Jesusita

When the fires came to Santa Barbara just to remind us how all beautiful things are finite, my room was being painted, empty save for a bare mattress and a large set of speakers.

Lydia's house was in a mandatory evacuation zone so she came with her family to stay for a few days. Once she arrived, my house was put on evacuation warning and my stomach began to ache so I called Louis and he brought some friends and we sat on my bare mattress in my empty room and blasted music out the speakers real loud.

Downstairs, Lydia's mother and my dad squabbled back and forth about politics, religion, money until my dad got fed up and drew a picture of her house on fire and taped it to the wall. Her laughter echoed throughout the house but I knew he was at least kind of serious. We just turned the music up and avoided making eye contact some more.

I kept my windows open wide until ashes began to coat the ground like snow stripped of its innocence. After the boys left, we sealed ourselves off from the heat and splayed out across the floor in tank tops and underwear, slicking our bodies with the soot that had gathered.

Local news streamed footage of the fire all through the night while Lyd and I leaned on each other, watching until sunrise woke the rest of them.

We felt some sort of self importance, watchdogging as they slept. When my mother got up I informed her that the fire had spread, and dry winds were pushing it in our direction.
She said it was going to be ok but I knew she didn't think so because all of last night's dishes were piled up in the sink and she wasn't going frantic about getting them washed.

Our parents told us we didn't have to go to school but we went anyways. Driving fast with the windows down, we were survivors of the apocalypse, adventurers in hell, anything but two kids in a fire hazard zone. We got to school all right only to find it had been turned into an evacuation shelter. Red Cross volunteers and smokey-lunged evacuees bustled about as we asked around, trying to help.

We wanted to stay. We wanted to stay and do anything but wait in my empty room on my sheet less mattress watching sweat drip from our noses. But, they told us this was no place for children and we pondered that while passing a very loud and intoxicated homeless man who was bitching about the allegedly burnt hash browns. I wanted to tell him everything was burnt or burning or at least singed today, but we just walked on by and got in Lydia's Volvo and drove home with the windows down, spitting ash out of our mouths.

When we got home, the fire had moved away from Lyd's house and her family had gone home. My dad took his drawing off the wall and said, "We have to evacuate, I think you'd better go now." She popped her gum and spun the keychain round her index finger once before she uttered a one-syllable goodbye, turned on her heel and walked out the door.

No embrace to convey the years of Christmas Eve's and Thanksgiving dinners spent roaming the streets while our families sat down together to eat. She didn't let herself care. She wasn't the type. Preoccupied with mud sledding, tapestries and teal. Her 3-foot-long blond hair; the antithesis of her boyish appeal.

Lyd left me standing infront of my parents and drove around town until the gas was drained and she barely squeaked home to people she tried so hard to avoid.

My parents decided the only thing to do at this point was grab my mother's jewelry box, some photographs, the money, and drive to San Francisco. The smoke looked small once we had climbed far enough up the mountain and I thought of you as the cloud of ash became indistinguishable from a marine layer cradling the city that taught us how to love.

I saw Lydia again recently when I invited her to my birthday party. I wanted to spend all night talking about Thanksgiving or the fire, but her friend got too drunk and pissed on my wall so I kicked him out and she went along without a word.

I

Three wolves lopped past me

passing a dead rabbit

like a baton

three wolves and then the shrill silence of alaska 

II

the northern lights

move through the higher hemisphere like an orgasm

and earth's legs quiver,

birds move south for the winter

but aurora borealis means nothing to the wolf

with a vocabulary of rabbit and blood and murder

III

the wolves paint the snow yellow and red

and the earth adjusts to cover their shapes

white against white until the horizon

death cradled behind their ears

half-limping as they pull in a kill

IV

The arial light show climaxes against polaris' indifference

M A L I G N A N T

When I first felt,

most delicately,

the acute, concerned edge of treason

my revivified lungs and blood and saliva

began to circumvent guilt

and I thought for a moment my outmost emotion could not grow past this point:

Excalibur slicking air after all,

Andromeda stuck in her eternal fall,

gasping for Cassiopeia's burn

grasping for the vernal tilt and turn

when the zodiac was still

in tact

and your eyes, finely tuned, 20/20 vision

before all that

"I made a mistake,"

and, "wont you just listen?"

Now I can't even admit it,

the conscience I'm missing,

So I teeter right at the edge (not off)

though that would make sense

just precariously balanced,

perpetually under the influence.

These days,

it's almost under control

adder, rattling in the pit of my gut

contagion active, but not aware

slick, coiled obsidian viper

asleep, but immortally there

my breath stinks of pomegranates

my teeth not teeth

but oozing, viscid seeds

My eyes as dull

and black as beads

My skin flakes in the warmth of spring
Your sight, amaurotic,

groping in darkness

handicapped fingers pricking on everything I've given you

and always at the whim of my thread

all of that hope, asleep but not dead

standing there, surrounded, reptilian skin sins
you moan like a bitch in heat.
I dream of quarantines and burning bibles
I tab my tongue, and shake some hands
but thirst for the worst
of its many symptoms,
just another victim
of restless universe syndrom. 

H E L P M E

Immediately:

1. Assign stories and compile Budget for week of Nov. 19, Today
2. Mass Media and Society discussion paper, due Nov. 14
3. I've Got Levitation Gallery review,  due Nov. 15, 8 a.m. 
4. Watch 3 - 5 episodes for Comm. project + take notes, due Nov. 15
5. Astronomy homework, extra- credit, due Nov. 19
6. Study for Astronomy quiz, Nov. 19
7. Compose letters of recommendation emails for Patricia, Chella
8. Write spoken word poem, due Nov. 20 (rap with Sean Urbany)
9. Attend Michael Gilbert's lecture Friday, Nov. 16
10. Apply for classes Friday, Nov. 16
11. Mass media discussion paper, due Nov. 19
12. Compile budget, Stories: 1 2 3 4 5, due Nov. 20
13. Write spoken word for The Event, due Nov. 27
14. Finish SFSU application, due Nov. 30
15. Write personal statements ONE and TWO for UC's, due Nov. 30
16. Finish UCSB + UCLA applications, due Nov. 30
17. Do astronomy magnitude homework, due Dec. 3
18. Study for astro quiz, due Nov. 26
19. Communication discussion essay 1, Due Nov. 26
20. Communication discussion essay 2, Due Nov. 29
21. Watch 15 episodes of Modern Family, write synopses, due Nov. 28
22. Write Rational for Mass Media final project, due Nov. 28
23. Interview actor for article, 1:00 p.m. SBCC fountain, Nov. 27
24. Write article, due Nov. 30

Next Week:

1. Work extensively on Communication final project, due Dec. 3
2. Extra Credit for Mass Media, 3 pages "discussion" research, due Dec. 6
3. Compile poems for College of Creative Studies application
4. Write sestina, prose-poem, sonnet, due Dec. 1
5. Finish Communications project, due Dec. 3

Near Future:

1. Actually study for Mass Media and Society final, tentatively Dec. 5
2. Compose Journalism portfolio, due Dec. 5
3. Compose poetry portfolio, due Dec. 5
4. Finish SAIC application, due Jan. 1
5. Finish College of Creative Studies application, due Jan. 14
6. Finish Pratt application, due Feb, 1
7. Puget Sound app, due March 1

MOEITY

I always knew you

Despite that diaphanous conscious choking

Your birthright ability

To feel and be felt

(in your beautiful head and your loins as well)

My king, my panacea

Once fisted his lissome fingers

Walked out the door

and crossed the continent

to settle

The loss of charming innocence

Peony breath and reverence

To our imbroglios love;

its entropy

My knack for adaption

And your inure. 

000

Ethereal rabbit fur coat

Wrapped gently about your shoulders before

Your shoulders folded in on themselves

And your hair was all translucent gold

Shining like the heart of the void that

Touched your pupils and clung,

A plague.

Then,

Gone were the days of your childish lilt

Lost to pathways of a labyrinthine imagination

You ingénue

You forest of a woman

Leaving men half-cocked, trapped

In the penumbra of your mother’s, mother’s nose

You are petrichor in the depths of chapels in Venice

Where you saw the mummified saint,

Smaller than you were

that seeded a skepticism
you nurture still;
a miracle in the pocket of your
iron will.

That is why he notices your lithe limbs

When they

Pause with some inexplicably graceful motion

Whist reading a novel you’re only half paying attention to

And that is why the scintilla is always enough

Busting up into micro-fireworks all across his brain and chest and genitals

Like vestigial hopefulness

At the end of it all
And then, and so on, and so forth

I guess.

Found this old journal entry from Nov. 2009:

"Today Lou and i made a fort in my room, dragged up my dad's amplifier and blasted music with the windows wide open and the wind screaming in. 
We drove until we found Africa, smoked until we couldn't tell the difference between sky and ground.
We climbed on opposite hills and whispered secrets into the valleys, smoked rose petals and tasted butter; stumbled to the edge of the earth.
The greatest adventurers there never were; I'd hold your hand if only you wouldn't kiss me."

I remember that day vividly, though the details have all blurred. Looks like I was up to the same old nonsense.

Oct. 15, 2:13am

Sean's tree house.

We said we were going to stay up all night studying but instead we drank and smoked and wrote poetry then promptly passed out.

The dreams are always shadowy now,
and cunning.
Just last night
I dreamt of the cabin on the shrapnel hillside
and pills that were dimes and pins
but still made my breath short and my body purple-tinged, shivery
and then I was watching Collin, who stood across the room,
as some fire devoured the cabin with us
in it.

I saw Dan yesterday and he said that phrase again which rung through my head like an alarm
"It's neither here nor there now."

I want to walk in the step-rhythm of whatever it takes
to move and continue to move
so nothing is ever here nor there
but for now it's still
scattered all about me.

acirema of states united

Traffic jam in the local clotted artery

like, sorry man

but there's a lot of us here and we've

got to make it to that 

ninetofive,

alright?

Dream 4 — Cabin Pin (2012)

there was a cabin in the woods
on the side of a shrapnel hill freckled with snow.
we sat at a table.
you had a bitter face on,
left the room then
i looked down for
o  n  e  s  e  c  o  n  e  d ,
and
you walked in and
you were smiling.
your smile reminded me
of how big your mouth is     how
one-hundred-thousand years ago
when I was still awake,
you were smiling at me
now you just smiled at a plate
in those hands.
it was a china plate
with an assortment
of pins and coins
that reminded me of the bird's bones thrown
to the ashy red dirt back when I was awake
and eight, staring down a witch doctor in africa.
they were magic
you took one —a dime
popped it in your mouth
smiled.
one time some years after my trip to africa
when we were awake one hundred thousand years ago,
you smiled so big you
swallowed me up
and I stayed stranded
in the pit of your belly for
t h r e e w h o l e d a y s
before resurfacing.
i saw laughter form in the hollow of your lower ribs
and watched it spiral until it broke loose:
noisy out the mouth,
flinging your hands to a clap before
it settled in your crow's feet.
i took a pin
from the china plate
i put it on my tongue
and then
a fire came that took everything promptly left
and left us    stranded;
shrapnel on the hill.
but i felt no remorse as the flames receded
because I heard your laugh one-hundred-thousand years A.D.
it was echoey and dull but unmistakably the same,
burning in the crackles of a moving flame.

Life Piracy and a Guest Appearance

Last night I
gave in to my selfish,
pressed up against
some pungently boyish smelling
Peter Pan
flower child

Last night he
tasted like Kyle
back when I was still
madly in heat
back when I was
vulnerable and
un-ignorant, not- naive
15
and pretty
and pretty miserable

I guess,
not all that much has changed,
save for the tally:

nineteen now,
at least I understand
just how naive I was (I am)
just how cruel
and foolish
and cracking;
a piece of the broken mason jar
that once held captive my spirit

now it's all this:
"I couldn't give a flying fuck
tonight"

and all that fuck-giving in the morning.

It's the disintegration of a moral compass,
the deregulation of Jiminy Cricket
who has not sat at the nape of my neck
since I mistook him for a regular cricket
and stomped the damn thing
with the heel
of my boot.

The Garden .001

The Garden .001

Satan never said I was at fault for
anything at all,
and she smelled so good,
coiling around my torso.

Satan promised me a bed
and not just any bed
but one
coated in white sheets
and some misc. birds' down feather pillows

She said it would be
white as snow
white as fucking angels

then chuckled
"fucking angels," she said.

But Satan never said I was at fault for anything at all,
at all!
And she smelled like Olivia
whom I had held, carefully
the night before she fell ill,
the night I dreamt of holding
a thousand white rabbits.

My ribs began to splinter like trees in a fire,
suffocated by the force of her grip
but she promised me a bed
and she smelled like Olivia
and she said it was no fault of my own

so I sold my soul to her

and she took me to bed
and she
fucked me senseless
like Olivia never would
and that night I dreamt of the rabbits again
but they weren't real rabbits,
not really at all.

Persona Poem (In the style of Sean Urbany)

Listen up people
please
just
fuckinglistentome

I am not going to say it again
it's not fair
its just not fair for the rest of us to sit and wait for your bullshit

alright:

the mind is slowed by suckling myriad
sun princesses
lusty in their haste

no, fuck that

listen, play in Bflatminor
yes, that's right, B F L A T M I N O R
and not so fast
no, no, too slow now
dammit
count your measurements

Michael Stillwell
Michael Stillwell, your timing
just
isn't happening

I'm going to be an actor but right now
my face
just
isn't happening

and if it isn't happening
then
it isn't at all.

someone please
roll me some fucking cancer.

Bad Entropy

BAD ENTROPY

In the 3rd district,
dogs don't wake up
to chase the mailman
when the mailman comes 'round
because the mailman never comes 'round
and the dogs are dead.

Well damn,

In the 3rd district
the factories pump soot
into our lungs until
we can no longer work the factories
so we build factories to build machines
to build factories to build machines
to work the factories,

And in district 3
we finally rest.

In the 3rd district
young women sprout wrinkles in the sun
to no fault of the sun at all;
shrouded by a veil of soot and birdshit

but even that doesn't last
because nothing does
in the 3rd district.

In district 3
birds rain from the sky
and dad says they are belly-flopping
which is something people did
all the time
back when there was water.

In the 3rd district
we cough until we know nothing else
our ears rendered deaf by the sounds of eachother,
vision no more
than a permanent image:
the insides of our eyelids

coughing coughing coughing
until we synchronize
in a pulsing S.O.S.

We cough until we slow and sputter out
and the machines slow and sputter out
and the factories spew
soot and slime and shit
until they bury themselves alive

and district 3
finally rests.

In the 4th district
a man sits on his porch reading an article
that promises a 20lbs loss with no change in diet.
His dog drops dead at his feet and he muffles a cough
but only thinks of the superbowl.

Victor

The shock will ebb
but its high tide
when I'm dressing
and I realize
(hard-hitting like 3am sunrise)
that you died, you died, you died


The chaos that
possessed your cells
and turned them into
something else
(overzealously fucking despite your health)
We heard but couldn't help


Last night when I
could hardly weep
picturing soft linen
on your knobby knees
(just evidence now of your disease)
You sleep but do not dream

ARK OF THE COVENANT

I'm an atheist so
my heaven's bones in a casket.
I mean, isn't religion
like all your eggs in one basket?
there are all these preachers trying so hard to mask it,
only as successful as how well
they keep their flasks hid.

Sure, it would be nice
for these dead over- achievers
to collect rewards for their
crippling ignorance fever
But all I've ever learned
from charismatic deceivers
is that locusts like to prey
on gardens of believers.

YOUR BONES
were so predestined to be buried
that we hardly noticed when they were laid to rest
finally

six feet below the ground.

As a girl you used to play, laughing in graveyards
up until the day you were burned badly

then reprimanded for sticking sticky child's fingers
into cap holes of candles

embellished with The Virgin Mary.

Her scent would always permeate whatever thoughts you had 

and coil itself around your troubles like a life vest,

like all the times you gripped your mother's hand at take-off, 

in anticipation in place of fear

and the waves of exhilaration that final night,

murder weapon gleaming in your eyes like a cataract.

You see, you used to wander graveyards,

back when you were young.

To smell the distilled gas of holy wax, dripping,

no longer in remembrance, but resolve,

to get that prickling feeling you always got

right below your hummingbird clavicle

and couldn't quite name,

but thought most closely resembled loneliness,

then belonging. 

You were intelligent so you must have known 

how the living suck from the deceased

until there is nothing left.

Now I picture your bones already brittle

because you lived planning your death.

Pauper

Heavy and foreign as a lead weight
I want to hold you in my hips until the day I die
(secretly)
coat soft pink with soft metal
slick my insides with your poison
and lay out in the sun until my body melts
with you in it

How long until death graces the land again and trees bow,
cracking and white,
in his presence?

I long to shape myself elegantly, catching your heart
on a silver tray
or in the slow blink of a rose at dusk

When, last night I took in your boyish musk and decidedly gathered my clothing
I held my breath for the card-trick sense of control
and heard yours quicken with graceless abandon

(One of these days)
You will spin your silk chalice
You will stop disappointing me
and I will sit watching your translucent cocoon vibrating in ripples from the force of my anticipation

But
for now, my darling
there is nothing I can do

So I tighten my chest around the absence of religion
I clench my fists, grappling for ignorance or belief,
hoping either one will shroud you

and your helplessness.

Everything wilts

in summer's slow, hard-pressing heat.

Was it just this morning that Jake drove us down Fairview at the cusp of dawn, with the streetlights still lit, when I felt it swell up in me?
I wanted so badly to remember to write these down:

1. Life is most peculiarly beautiful even when its not particularly so. 
2. When Sean, Jake and I were attempting to stifle our howling laughter in the booth at Denny's at 5am, I felt again the warmth of youthful innocence and let it fill my stomach with its sticky syrup. 
3. The eggs were most definitely green so I did not eat them. 
4. On the way home I sought out the same sugary sweet nostalgia, but only came across the crash: You could have been there on cold faux-leather, laughing until you wept.

I thought of your eyes again, at night on the corner, black as space, equally dead,

and all the while you slept. 

?

ALL MY WORDS

ALL OF MY WORDS

HAVE GATHERED AND CHOKED ME

HAVE SPILT FROM MY GUT;

YOU POUR ME INTO YOUR FINEST CRYSTAL

BUT YOU NEVER DRINK ME UP

A bullet in the night

I don't know what to say for myself.
Words are coagulating in my throat
like day old blood and the gathering of ants
so I breath in, gulp them all down
Now,
I have grown accustomed to your coldness
and the constant flurry of hornets when I reach for the door
knowing you are on the other side
Still,
I am surprised
(In the few seconds before the curtain falls
I'll hold my gaping mouth with the grace of a thousand drunken soldiers
days after they lost the war)
There is a miner shouting Eureka in the abscesses of my comatose soul while
Something behind your cold eyes sparks and fizzles out:
Goodnight, great party.
Then you speed away,
A spy,
a bullet in the night.

It was not long ago that she did breath deeply the perceptible rush of freedom:

• sharp air surrounding mountains like a halo
• the faintest jingle of keys in a stale jail cell
• dog off-leash for the first time, 

How could she have expected you to tie her back up?

Bind skinny wrists until her bones were brittle and breaking
even before you gripped her once, tightly, and cast her into the dawn. 

There is a silence that starts at the end of a beat inside you, stretching for miles; an infinite halt.

But you are not there to hear it, because you are not there at all. 

- eventually it will all have to go

I thought to myself, rounding the corner of a school where the ghost of children's laughter still lingered in fiveoclock hallways.

- i want to listen forever

I had gotten lost inside a very small forest, unfocused because I couldn't find my way out of Yosemite, growing in my head. Ceders cropped up like locusts in the gardens of believers.

- but

Walking home on the dirt path behind the cabin house that stuck out like a sore thumb among haciendas reigning the cul-de-sac, I knew something was terribly wrong with me. I peered into the window of the dirty cabin to find dust floating, still, in filtered light. Here there was no echoing laughter, only the entity of cheap tabacco and spilt beer.

- eventually it will all have to go

When the mortician splits me open he will understand how I felt, looking through the cabin window.

Katrina

When the water first began to pool,

creeping like sweat on a child's back,

it went unnoticed

until it breached the crack of light below our front door

and cast it, momentarily shattered,

so it painted the kitchen with

amorphous reds and blues.

Then mama began to scream.

     The photographs! The money! We have to go, we have to go!

Go Go Go Go Go

For the two hours we went

we were shown the purest forms of ourselves

stacked precariously (and mostly wet)

on our respective beds.

This was our judgement day.

The clouds collected and collided

whipped by sentient winds 

(soldiers of the rapture).

How could I be afraid?

I lifted the cross to my lips and pretended to pray

but mama said God had a different plan

The Ark! (our minivan)

my heart warmed despite the splitting cold 

that seeped into my feet's bones

from water now three inches high and well above my ankles

When we finally set our collected belongings

upon the dining room table

I thought they were so small,

that we are all so small

in the eye of a storm.

I said

   But mama, we can't fit all the animals in the car

She didn't even smile,

the expression was fragmented;

a moving-box trembling slightly in her frozen hands.

She perched like a predator on the wrong side of the food chain,

eyes glued to the window. 

In my head I heard choirs singing

saw their mouths open in slow motion,

saliva raining from their lips,

They sang of salvation and sacrifice

as our minivan drifted by in brackish water

21st Century Anthem

My Nona was heaving,
bent over a pillow belonging to the sofa I hated
attempting to sew the seam together
where the zipper had broken from use
and over-use


I smiled at her efforts empathetically but
        It's not a big deal 
she said in her native tongue
        Your mama will buy a new couch soon, you know?
        That's how it is 
(she smiled)


That's how it is
                     
Yet she stayed there,
hunched over the spilling, gluttonous foam
while her fragile thread snapped as quickly as she pushed it through


       There are blackberries in the fridge 
she said


So I went and poured a bowl too big for blackberries
full of blackberries (to the brim!)


And damnit if I didn't eat them all

In    the    art    museum    there    was   a    girl

stark white against cobalt,

eyebrows dark and glaring

cutting her milky skin in angles 

enough to make any man's knees tremble.

The artist assembled her with care

so each passer-by could feel her presence. 

Even when amusing himself

with something across the room

he felt her:

dark hair framing high cheekbones

sheer fabric atop her pallid breast

the rose bud nipple that reverberated sexuality across cool museum floors,
entering the nostrils and lips of a young couple, 

who moved closer together, grazing hands in secret

until the man wandered away and swore under his breath

when,
looking back from the painting 

he saw his partner and felt nothing. 

You are too close for comfort if I can run to you.

Sometimes I dream of walking down your street in blinding sunshine 

and find myself there, 

cold and awake in the night.

Ticking gracefully
as the basins of a watermill,
a watch was wound and put away
a coat misplaced
in some infinite cabinet 
bound the clock work where it lay
for years and years
it counted,
set back each week an hour
until the cogs all rusted
and the battery lost its power
all the while children laughed,
people were in pain
no one heard the buried watch
counting out in vain

Someone will find it lifeless
repair not worth the cost
they'll never stop to pose the question
        where does time go when it is lost?

13

I know him
by the strength of his grip
when I'm reaching the brink of dreams
and he senses me
in early morning silence
the way one feels an ice cube, swallowed
slipping down most private hallways
-mazes in our hollow bodies.

I always thought them bloody;
the epitome of human filth
but I slide through him to find passages gilded in ochre,
molten gold flowing in place of blood,
and a chandelier where his heart should be;
a brain of copper clockwork


It chimes and I count with it:
one, two, thirteen
I thought I heard it shrill my name
but it must have been a dream.

I am alone in my unhappiness.
In the depths of some ocean cave I will bury my legs in sand and wait for high tide.
When they look at my carcass washed up on the shore they will wonder if I were born to the sea, and you will choose to believe it.

Still in the dark of the night you will hear the clinking of sailboat's masts miles away
and you will clutch at your guts in fervent prayer
and you will sweat your strain until it equates all my wretched tears
and in the depths of some ocean cave I will sit,
smiling.

C A P T O R
Where have I left my
broken sword,
my strong-willed
swift escape?

Tarnished wood tables
 greet me
in rooms I once saw
plated with gold.

A sewing machine hums in some
dark cavity
on a night marred only
by its shortness

I walk past your door
grasping the hilt
I count on you not to stop me
and
my hands are empty
when you do.

A note (on writer's block):
I feel as though I'm losing my inspiration and it terrifies me. The harder I work at improving my writing, the more it feels like I'm gripping the neck of creativity, unsatisfied with whatever it coughs up. I want a poem to surprise me again when I  feel the sting of pines (my favorite smell) or the dense air before rain when it feels like the atmosphere is holding its breath.
Instead, I grow to hate my writing. It infuriates me, but I cannot stop.
I chronicle to share the weight of everything.
When someone else can read your life back to you on paper, it makes it less meaningful, less real.
I live in the world I create for myself.

The Drought

How quickly we turned hostile.
Was it slowly?
Trepidation at its finest
So we could not feel it creep up behind us,
cutting air like a knife.

In hindsight, (celebrating my victories in the bathroom mirror,
Stained teeth peering out from the curtain of my lips)
I knew your emotion
I felt it in the palms of my hands
and saw it creep from the corners of your eyes.

I have memorized your wrinkles
and poured water from your brow only to watch it
fill the creases stemming from your lashes.

Take me to his ocean!
I am calling out to the wind.
I am licking your cheekbones.

You taste of peonies and warm wood,
of termites and the fall of Rome,
the ashes in Poland.

I have hidden all of this in ink and paper,
stuffed a wine bottle with your taste,
all of your criticism, and the collected rainfall
of two-and-a-half years in California.

We are the drought.
The farmers curse their gods and lift pitchforks to the sun.
We are damnation and rows of dried tomatoes.

Surely this is the end of days:
a startling lack of avocados on the golden coast.
Children wail to find their bread filled with sand
and have no energy to run barefoot through yellow grass.

We are living off the sea,
we are drinking only wine and our livers are pacified,
our hearts tick like clockwork.

You never answer me, just stare and shake your head.
I pour wine down your face,
down your pale, white face,
but it has no apparent path.

Take me take me! Where have I thrown my soul?
I long to dig up the graves of our memories
pop a cork and breathe magnetism
in the space between our clasped palms.

Instead,
I am watching deep red spread across your features
and it is nothing but split wine
on worn hardwood floors.

Stag

An introduction

What can we do but exchange pleasantries? We grapple with the thought of slapping one another hard, once or twice on the cheek, and lean in for a handshake instead.

Long have I known you and the hatred that brews in steel chambers of your soul for the woman who cost you the long war of your early years.

Still she roams freely, unaware of the invisible lasso you have thrown and are inching closed around her, so when she glimpses it in the corner of a dream in the form of your freckled palm, all of the love in her heart diffuses like an atomic bomb.

But she wakes and claims to remember nothing.

You seek the bitter sting of a cold hand in crisp morning air on the fourth of July in Brooklyn, when you are looking at her eyes unable to see the pigment of the irises you used to know like the back of your hand.

Part one

A phone rang, informing her of a funeral. When the name finally hit her ear from the other side of the continent, she hesitated for one moment, then said,

"To me, he has been dead a long time"

In that moment of hesitation:

The woman's breath did not catch, nor did her grip tighten on the phone. She stared straight at the wall ahead of her, the wrinkles around her mouth constricting in a concentrated frown. She would have seemed indestructible save for the slightest of quivers that started in her knees and grew progressively more severe so she had to sit down and reposition herself when there was a great clearing of throats on the other end of the line:

"Miss, I don't think you understand, he died but this morning, 

one hour ago."

Promptly she hung up the phone and downed four pills. She thought to herself that it may have been foolish, that she could not remember the identity of these medicines, then wondered if perhaps they had been candy instead.

Part two 

He was in a dream, God did he know it, nostalgia bubbled in the pits of his stomach like a virus. The floor was coated in snow thick as frosting, but only high enough to cover his boots as he trudged through the dense green forrest. Why am I always here, he thought. Soon I will wake up and pretend I didn't feel her in the breaths of air that froze  fibres of my lungs.

Years ago, upon his reckoning of the girl's cruelties, he had abandoned seeking her in the labyrinthian trees. 
A broken heart bittered his palate, and her dreamland became uninspiring. Conniving bitch, his thoughts echoed. 
In most of her dreams, he would walk to the empty stage (used for summer theater, he assumed) and look through the spaces between trees until he could no longer remember where he was and the scenery before him became nothing more than an abstract painting.

All the while she would watch him, hiding just out of his peripheral vision, noticing the way he would squint and tilt his head as if it could help him make sense of the place. Sometimes she spent hours there, just staring at his neck or his  hands. Sometimes she'd go up and talk to him, but when they passed each-other at school the next morning, she could see in his eyes that he did not remember their conversations.

This time, when she walked up, he stiffened on stage and arranged his features to look stoic 
while his mind cried for gods to turn him to stone. 

Then he said, "Hello."

"Shall we preform a play?" the girl asked, voice pitching slightly in anticipation of his typical callousness.

"No," said the boy.

"You know," said the girl, inching closer to him. He could see that she was cold, goosebumps raised up from her bare arms. Her skin looked ancient, thin as paper. He watched blood lie stagnent inside her. Her lips were a deep blue and she looked dead.  
He told her so.

"I'm just as trapped as you are, here. Do you think I wish to dream of you every-night?," she said.
At this, the boy smiled. "Who wouldn't want to dream of me?" he said. 
She laughed, or  at least made all the motions of laughing, but no sound was omitted from her open mouth, and her gasping reminded him too much of his role as the gaping fish, left to dry out on the dock after she had reeled him in, trampled him, and walked away. 


Silence returned to the forest, and he looked her over again with the coldest eyes.
"Then why do you do it, why do you bring me here?" the boy snapped. "Haven't you done enough?
Have you not had enough of me?"


"N- no ," the girl said, she was beginning to shake from his palpable fury.  
Snow was melting around his ankles, turning the ground to mush. 
"I don't mean to," she said. "I can't stop them, you see. It's a nightmare for me to see you so often. It's wrecking me, 
it's tearing me apart."


A vein began to throb  near the boy's right temple. She wanted to kiss it, feel its warm pulse beneath her frozen lips. 
 Instead, she fell to the ground and  hid her face with her papery hands. 
"She ate me up when she realized you weren't coming back. She took all the pure parts that were left of her and devoured them. I think she conjures you only to keep me miserable," the girl said. 

"Then, I do not want to hit you," said the boy, his lips softening from their deep frown. "But I will never love you again, 
as long as I live."

"Perhaps, that is worse," said the girl as she began sobbing soundlessly.
"You will live with it as I learned to live with the absence of you," the boy said,
then he turned into a deer and gazed at her with the wildest of eyes before bolting into the thicket.

Part three


She awoke in a damp bed, hair matted to her face and neck, reeking of perspiration. The woman groaned as she threw off the layers of bedding she must have pulled on while asleep.
"Always in that fucking snow," she muttered. 


As she went through her ritualized morning routine, bits of a phone conversation drifted through her consciousness. 
She wondered, briefly, if that had been a sort of prelude to her usual dream, but dismissed the idea when she found her phone blaring its dial-tone on the kitchen floor. 


Silently, she put the phone back on its hook and began to pack up her nicest black clothing. 


Part Four 

She was running through the woods.

 She was screaming screaming screaming his name, but her legs were bare, breaking below her. 
By the time she reached the lake she was missing four toes and the purple sting of frostbite had crept half-way up her body.  She was hands and knees on the ice, skating with her palms. Icicles dawned with the sweat on her brow and she swatted at them as her body trembled.

When he opened his eyes he was not in a forest and this, he thought, was a very good sign. 

 Still a softer part of him (one he had disposed of long, long ago) 
howled  in the trenches of his abdomen, mourning the loss of her company.   

He silenced it almost instantaneously, but the muffled wail was enough to conjure her name to the whim of his tongue, 
and he allowed himself to whisper it only once. 

She was lying on the lake in submission when she heard his voice bubble up from a hole in the ice. 
Sometimes, while awake and driving down the highway she'd hear the ghost of his voice say her name.
The first time it happened she made the mistake of calling him repeatedly, certain that he was in some sort of trouble. 
He picked up on the 24th call, told her to fuck off and hung up. 
She didn't try again. 

Someone was calling to him, banging on the wall of ice he only now realized was keeping him submerged. 
When he finally recognized the voice, he felt something tear through his chest like an arrow. 

Suppose I spoke too soon,  he thought, moving towards the sound. 
Only after hearing her did he begin to feel the pressure to breathe accumulating in his deflated lungs. 
 However, he remained undecided on the state of his will to live and was weighing his options
 when her voice rang out once more above the surface.

"Please, please come up. There is something I must tell you. Something important," she said. 

"Tell me, then I will see if I want to come up," he responded defiantly, 
watching the girl's figure, morphed through crystalline ice. 

The girl sobbed aloud, only once, for his irrefutable stubbornness  and the gravity of her following sentiment.

"My love-"

With those two words he felt the entirety of the lake's pressure rest upon him until the boy was sure it had broken every bone in his body. Had he been able to speak he would have told her to fuck off. 
Instead, he let himself sink towards the lake floor.

The girl continued:

"They tell me you are gone. They tell me you have died!
 but how can I believe them when I see you every night?"

The boy was fading deeper into black lake water.  

From the depths there was no sound, but the girl heard his voice clearly in her head:

"Go to the funeral. 
There will be no body in that casket. Go to it and see that I am well, then lock your dreams and keep me away. 

I long to sleep forever,  soundlessly and out of the snow."

"No, no, no! You have to listen! You have to hear me!  I cannot face this cold alone."

The girl was clawing at the ice now. 
Her fingers became elongated and turned into thin branches,

snapping as they swept the surface.   

Part Five

"Coffee?" the woman heard as she was shaken from her sleep. A flight attendant occupied the aisle beside her. 
Accepting the cup of steaming liquid if only for the fact that it would warm her hands, she noticed the slightest sense of snow on her clothing. It reminded her of skiing in her youth  and returning home with the mountain's chill trapped in her hair.

She thought, it must be the greatest of untruths to go bury his body now, so soon after seeing him. 

How could she look his mother in the eye to tell her, "Your son's not dead, not dead at all. 
You see, he lives in the corpse of my vestigial goodness."

The End

At the wake, she laid eyes on his dead face. She took in his limp body, his age, the lack of a grimace,  and thought that this couldn't be the boy she dreamt of, that it wasn't him at all. 
She stayed to watch the tears of all his friends and family stream past her like raindrops on a car,
speeding down the highway.

When the woman dropped dirt on his casket, the wind picked up as if adjusting to her awakening sense of effervescent freedom,

and that night when she closed her eyes only to open them in the resonating whiteness of dreams, 

he ran to her and kissed her hard on her lips 

until one drop of blood fell to the snow like a treaty

.