August 2010
1 post
1 tag
It's so humid that the windows to my room are...
I feel the water creep out of my ear after I take a shower and think of sustained relationships and reasons for leaving parts of myself in different hiding places—underneath seats on the airplane, in between rocks, inside a sock, the crease behind your ear.
On the other side of the world you are maybe clearing out your throat and thinking, briefly, about something that happened when we were...
July 2010
4 posts
1 tag
It is nearly impossible to know both:
.
I feel nothing
I am nothing
and yet, with the magpies that I see with their blue-rimmed wings, a vein underneath my chest lifts; there is the sky, completely covered with clouds, and air that tastes like salt. There is a sweltering breeze that seems to move through me. There is ambivalence, and there is also the feminine.
1 tag
I miss your body curling against mine, like an...
I miss the feeling of your warm chest against my ear; when I listened to your heartbeat thudding itself into my being, I would marvel at the heat between your skin and mine, the softness of your skin, and how I felt so comfortable resting there.
Late in the night the sirens outside would ask us to come out for a smoke, I’d hold on to your waist with one arm and bury my face in your side....
1 tag
I wake up with a question
Every day I wake up with a question, an Are you there? lingering on the soft patch of muscle in my mouth. I remember waking up to you, the smell your body fell into while you were sleeping, the heaviness of a limb on mine, the kind of warmth that only a human body can give. Every day I wake up with the mild bitterness of memories asked to pause, the saltiness of your skin, the sticky sweet of...
1 tag
In the pit of your stomach,
the acoustics are rather terrible.
So all the secrets and worries sound a lot worse, vibrate with all the wrong tones, make you shiver as though you’re watching your favorite musician make a fool of himself/herself on the stage.
My one secret paces back and forth and I can hear its footfalls stretching upwards through my diaphragm, swelling painfully across my ribs before gurgling into the...
June 2010
6 posts
1 tag
Brief interlude between classes:
Regardless of the the impropriety of favoritism, my mother’s older sister is my favorite relative. Perhaps because she is also the oldest child of her family, and because of her intelligence and success, I relate to her more easily than I do almost anyone else. And she relates to me. A couple days ago, before my classes started, we had a lengthy conversation about my family, and she told me...
1 tag
I stop myself from ringing the number that is you.
I perch on the window sill; these days I enjoy writing only by sunlight. There is a hint of want—I want to ask the questions, of course. I want to be able to say, Yes, I was answered. Not left. Waiting. Wanting.
In my head, I see you with very battered shoes and ever so slightly messed up hair. In my body, I feel you as one does a bruise that will not rub away. A sound or a sensation from...
1 tag
the act of unclenching a fist is far more...
after a while, your hand becomes accustomed to a firm grip, but when the time comes for you to let go, the fingers feel brittle, the wrist refuses, the palm is glossy with sweat, and there is pain.
your body was for me the staggered line between ocean and land. every time your tide became swollen, my pores drunk your cool saltiness. it is difficult to escape a rhythm such as the one of the sea....
1 tag
Old Friendship 3.
I remember the feeling of my skin fixed on yours, welded into place with a bond of your sweat and my sweat. Heat had nowhere to go so it flooded upwards into our mouths. Every time I moved I slipped against you. Every time I tried to gasp fresh air I tasted salt.
Whenever I can feel my past with you creeping up on the nape of my neck I revert to stories I make up that are somewhat fantasy and...
1 tag
Old Friendship 2.
The fourteen year old you met me in the morning then went on a very long walk before coming back dirty, tired, and unwilling to shave. I stand knowing little more than you about the effects tomorrow has on today, finding no comfort in the knowledge. Your fourteen year old self and I lit our cigarettes, bit our lips while we pinched the filters hard between our fingers until I whispered to you, I...
1 tag
Old Friendship.
There is no way to smooth out the creases that exist between us. Like the folds of an old letter that has been read over and over again, the bond between you and me is worn. Marred. I cannot approach you without pushing against this tension: like an accordion, I wail a coughing note of “I wish we could…” and “I miss…” as I press closer to you. At opposite ends...
May 2010
7 posts
1 tag
The clenching feeling in the chest--
like the uncontrollable loss of reason, knowledge, history when on the brink of a great fall,
like the absolutely intolerable nausea crawling underneath a realization of a mistake,
like the immensity of being caught underneath a rolling wave, the entire body twisting every which way,
that entire unbelievable feeling condensed, contained in a muscle the size of your fist.
1 tag
After five years, a side note:
I told you today that the best way for me to explain whatever it is we have is to say that you make me want to write about you. The best way for me to explain was to tell you that. For your sake, I didn’t say that usually I write to you. Usually I write what could be unsent letters, as if everything I want to tell you in person cannot be said out loud. I will probably continue like that...
1 tag
You said you believe in fate for comfort.
Maybe somewhere deep in the Azusa mountains we can find a place and time for us to start over again, to make the decisions we want to, without fear, without assuming we’d have time in the future to be what we could be. Maybe when the sun hits the slope of these hills, you will have let me go without believing anymore in fate.
1 tag
Against Hands
Palms damp like the surface of contemptuous stones on the steaming riverbank; fingers ache like hills of burned homelands. Often scarred; nails clipped short, cracked and unclean. Thick wrists, with skin more like that of beasts bent gently across painful angles Your two hands— balanced like a scale, weighing my need against the glass in my eyes. as if justice was only a whim.
1 tag
A part of me says this:
The inner surface of my bottom lip remembers your brow and the heat of green flames underneath—
I kissed your forehead, and now I bend backwards with the breaching of this sun to ask you if you moon of your ribs can still cradle me.
(Cut your side open and you can keep me nestled against muscle, rooted in your veins: Let me sit in your western mountain cavity.)
The shadow we cast...
1 tag
Back to You
In certain moments, on certain days, I smell you. There is a whiff of mowed grass in the air, or a a hint of Old Spice deodorant, and I am suddenly remembering you, always with my eyes closed and my back slumped like a question mark, wondering when you’ll be erased. When anyone mentions “the people” we never leave behind, I think of you. My house is on top of a hill, and when the sliding...
1 tag
June 2007, Before Leaving
You drove to my house in your first car, parked a few blocks away— we shared the sun, the lips of leaves reaching over us. I remember the layered shadows of your eyelashes, bent over the soft bed of skin next to your nose—I wanted to curl up in that darkness and rest.
I ask your mother if you’ve gone. It has taken us three years to grow enough sincerity in which we cast this mold...