smirk.
black lipstick and naked eyes and
lied about time when I asked her.
she looked at her wrist to
count the hearts but missed an
hour and she is
dulled,
not rusty but
blunt and I dare to say
when she walked away,
her hand was
steadily sharpening.
“how guys save me in their phone”
I step on wet cat litter
on the way to the mirror
and ignore it.
my feet are bare,
my knees are tired,
my legs are still spent from cartwheeling down your block
all summer: bruised, broken spindles
of scabs and bravado.
I’m ignoring the gravel
under my toes.
I’m plucking my eyebrows.
I’m picking out tights.
I’m meeting someone soon.
I try on several lipsticks;
take my time with each palette,
each gloss, each burgundy line
of delusory affection drawn into
a wide, wolfish smile.
I’m nude for a while
in front of the sink;
my dry hands are
unwashed but I can smell flowers
on my nails as I tease my split ends
into hair bigger than it is:
rosewater from the quick spritz
to my face to pace myself
when I feel the urge to
go back in time,
erase and retrace things in
illusive reception,
name them things like
us or
enough so I learn how to
stop.
unfitting for grown women
and I’ll continue to falter:
cut my hair unevenly
to the nape of my neck without
sexuality,
be incorrect
and often
without attachment to its correction.
take my time with mopping things,
take my time learning ruby liner,
onyx lashes,
diffusing for a while.
spit in the faucet without washing
the couple spots the stream missed
and I stay waffling between color schemes
and themes of conquest.
I remember the years of unnamed longing
and I scream as I
suddenly soften.
heels are the last to go on.
they’re uncomfortable but I
like how tall I am as I prowl past your place
so you get one last double take.
I clack over the litter without a glance back in
its direction on my way out the door and
if I’m lucky,
if I am very lucky,
I’ll teach my daughter how to shapeshift her way
to knighthood without compromise.
without insertion.
she can keep her crooked breasts,
her imperfection,
her relentless gaze towards furtive weight:
martydom.
her overused adjectives that she breathes
even in her sleep,
works into every passage;
how many times can one really be amenable or
replete? but I am
and often.
and sorry, how many times she is sorry
when she meant to say nothing,
when she meant to say don’t call me or
yell I’m starving.
my love will have a cradle and a blanket and
a mobile with the planets hung crookedly and
carved into the center of Jupiter
hovering far above Earth,
her mother’s favorite emblem of luck and
expansion,
with a butter knife and an old eyebrow pen
the only poem I felt strong enough
never to rework:
rest girl,
you do not earn your birth.
12.
I am protected.
I am wet and giant
and shaking from the
waves.
I am the midnight ocean
birthed from the absent sun
taken over by the
full moon’s rage.
I am an alarm.
a storm brims the coast
and you start writing down
anything you remember
about me.
I am undulating in great
tidal gasps; a siren
sights set on horizon,
humming low, humming
softly and
come in closer
splayed across the break.
your arid soul is thirsty for the
new oasis I’ve become
but your obtrusive leaps
are doused in hex
before they ever reach me.
you are responsible for
some of this and
I am responsible for
that.
my bed is soaked
and I am angry.
black in vengeance cloaks
in white to walk the streets
the way furtive angels might.
you send me butterflies
at night
to assuage me.
I return the offer:
I dress in wings,
suck the nectar from the
dusk’s flowers,
learn her tales,
twist into my final form:
a long nightmare,
black hairy legs and
two tagmata,
one long dry choke
at the stroke of
3:33 every
morning onward.
you spend the year immured
in poetry and pieces
of half finished themes
obsessing over everything
you turn to see.
over everything you thought you
saw out of your
unrelenting periphery,
how many twins do I own?
thought you
dreamed and wrote
down, unwind,
which moon did I come out of
and how many wolves
did I set free last night?
I become immune.
you become the
stranded calf in
my forest while
I spend the year
immersed in baths of
black obsidian and
forgetting what it
ever meant to
me.
“reversing” or “us”
round, tight ass and
bright, blue eyeliner.
permanent ink stain on
left hand with a note
or symbol
or something of former
value, a reminder to her
and she is
brutally apathetic to any
male presence
of any kind.
postures.
she asked for the time and
is currently walking
away from me to
ask directions from
someone else.
she asked for the time
and turned around once more
to smile
before she asked him.
“how guys save me in their phone”
slugs salted on the patio,
cicada shells clinging to the moldering
legs of the picnic bench
I set my birthday cake on when I
was five and still clamoring the plates
together for attention,
(and now?)
dozens of unclaimed Easter eggs
rotting under rusty swing sets,
a mouse writhing on a glue trap
that was just SHOVED
in a garbage bag
and me
just staring at the thing,
just watching it suffocate as I
am mired in self pity and
freshly out of love.
my wings tip towards
the sun and I’m triumphant
in my emptiness,
my patient nihilism I
chew when the void becomes
the only measurable thing
in my life I don’t
notice the oncoming car.
grasshopper never notices
the magnifying glass
or pesticide gun.
dog with the mange and glaucoma
blithely to cage.
drunk blindly to rage
then car
then grave.
snail to salt,
cricket to web,
temple to gun
and you say
no, what you never notice is
us.
“love”
lick the salt from the crest
underneath my elbow
where the flesh is softest
and my nerves are most
on end.
it’s a spot I never tell
them about.
you feel something in me,
something growing,
you know I’m antsy
itching to grow the
space between us large enough
to span separate states
and you
let your lips rest there.
the polar vortex
has passed:
it’s Saturday
and the sun is out.
I am lying on my side
facing a bookshelf
that is only
half unpacked
nearest the crack in the
window and I feel a
breeze. I hear
a sparrow call me.
I hear a car pull away
and feel a wet tongue trace
the blue vein underneath
the skin of my arm
in wonder,
inquisition.
my hands contain
a spate and yet
you hold them,
drunk from my fingertips.
I hear you say the slow word
I strangled:
s t a y.
“Saturday,
and the sun is
out.”
you’ve tired of her.
her proletarianism without true
protest feigned theses and
shallow interests, a light
encroaching hum that spins into
white noise in the background while
you begin to obsess over another actress.
she can taste your indifference
in the space left of the mattress.
and anyway, you’ve been watching
tigers move.
you’ve been memorizing motion.
you’ve been stating needs and retreating
and she’s been stepping closer.
where’s the knife inside of you?
I say and
I’ve been eavesdropping.
I’ve been spinning webs.
you’ve been seeking the hunt in cats
and I’ve been catching mice
as traps
to rip it from your
nervous breath.
10.
all day long I do mathematical equations
they say I’m calculating.
in my head.
as I walk to the laundromat
shifting the hamper beneath me,
I think,
that’s an understatement.
I think.
I think.
I think.
I love probability
like
what’s the likelihood I’ll see you again
believing I both convinced myself in this reality
and believe I convinced you it was true
so imbued in my delusion
but then God came to my defense
and I knew that as I watched
some things begin to sprout?
or the analysis like
how much money will I make
if I do this appt and at what cost
to me?
and statistically speaking,
we have to look at patterns,
not just equations but
trends so then here comes
the past.
I turn the headphones up.
you gave me a bouquet of
weeds as I was drinking
my third cup of coffee.
you had picked them from
our backyard when I wasn’t
looking.
you were smiling with teeth;
big, and I thought I loved
you.
I had gone upstairs to
change into a sundress
and tore something near my spine,
suddenly, like a rip inside.
I mustered up enough breath
to walk down the stairs,
back to you,
where you had been standing with the weeds,
where you had been telling jokes,
where you had been laughing and I said:
it feels like I pinched a nerve
and am having trouble breathing.
what should I do?
you had to be somewhere
soon, I knew.
you looked up the staircase
on your way out
the front door and tossed a
I don’t believe you
over the living room floor.
someone else drove me to
the doctor and that doctor
confirmed it,
prescribed me Flexeril
for the pain and wrote me
a note explaining to my internship
why I wouldn’t be in that day.
I laid in bed, waiting for the
drugs to subside.
you came home
and attempted to justify
why you always felt
deceived by me.
I lay numb,
relieved of feeling anything as you recited
everything I’d ever done
that bothered you.
you weren’t sorry,
it’s Thursday and I feel
nothing for you
now.
I drop a pair of panties
on the sidewalk
on the way out and
someone calls me from
the corner.
I turn my headphones up
I feel nothing for you now
but history repeats itself.
“Thursday”
She put her makeup on slowly. She wanted it to be correct. Never quite flawless, she was more adept at wearing graceful missteps to humanize herself in public. Tonight, she moved slowly. She paid attention to the brow bone, the jaw line, her full lips, all of her best features. She stopped applying the powder to stare. The blush she chose was dark; a shimmering burgundy that ran across her face and cheekbones in the shape of a bruise– untidy but organic. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear examining the soft, honey waves falling over her shoulders first as they moved with her fingers, with the light twist of her neck, and then again as they settled over her clavicle. 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 but wet her lips with her tongue instead. 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 unyielding thirst to pick 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. They were constant, persistent and biting. Sometimes they were mean. You will never make it. It was distracting. They were being seized by something else (you will never make it); something distant, either imaginary or future she could never tell, but something tugging at her sleeve. Look behind you. She stopped applying the mascara to reach 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 out loud 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 underneath 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. As she fawned over herself inside, pretending he was next to her complimenting her as she coyly licked the cherry gloss from her lips, she let him praise the way her eyes grew from small and doting to big and black and full of infirmity. She let him kiss her cheek and she closed her eyes to feel it, his light kiss that held no real urgency. She felt his lips part near the corner of her mouth. She could feel his tongue poke out a little as she turned to meet him before she heard a car backfire a few blocks over. Goosebumps trickled up both arms. He was gone and she was gone too. She opened her eyes to see the pencil was now in the drain in a pool of tiny drops of water. In her spine, her bone grove of smoke and scream and sudden life, she felt it. She stared at the pencil, now damp, not ruined but damaged like everything she owned. He was not with her in the bathroom. He was not with her. To clear her throat, her desert dry throat that desperately needed attention, she let out a tiny cough. She came back to life.
“My name is Catarina Kacurek,” she began, facing the mirror.”May I come in?”
She held it there, in her reflection, her dirty blonde and olive complexion not unlike her original self but twisted, distorted slightly like the way it feels when you finally see yourself without a mirror. You’ve been looking at yourself backwards. She was looking at herself angled her whole life; angled smirk, angled eyebrow lift, angled posture. Manicured and yearning and looking more nubile lately, she began wetting her lips again with her tongue. Her lips tasted like plastic fruit and she laughed aloud to see her smile lines so she could once again hide them when the time was right. She laughed aloud and the car backfired again but she expected it now. Her spine grew. She let herself feel the backfire of every other thing in the distance.
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”
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