creative writing

every day at three pm
the chime rings and
most of us ignore it.
we are sitting in front
of it; he in his wheelchair
and me standing, nervous,
moving from side to side
with clench palm, straw inside,
unable to commit to the chair
I placed at the entrance of
the cage.

the birds in the aviary
smell their own shit all day and
think the bell is a taunting God
clanging from a distance to keep time
of their blinkered sentence.
they have flown less than one mile,
tired out on plastic branches
picking each other’s imagined nits;
stick legs and beady eyes that,
if bigger,
would reflect a melancholy
I always thought that myself,
or the willows wore best
but they have a rival.

I consider lighting the whole thing on fire
so they can rise to the clouds with the smoke;
use their wings for something other than
beating back water
during forced bath time when
that satanic effigy
in a hazmat suit approaches and
I’d give them tiny tools:
tiny lighters, tiny bullets, gatling guns
and the wherewithal to fire them.
ice picks for the stabs and
the insults to go deeper.
I’d help haunt him.
but they are small, untrained,
and they’d just eat the things.
smell the irony
when the cage fills up with
bloody stool and the devil
in white comes back to wash
them out.

my apologies are inaudible.
outside looking in,
gawking, checking my phone
for the time, an old love letter,
avoiding my clients’ increasing mucus
in his cough,
his impending question.
(no missed calls)
do you think Sarah?
          in his Polish accent,
            sleeve half covering his mouth to hide the yellow
                            discharge.
. I have a tissue in my pocket, wilting.
unprepared to think of anyone but myself
               at this time in my process.
(check the time)

             but they don’t get words,
fertilized; little beaks poking through
spotted eggs and
above all else,
birds with clipped wings
avoid the despondency
that liberty brings.
that bell rings
and I want them to know
               that the birds think that bell is a God?
  muted sniffle.
                 I move past the withering Kleenex,
                      his equally decaying stare,
to check the time again
(no new voicemails)

that bell rings and
I want them to know
just how badly freedom hurts.

“the aviary”

March 29, 2019 0

my heart was a brass bell:
frozen,
staid,
caught between two
hungers, and I’m asking
you if anyone ever told you
there is no time.

you demand cogency,
a nightlight,
me at your bedside blowing
ardent lullabies.
here I come in linear order.
in the end my gown will be
doused in the close shouts of
someone you love;
I will be draped in
the slow and constant drip
of her;
the residue of
skinned bones rouging
my cheeks with their sudden
red cries that blossom into
spells I tie into crown,
rest on my head
like a prize
as I am laid against
my slain and coffined
in confession before I
rise but you should know
so I’m writing it.

I would pluck at my
backbone to charm her
into weave, into
conjure her discordant euphony
that produced a mild shock
of light to remind me
I contain some very black
nights but a
torch lodged deep in
coccyx, and a dream;
sketch on marker web,
write the titles
in my thrumming patient way,
my hum,
my black belt bullet tongue
of song rising with summer,
and a damn stitched in
spine ready to synthesize
in crescendo
downward like a flash
flood and

you should know the truth
as it happens and the
past as it really
was and me, risen
growing full of hell
with each new moon,
full of part
with each new
sun.
you should know
what I mean
when I say
my hands contain a deluge.

“the flood”

March 27, 2019 0

I’m done spitting on your face
and on my way
to pick up a bag of cutlery and dishes
for our house from the front porch
of a stranger’s
when I stop to admire the cracks
in the side of the building.
the wall is coral, faded but still
garish, stands out.
it’s brick and

this building has no doors and
one broken window.
these defects in the painted halls
lining my new city catch my
eye each time I run an errand
and I pay my respects in
photographs      stopping at each one,
trying to remember how the boulders
haunted too      how the ocean felt
on my wasted ankles at gloaming when I guzzled
vodka Big Gulps and watched the
ghost crabs roam the bay.
watched myself dissolve into
the bits of me and can I remember
how the sunset looked draped over both
tide and flatirons,
hold two things at once
without favor?
how it feels to lose several
small countries you claimed.
all I see are metaphors
and I’m intruded.

these overcoats that rot
without dismay hold space;
there is natural beauty
here but it shines brightest
in demise.
these bricks are painted to distract from
it’s true inability
to keep a home safe like
the way men have held me;
hugged with their claws,
I cracked at the touch     put my rosy shades on
I only see them
in their handsome sway.
I snap a picture of the edge of the broken
glass pane and the beginning of
the paint peeling into
white–the fissure.
I trace my finger
over a chip and watch
it flake.

how they left me.

“doors #1”

March 18, 2019 0

it’s Friday and we are
processing hard truths
before we seek the auspiciousness
of everything; before we rest,
pay altar on Sunday
like
:
sometimes some things
just aren’t meant for you.
it’s true, the blur,
life is rushing and swamps
with it’s shades of
blue; azure
(you name things)
sky, or cobalt fluid
or nightmare
like a wall of nail polish
you’re reading every
dressed up inch of you,
every feeling to decide
what to bathe your magic
tips in tonight.

with or without your
undivided presence,
your inquisitive fantasy,
the moon moves.
time heals all those
unsewn wounds and you embrace
things now with reticence,
but you’re open to the aphorism,
to the temperance,
to the tombstone epitaph
you made him carve across
your eyelids that night
on Jupiter:

I remember everything.

everything you grow to love,
you lose.

“xxx”

March 17, 2019 0

March 12, 2019 0

you’re shrouded
in caricature of self
under pressure:
embosked in

crouching vines,
twigs and berries, my clothing
and your permanent frost that
molds you into something
statuesque–a snowman frozen
in my front
yard but I’m suddenly feeling
myself so sun,
so warm,
arms wide open,

cherry lipstick,
leper with no island and a
strong want for community.
need to touch your fingers with
my tongue,
audacity,
some ire,
some unresolved bleak black,
and I’m mad at God for every season
that brings the buried back.
I’m not over it,
I’m batshit and
I’m terribly bereft.
I’m hot
they say.

you’re melting a
little and I keep talking about
myself to fill the space.
I used to be
a vacant room
but now I’m full of
places,
suspect,
other people’s things,
vindictive trust and other people’s prayers;
the hurt of how they wear me once,
or at night or in their head
and then hang me like
an amulet above their door
to gawk at, clap at,
ask for favor like I’m God’s
only walking angel and really
i’m full of enmity and
you and I are both full of
me. pinch your carrot nose
and wait for the high noon
rays to hit your coal smile
so you become the puddle
at my feet the thirsty
dog I leashed laps
quietly and you asked me.
what do I long for?

the cloying puffs of air
near my ear saying
come here and
the weather changing.
i’m adding a hat to your costume when
a man taps me on the shoulder.
he wants to ask what’s become of the
others that came before you
and I want to get to the
bottom of it.

“the sun”

March 12, 2019 0

I’m the fairest thing that ever happened to you. I know because I once saw the whole thing. You could say I asked for it.

“God,” I began.

I was centered in sigil. My spine was straight, although I usually slouch. I usually admonish myself for taking up too much space on my couch; even alone, even in privacy, I shrink. This evening was different. I felt propped by something and sitting up, breathing softly, not nervous and with intention. The gasping I am used to transmuted into long, deep inhales; long, thrumming exhales. That night even the callous on my palm where I lay the plastic straw I can’t let go of, can’t stop twiddling as I walk around the city, felt soft. It felt healed and my hands smelled like cherry blossom from the lotion I rubbed on my knees as I took care of myself, my needs, for once. Once a day, I drink water and rest. Once a day, I pause to smell a honeysuckle. Once in a while, I cease compulsion to drop the straw, pet a dog, move on.

I was melting; suffused with the moonstone resting on my lap, becoming waxing crescent. I was becoming spring. Dust around me tickled my shoulders to remind me: We are here to help you breathe. I immediately became breath. The room rocked like a cradle and I was swathed in her gentle nightlight. I was enveloped. Call the dust what you want, the noise what you want: dirt, fantasy, demons, guides, saints, Lilith and her coven (I light candles to all kinds), they were there that night using my forearms, using my hands, using my throat to sing. My diaphragm rose and fell with ease. God. I asked for breath. Breathe. I became breath. I became nestled in large silk strands.

“God,” I waited and then started again.

I let the fire in my chest build with each name I said until I could feel the slow burning rise to full flame. I waited until I could feel the full pounding of the floor dropping out, until I was hovering in air, until I was on the cloud. It’s the pyre I’ve been waiting for: the charred ribs, the suckled breasts, the ghosts that waft out of the ropes. I waited until I knew who to ask for; until I heard someone say it.

“God,” I started again, and let it be known I was not in fear, I was not shaking, I was not anxious. “Whose answered prayer am I?”

There is no trepidation. You only enter with one affirmation. You only enter with perfect love and perfect trust or you do not enter us. I waited.

March 12, 2019 0

your house was yellow.

my house was blue and
a ten by ten box;
a cage and me trapped,
torn between watching them
pack up their stuff
from their own pact to self
and me, dripping virile,
pushing them out.
we needed a spark,
I pounced and

shortly after,
the railing tumbled on my
sprinting ankles,
the basement rattled and the
floorboards dropped
filling the place with the kind of emptiness
that is so dense
it smothers.
smoke smells a lot like
ticking minutes
if we scented time the way we
spray each other.
I hear a bark.
hope the turtle remembers how to
duck and cover.
the cat’s sure got it.

remember me as a black-winged fury
hovering over your bed at night because
there will be nothing left by dawn
except some burning blue
cedar wood and a cheap comb
that found its way buried in the dirt.
the photo albums gone,
dusty cookbooks charred,
vanished remote controls stay hidden
and the asbestos and fiberglass ceilings
imploded despite our fear that was the
thing that would kill us.
I am left with a cancer
that gnaws through the joints
like packs of rats chewing through cables
to take the attic back.
and I need this.

I really miss your hands on me
and the convivial cluster of caterpillars
that swallowed the bark
the day in the orchard
when you held me in sullen incubation
before the devastation of the forest,
before I made way for us,
the start,
the parting and somewhere
an empty crib stays unfurnished.
someone starts an engine.
the varnish is melting and so am I.
God gave you a chance and
an unfinished smile.
a smoke alarm malfunctions
mocking your reluctance
to just grin and bare it,
to just open up your arms
and catch me when I jump;
but first here comes the fish tank
catch me with all the fit I threw.
we all look like burnt books
blowing in the breeze
and now, I too,
am wafting with the exhumed memories.
before my legs even hit the dew,
you watch me dwindle to a million floating pieces
in the cradle of tar black trees.

you see the contract ascertained a certain
ephemeral appeal
and I’m too thirsty to complain
about anything but the heat in here.
hold your breath and wait
for some other current to take me.
baby

there are no exits.

“chrysalis”

March 8, 2019 0

nice figure.

sharp glances,
obsessed with her wrinkles in
passing window.
thirty three years old and can’t seem to
thwart her own self persecution,

said she liked ass play
and pegging and
doing things in pieces.

“how guys save me in their phone”

February 16, 2019 0

one day I had a dream
you bit the head off of a blue jay
and spit it back into her nest.
when I asked why you said:
To prove you will never leave me.

here I am,
on command about to run
across the canyon and I
laugh real loud in my
skin tight
dress:
the one cut real low in the back
in the shape
of an obtuse
triangle;
jarring contrast to my
scared-straight spine
but I still
slouch.
I twist the straw into crooked pieces
and tell myself things:
make sure they know
you are having
a real good time,
show your teeth,
hearty laugh
with belly and mouth and your
lips are stretched to the limits like your
social apathy.
show your full moon eyes
and hide.
hold your tonic like a wand;
fall asleep
inside of yourself
in the middle of
everything and wait for
the night to break.

later, he will show
you photographs
to prove you were
there.
if you are lucky,
he notices the story
dripping from your
eyes, the door
opening, the splash
of scarlet on your tights
as you replace each page,
as you become the
walking lake flooding
the wake that held
you, and he becomes
the witness that love
is a quivering knife.

“tributaries”

February 16, 2019 0