacoats on my way to
the El or nowhere.
just circling Girard for fun.

It’s the beginning of December.
and I made rent.
I sort of grimace as
I sway the town, head to
toe in unbought clothes,
heeled boots,
hips flexed and
recently fucked.

let my hand hit the elbow
of an unsuspecting man,
unfucked, soon to
be turning around and
catching a flash of my
back, purple mock wool
and  hear the clack
of my shoes walk
away.
it is with love
they say.

“the honey trap”

0

I’m obsessed with transition.
the form it takes
in movement and
thrown against a wall;
stalled in its pounce;
sudden landing
 without intent.
the motion to freeze,
liquefy.
reabsorbed and to
precipitate or the moment
before, to reform.

and after all that patience
and miles of crouch
through the city,
admiring the syringe tops
and mortar and filling
the jacket lining
with bills and your ardor
growing big and bright
and pulling things towards you
like the moon
to be suddenly seized
by your habits again.

 

when I walked into the room
I saw you again.
you offered to show me upstairs
right away, ushering me with
your hand on my lower back
and I heard your voice
behind me, concerned:
   watch your step

it’s just one breath,
that’s all it takes.

 

“the men” or “the loop”

0

I can smell you
everywhere.

one block,
no headphones and
susurration of crickets somewhere
 in a distance.

my stomach rushes.
it’s night,
in shorts and halter.
i’m nowhere near to
getting there
but it’s August
and I’m alone.
that’s a step,
I think.
being alone and
dropping the quarter
without notice
cuz I have a pocket full.

I think,
you have a pocket full
of quarters and you’re alone.
that’s really something
to have kept the townhome
also.

it’s August, 8:42 pm
and eighty one degrees
but dropping.

“August”

0

in a constant state of transition
like wind,
a severity when charged
or something that merely
carries.

 how I can be a mechanism
not always fit for ground.
when standing,
an unbearable pressure.
more reasonable in
flight, even in
vehemence, I begin.

I begin to weigh the scales:
what’s the probability
that illusion grows legs
or that imagination is laden
with foresight?
you see if I don’t begin to
think this way, I will
cross the bridge
and when my foot hits the
concrete, I want to
leap, arms spread.
it’s not about anyone coming
back. and to end the poem
graciously, i want you to 

feel the pins sticking out
of your eyes before you
taste the thumbtacks.
before you eat the cupcake,
I want you to sniff
the befouled wine.
before you get to
her house, I want
you to see the frog
and I want you to
remember to
(leap before you look)
pluck the nightshade.

consider me a drifting bubble;
felt in passing,
 kind of gazed at,
 sometimes solidifying
on an open palm
but mostly just
rising.
a pressure.
a violent
rotating
column and leaving
origami pigeons
 full of acrimony
everywhere like I just
drip that.

“Saturn in Scorpio”

0

I do remember February,
always as the coldest month,
starts in January
with a little bird who keeps
following me begging to be
immortalized by signing
her full name with every
email she sent to me:
you’re a fucking whore and
you should kill yourself

but it really just continues
for two years.
I don’t know
what to tell you
like I am one to
waft, picking
daisies in a raincoat
or am I the one to
drop the deluge,
watch you stack
your mileage,
sue?
like men have not shivered
at my feet, ways I’ve kept
note of every tic.
I’m scorned like you,
witch but I didn’t send
you seven emails outlining
all my plans to ruin your
career with a link
to your business at the end.

they say revenge is a
dish served ice cold but it
can be hot too;
just sudden, blaring,
a surprise. I sign
every single one
“xxx”
like a curse or
a hex,
I can’t let go.

“resentment”

0

suffering incursion will
change you. there are a thousand ways
to die, my head begins again.
nail in eye.
car to body.
man with fist.
I begin to count
and begin to twist the straw
in an effort to curb the brain
from going deeper, usually
the fixation begins from the most
likely place.
it was the end of February,
2014 and I lived in a rowhome
on the cusp of Port Richmond
and Kensington and knew two things:
cars don’t stop for anything here,
and neither do men.

I begin to count and organize and also
step into a dark long reverie
of a place that is warm and
seeking me, but I also begin to
count and create myth from fingers.
begin to list the ways I’ve watched the
Earth take: my aunt run over multiple
times, murdered. my eight year old cousin
died from a brain anuerysm. my uncle
shot his face off in his father’s
old house. my aunt drank her body to death.

you see I have to stop and enter
the beach seeking me.
you won’t make it otherwise
as I turn the headphones up,
just miss a truck but I can
hear the ATVS revving.
the sign says walk
but my aunt was once run over
repeatedly.

it’s the coldest winter in years,
they tell me after meetings,
and it’s not an easy time to make friends.

“doors #2”

1

in Colorado,
his name was (redacted).
I am passing 3rd street unaware
of my hands withering,
clutching my phone.
another bad habit of mine,
not wearing gloves and never
placing my hands in
my jeans or coat pocket
or any warmth.
I’m always fiddling or
adjusting the volume.


he was very young and
wide eyed and used to doodle
through meetings,
watching the layers of people
shift in their seats, gathering
outlines with his pencil.
I would try to peek
to see how he made them and
who he most favored
knowing my cheekbones were perfect
but some things are more discreet and I
said hi to him only if I passed
him but mostly enjoyed the thrill
of picking a home group full
of freshman in college,
the perversion of me
unfolding like that,
so uninhibited in my quest
for sobriety and undivided
attention

spreading my
legs in the chair
in my turtleneck dress and
brown tights betting they could
smell my fever from here.
three children catch me muttering
and smile.      they watch
my fingers curve around an object,
then divide as I tap each tip
with my thumb like
I’m counting.
 they are thinking
I have secrets,
not that I am crazy
because children see parallel
lines.

one time,
he kept his eyes closed as everyone
in the circle shared.
when it was my turn, he popped
them back open and stared
the length of my story
like he had come here for this.
I was too confused to make
direct contact with him;
this being so flagrant
and sudden, I fluster
with bold advances
preferring to be the aggressor
not the pursued;
not the doe in the reticle
but the bear from behind.
I spent one whole year fantasizing
about him.

not lured by his youth
which makes him easy to command
but the way he was clearly taken
by me, his obvious insouciance,
and his right to be that way,
being only eighteen and
forced here to survive
among such alphas.
such witches with prowess
and skill and eight years
of drowning, emerging.

the children notice my
mouth moving as I walk down the
street, reviewing.
they all think I am writing about
them. I am writing about a cloud
I passed once.
cry cry cry and then
just start fucking laughing,
I say out loud
so the ten year old widens
her eyes
as she passes
not alarmed at the way
I keep touching things,
but the way I say fuck
in front of them so
unabashedly and in the
middle of the story like
we’d been talking this
whole time.

“xxx #1”

0

I learned to drift
young and
listened to my Papa’s
stories, my aunt’s stories,
the whole family telling stories
and I learned to joke
too. it’s about knowing
what people respond to
but also a dauntlessness.
everyone in my family
laughed big and loud,
smoking cigarettes sitting around
the picnic table,
a pretty red wood covered
with some tawdry pear-slathered
yellow and cream plastic cloth
made to absorb ketchup
and beer cans everywhere.
the empty ones there for butts.
and bottles of Coke in giant
two liters   their tan slender fingers
and the confidence of lighting up.
I perfected the flick of an ash
off the end of a burning cigarette
long before I held one.

it’s ninety percent the way
your neck looks when you’re listening
and ten percent what you say
when you finally move to
enter the game.
I learned to grift too.
there were many ways.
more about fun then–
just how to sneak out
at night to grab cigarettes
from the bowling alley cigarette
machine; a preposterous
thing but came in handy.
I would sometimes crawl out of
my bedroom window,
my bed right beneath it and
able to slide the screen right open
without breaking it,
it was easier then the back door.
I had to tiptoe.
we had thin walls.
I slept with my door shut,
pitch black and covered with
pillows scared of my closet.

sometimes we took beer from my friend’s
parents cooler,
or candy pocketed from 7-11
or lip gloss from Eckerd’s
or something from a man’s house,
anything really.
I liked to take photographs of them
and items of clothing to smell
before they leave me.
sometimes I would stare at the pictures
he left out on his dresser
suddenly. not sure if they were planted
or just forgotten as he
offered me a shot of tequila on
his barracks colored carpet;
that off-white every sailor had;
stained with Friday nights
and teenage vomit.
movie ticket stubs falling
out of my coat pocket.
I always took my shoes off
out of politeness even though
I could see the scrape of dirt
from welcome mat to
cot and today:


a picture of him and his wife
on the rocks on the coast
of San Diego,
a card she left him,
something in spanish.
I would listen to the CDs he played
on repeat to get over her, later
alone, more holding the sting
 and the shattering way
it felt forced to be fucked
to music like that.
fascinated that grief can transcend
between two people, same song,
two different ways.
two different meanings.

where are you running to now?

I’m at Lehigh and 2nd
giving a man directions
to the 15 stop and he is asking
me where I am going.
I have no job or friends,.
but tons of antique wood
furniture and I kind of nod
to myself without answering him,
just keeping that buoyancy of
knowing that
acquiring objects is half the battle.
the other half is unearthing.


“walls #1”

1

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