Tag: creative writing

when it came to me
you said I was all
  muscled positivity
as if I didn’t hang myself once before;
as if I didn’t try to tell you

how cavernous a grin is,
or anything at all.
even though you are never sure I won’t
find that perfect bedsheet knot
or not or a razor or a kitchen knife
or a drunk night on the freeway and I’m
headfirst in the cement mixer
but I made it out of that
in jail and alive and I am
always palms clasped and grateful.
you say   you pray
with FERVOR  as I finger the locket,
my brother’s ashed clasped
around my throat
and I hold onto
 that same little lie
about choice.

I let go of the wild lavender
 sprouting from your toes through
the hints of splattered paint.
there’s a meadow in your abdomen
coaxing foxes from their
holes    your knees knock mine,
sudden sting         close and sharp
  the way memory sits on your skull
then pulled back
 how you held me
far away sometimes;
making wind happen
blowing kisses from the pines.
the bath is on, I’m cold.
you always say
I’m cold.
I beckon to the side:
you and I are from the same
arctic sky.
help me in so I feel
the frost of your fingertips
trace me;

my broken back to you now.
my nails are brown tipped and filthy
from digging myself out of my ancestral
grave and I’m spattered in the ,
sweat from a hard night’s day,
walking alleys, stalking shadows
and you’re truly unremarkable
 these days save
the mosaic of carpenter’s paint,
 some gray cement
garden: no flora, no fauna,
and even God told me to pause  
and rest on my previous laurels
before I get carried away.
but i’m a martyr for this,
God,
I crave repercussion

I become a
yawning, clanking watering can
 spritzing your open lips,
dolling up your stolid ground
to birth your stories:
pollen murals out of micro gestures,
extinguished longing that suddenly reignites and
I’m grabbing cattails from the gales to
 comb out the tangles of your childhood,
fistfuls of mud    planting seeds in the
 tiny cracks around your chest that my own
sharp-toothed grief left when you
muttered the first
no  and I stepped a few
years back.
freedom will teach you how
to stay in all new ways.

there is no difference
between love and liberation
and some were born saints,
you say as you help me
in the mugwort bath,
the smell of rose and lavender.
I plucked the petals and dropped
them one by one
for aesthetic reasons.
not free of indulgence, but
patient   your fingers make
stems in the water.

“hurricane”

0

things I like:
symmetry and
the act of naming things,
the synthesis of dream and
disorderly thinking,  and my bout
of many hidden rituals
like a drunk blossom,
full and suddenly
noticed

“Leo”

0

 

I was so broke
and depressed.   sometimes I forget
that. it was the depression that was pinning me
to my apartment after you left;
keeping me locked there
keeping me imprisoned.
I let someone use my old Access card to pick their
lock so it did come in handy
after all.

I’ve put on no weight but I’m
satiated and all security is an illusion.
numbness had me
making more terminable plans
with bathtubs
bu some small joy always carried me:
my cat Alize,
always and

a used and discarded turquoise shelf
I found when I was out.
I hung it loosely on the wall,
 without commitment and the wood
became immediately blackened by my incense cones.
the corners splintered and were
 dripping rosary,
 rarely dusted and topped with pictures
of my deceased:
Nana, Papa, Anselm Hollo,
other clients, friends I knew
in childhood and
unknown cousins,
guinea pigs,
first dog Pepper,
my first dead brother
or third dead uncle.
always drink or suicide,
something tragic when it comes
to my family but
I’m still here and
 brave, I think.
in a few different ways
but I want cleansing

so I tear it from the wall,
I’m stripping the floral siding
with my fingernails,
peeling the paint back to white
 to present to you
a dusted start.
I wear black skirts with lace
lining for the cats,
rain boots when I go out,
drawn shades with a smirk,
and nothing when you start
to come about.

6.

0

 

well, they always start
 the same way:
in winter, it always starts in
winter when I am my weakest.
I am usually unsettled,
raving at the window,
the frost,
the cracks in my joints announcing
themselves in arthritic temper.
   you’re so young
I’m so young at this.

inexplicably manic
during the darkest months,
 at times I know I should
be sleeping but  I am reaching
for anything that reaches
back.

in truth, I am a nihilist and
men didn’t teach me that
nothing ever matters and
nothing is ever coming back.
I watch my days get dragged away by tides
that become encroaching swells
and think to myself,
well, it always starts
with a storm.

I am a nihilist,
nobody had to teach me
that and no men
held that void quite like
I can hold that void.  
they mocked me and I let
them and mired in my
 constructed reality I now feel
a thirty year repression
birthing from a well,
from a heavy pour
and it carries eels like
lightning, the nose of sharks,
their discarded carcasses like
past betrayals coming next.
 you like rain?
a little deluge for your
flight.

 I feel no obligation
to anything:
my rectitude,
our plans,
or my penciled tips
on how to revitalize
warehouse row,
I’m tired and
my want for self grows and ends
in impatient provocation,
 your spiral notebook,
the bottom of the ocean
as the engine fails.
and you say
well, anything can be
contained in a cloud.

to which I reply,
catastrophe as well

“the well”

0

 

i’ve been out to lunch since we got here.
it’s another change in seasons,
spring and everyone is out to
brunch celebrating
 maternal lessons,

begotten lies, or if they’re more
 triumphant; forgotten
spite.    spring hats,
spring sandals,
spring grief,
sometimes things just go away
like missing pieces:
backs of earrings in the hotel room
at your youngest cousin’s wedding,
origami florets you sprinkled at your mother’s ankles
when you were just learning how to fix
 the pancakes to give appreciation;
diplomas, expired passports, birth certificates,
various certifications,
everything a lover gave you,
hand me downs, or cute owl
 pajama sets that were xmas gifts
callously discarded in the great
 throw everything the fuck away fest.
      I have nothing left.
anything that reminds you of your
lineage: scrapbooks and family
heirlooms, voicemails from your dead
brother pleading for you to
come back, the ashes swinging from
your neck, the letter from
your dad,

they don’t really mean much.
you’re here and you can prove it if they ask
with this giant gaping hole in the center of
everything
that you at last had the guts to crack;
the diamond she stole,
all winter blooms,
the time you had left,
grand ideas slipping out of your ears like ripples of
eureka!
plopping on your floor for the ants to devour
before they ever land.
you should have tried harder.

because love is boundless I can’t possess it;
it consumes me with its humility,
strangles like history,
swallows like tidal waves of
unyielding southern humidity,
and  I can’t escape it.
feelings for the flesh that steal me are so
 palpable, like ghosts, I’m moaning
exorcism! and synonyms for
 hurry up.
the climax is the body’s clever parapraxis,
and love?
I want this thing gone

so I can be empty with my tea
 and good ideas,
alone.
I knit a sweater full of verses I’ve never heard,
wrap it tightly for the winter.
wear the world like vapor,
my fortune cookie says
and something adds:

my dear girl, you are so lonely
 you have created all of this
          (the world just falls from my shoulders)
you are mourning events,
people, places & things that never existed
                      (cut it open, pull it out)
wipe those ruby red eyes
     and take a look around
                (before it disintegrates)
but my house is a burning building
so I better bounce.

I had one fawn over me
but he fell in the giant yawn
 I stomped in the yard
and like my bright wishes,
he’s also passing me by
carrying something I don’t get
because it’s real and it’s found
he is holding it and I am
     eyes shut tight   catarina
thinking about it
again when someone grabs  
my arm.

“how to forget everything day 67”

0

you are God-drawn,
celibate,
obsessively
testing yourself and
binded by conviction.

you are wrapping yourself
in your lovers’
unhinging,
your lovers’ veins,
your lovers’ disdain
for the way they scream your
name into the pillow
and you’ll be around
come never.

you are distant.
you are giant.
you are waving your hands
in the air and calling it
time magic.

oh, you are quiet in your cave,
becoming whatever you say
you are.
becoming whatever you say.

be careful what you say.

“the magician”

0

 

I went from being a frozen tundra:
algid, wide and growing fields of ground to cover with
no visible tracks to follow

unless the wind was kind and left
the prints
but it wasn’t often.
taciturn but for some
icy speech and bleak; 
caustic prose in
squalling breezes that freeze
and stick to your cheeks,
harden               bite your tongue
in frostbit chomps so it takes a while before we completely cut those
meek coughs off
just as they start.
before they form into spit,
white noise, handwritten
cards,
I sprout into a raging sun:

precocious and blazing
hot, I become
a long bending desert to
warm you up:
fields of sand to cover,
infinite high noon run,
no moon to come,
hollowing the others with
deprivation,
 promising mirages,
a wide and weaving
ever-longing
desiccation,
sudden sidewinders and a
slow and draining
drip that never hits and
dehydration,
never an inch of rain and you
find every trap I laid.

I start by slaughtering your brothers
in front of you to see
 if you can stand it.

“sekhmet”

0

With a natural lethargy, she put her makeup on slowly elongating the whole process by several minutes. She wasn’t used to wearing it. Moving her neck like a snake upward from left to right, like she was wrapping it around a trunk or leg, she admired the stretch first, then the movement itself; hypnotic and quiet and binding. She stopped applying the powder to stare. Motionless, she admired herself head on. The blush she chose was dark; a shimmering burgundy that ran across her face and cheekbones in the shape of a bruise. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear examining the soft waves falling over her shoulders first as they moved, and then again as they settled. She wanted to see what she looked like as she approached; in stillness and in motion.


 “That took too much time,” she said out loud.


 Moving her head back and forth in a slow no gesture to see what she looked like disagreeing, she could feel and see the skin of her lips cracking. She eyed the chapstick on the shelf.  She wet her lips with her tongue. We must move on. There was nothing she did for anyone without motive and no one was around to touch them yet. Setting the bamboo brush on the sink, she ignored her dry mouth and her thirst, and picked up the mascara. Carefully, she applied the wand to the eyelashes of her left lid and then immediately stopped to examine herself again. Unbundled and free, her thoughts had been leaping ahead of her. It was distracting. They were being seized by something else; something distant, either imaginary or future she could never tell, but something tugging at her sleeve. Look behind you. She reached for the twisted, plastic straw from the sink’s ledge and began twirling it in her fingers on instinct.  Letting herself be overtaken by the fake memory; the fake way he held her, the fake way he smiled, the fake way it felt, she felt the rush in her chest.

“Stop it,” she barked at herself.


 Staring at the mirror once more, she held her own gaze in trance.


“My name is Catarina Kacurek,” she practiced again.


She said it a couple more times until she was satisfied with the way it felt rolling off her tongue. Naturally. Nodding, she put the straw back on the ledge and began to apply the mascara to the right lid’s eyelashes. It’s always like this. She couldn’t see the clock in the bedroom and was thankful. I’m late, she knew. Taking her time anyway, she could still feel the electric bubble running up her spine to announce its arrival, announce its bones were growing over her bones into a grove of wands. I have things to do. She set the mascara neatly back in her makeup bag and pulled out the eyeliner. Dragging the skinny black pencil across the top of her left lid first, she felt a breeze, a draft from a hidden place to the left of her. What the fuck is this all for?


 As she fawned herself, praising the way her eyes grew from small and doting to big and black and full of infirmity, she heard a car backfire somewhere in the distance. She placed the pencil on the sink and waited. Goosebumps trickled up both arms. In her spine, her bone grove of smoke and scream and sudden life, she felt it.


“My name is Catarina Kacurek. May I come in?” she practiced again, feeling the backfire of other every other thing.

0

what is it that harms you most                and is insidious?

my persistent altruism
cloaked in gold,
I am
walked on like a golden
road.
0

I was so broke
and depressed.   sometimes I forget
that. it was the depression that was pinning me
to my apartment, keeping me locked there
keeping me imprisoned.
not my insecurity but a numbness that had me
making more terminable plans
with bathtubs
bu some small joy always carried me:

Alize,
always and

a used and discarded turquoise shelf
I found when I was out.
I hung it loosely on the wall,
 without commitment and the wood
became immediately blackened by my incense cones.
the corners splintered and were
 dripping rosary,
 rarely dusted and topped with pictures
of my deceased:
Nana, Papa, Anselm Hollo,
other clients, friends I knew
in childhood and
unknown cousins,
guinea pigs,
first dog Pepper,
my first dead brother
or third dead uncle.
always drink or suicide,
something tragic when it comes
to my family but
I’m still here and
 brave, I think.
in a few different ways
but I want cleansing

so I tear it from wall,
I’m stripping the floral siding
with my fingernails,
peeling the paint back to white
 to present to you
a dusted start.
I wear black skirts with lace
lining for the cats,
rain boots when I go out,
drawn shades with a smirk,
and nothing when you come
about.

6.

0

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