Come on skinny love just last the year
It is now September 1st, 2011, it’ll be three months this week.
I wish I could tell you anything special about that day. I remember the sun was getting higher in the sky, my memory feels bleached by sunlight. It was a Thursday. I’d decided to keep seeing the fellow I’d just started dating. I’d graduated physical therapy and was feeling unsure about life without my physical therapist, Kristen. I stayed out the night before, laid around all afternoon. Showered early and curled my hair for work. There is nothing special about that day.
Three months will come and go and no one will know but me. The scar shaped like Arkansas looks more like a birthmark and I don’t bother to correct anyone. I talked the emergency room nurse out of cutting off my work pants, but I haven’t worn them since.
I could never tell you what happened. I couldn’t tell you the order it happened. The now-me fills in the blanks with what I hope happened. I can’t tell you how it went, the truck disappeared in my rear view mirror long before he hit me and the more time I put between myself and it I lose track. I never saw him coming, I never saw the crash. I still know what it feels like. The impact remains inside me. I keep it in my bones. I don’t want to talk about these things.
I am better enough that I walk and drive. I am healed enough that a stranger doesn’t need to know. I work and chitchat and find things to fill up the hours of each day.
Life’s more and less fragile all at once. I understand, and have always understood, how fleeting it can be. Yet I bring carelessness to it now. I hear that after a trauma it is normal to continue to see the world as a constant threat, but it’s impossible to explain to friends and family that sometimes I’m convinced I’ll not make it the year. That future plans seem to be a waste. You can’t just tell folks this because they’ll worry. You’ll be labeled things. You’ll have people speaking in whispers around you. Exchanging uncomfortable looks when they think you don’t see. I don’t want to think these things.
There were moments when the pain made it so I didn’t want to finish the year. And I can’t name all the ways life isn’t what it was before. It has limitations now. I don’t still see parked cars on the street smashing into one another. But as the crazy thinking goes away clarity does not take its place. I look for resolution and I see none.
I don’t want to keep writing this.
If I am to keep living I am going to have to surrender to the future. And I realize that there’s part of me that doesn’t want to let go. This won’t be the meaning of my life forever but I lose sense of what the meaning of my life is supposed to be. Letting go makes it less important that I’ve survived. It’s too heavy a betrayal and the future remains a threat.
My brain parks sometimes in the moment before the crash. I am stopped in traffic, fiddling with the radio. I am checking my hair in the mirror, checking my lip gloss and fixing it. I am focused on getting to work, getting out of work, kissing the boy, seeing the ocean. What I hope happened. I don’t want to leave this moment.
beautifulness
On my worst day he brings roses. Only six and he never minded to remove the red SALE sticker, but they are roses. Antiqued and delicate as he imagines I still must be, he leaves them on a shelf because he doesn’t know what to do with them. He doesn’t have a vase, or vaahse he enunciates, and I’m suddenly apologetic that I can’t get up and cut the stems, find a large beer mug, solve the problem and ask him not to ever say that word again.
The day is my worst because my foot becomes cramped as the leg spends hour after hour and day after day in a single position leaving the muscle to work itself up to where it constantly spasms. The kind of cramped where if he sits down next to me I swear he’s making it worse because his hand touched the bed and the movement rippled and can’t he just stay still. The day is my worst because my face is still not right. I see wreckage. The day is my worst because I can do nothing but wait. What’s really atrophying here is my vitality. What’s really rotting here is time. I could explain in detail what each hour of the day looks like. The way boredom is like an infestation. I sit sometimes and say nothing for hours, letting him pace around me checking temperatures, refilling ice bags, waiting for me to crack open and spill out. He could be my hero if there were tears to wipe and blankets to wrap around me. I’d be easier to love if I were openly devastated.
I wonder where we’d be if we hadn’t had the big fight, the week apart, if we hadn’t furiously made-up just days before the accident. If I hadn’t made him atone. How would this be different if he hadn’t come to the scene? He saw my car broken down into pieces like a Lego tragedy and me nowhere in sight. Identified himself as family and became my caretaker. It’s not like he’d stop now, anyways, even if he wanted. I wonder what this would be like if he didn’t feel beholden to me.
I am a broken doll. I wait to be dusted and relocated. Repaired and restored. He has to be there in case I need to move, in case I need something. He used to leave. Used to go out and run errands, take care of things, have his own life. But he discovered I would wobble around the empty house high as a kite and reveling in the fact that I was responsible for my own transportation from bed to sofa, soft space to soft space. Something as stupid as a water glass refilled gave me away and the reprimands came gently albeit sternly. I learned to leave things where he leaves them. And now I listen for the key in the lock, car leaving the block and pretend to have all the freedom in the world. Anymore I can’t walk unaided. The drugs aren’t strong enough and I become less rebellious by the day.
It’s still light out. And he’s gone for the moment. I’ll remind him when he returns I haven’t eaten. I’ll ask if a shower can be worked in to tonight’s plans of laying down followed by more laying down. He doesn’t like that I insist on showering alone, it’s hard on him and I could fall in the bathtub and he would be just destroyed. He spoke this morning of the future when I’m better. I don’t always see an afterlife to this but I nod and I’m quiet, he’s had enough stress lately. I hold my breath and try not to decay. He talks and talks about things we’ll someday do. I turn my face. Ask if he can move me to the sofa. He stops talking and reaches out for my elbow preparing to get me up and bring me to where ever I want to be. Captor and hostage, hostage and hostage.
At least there’s roses.
Writing is hard. Coal mining is harder.
“How many women wrote beautiful novels and stories and poems and essays and plays and scripts and songs in spite of all the crap they endured. How many of them didn’t collapse in a heap of ‘I could have been better than this’ and instead went right ahead and became better than anyone would have predicted or allowed them to be. The unifying theme is resilience and faith. The unifying theme is being a warrior and a motherfucker. It is not fragility. It’s strength. It’s nerve. And ‘if your Nerve, deny you –,’ as Emily Dickinson wrote, ‘go above your Nerve.’ Writing is hard for every last one of us—straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.”
yump
“Littany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out”By Richard Siken
Every morning the maple leaves.
Every morning another chapter where the hero shifts
from one foot to the other. Every morning the same big
and little words all spelling out desire, all spelling out
You will be alone always and then you will die.
So maybe I wanted to give you something more than a catalog
of non-definitive acts,
something other than the desperation.
Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I couldn’t come to your party.
Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I came to your party
and seduced you
and left you bruised and ruined, you poor sad thing.
You want a better story. Who wouldn’t?
A forest, then. Beautiful trees. And a lady singing.
Love on the water, love underwater, love, love and so on.
What a sweet lady. Sing lady, sing! Of course, she wakes the dragon.
Love always wakes the dragon and suddenly
flames everywhere.
I can tell already you think I’m the dragon,
that would be so like me, but I’m not. I’m not the dragon.
I’m not the princess either.
Who am I? I’m just a writer. I write things down.
I walk through your dreams and invent the future. Sure,
I sink the boat of love, but that comes later. And yes, I swallow
glass, but that comes later.
And the part where I push you
flush against the wall and every part of your body rubs against the bricks,
shut up
I’m getting to it.
For a while I thought I was the dragon.
I guess I can tell you that now. And, for a while, I thought I was
the princess,
cotton candy pink, sitting there in my room, in the tower of the castle,
young and beautiful and in love and waiting for you with
confidence
but the princess looks into her mirror and only sees the princess,
while I’m out here, slogging through the mud, breathing fire,
and getting stabbed to death.
Okay, so I’m the dragon. Big deal.
You still get to be the hero.
You get the magic gloves! A fish that talks! You get eyes like flashlights!
What more do you want?
I make you pancakes, I take you hunting, I talk to you as if you’re
really there.
Are you there, sweetheart? Do you know me? Is this microphone live?
Let me do it right for once,
for the record, let me make a thing of cream and stars that becomes,
you know the story, simply heaven.
Inside your head you hear a phone ringing
and when you open your eyes
only a clearing with deer in it. Hello deer.
Inside your head the sound of glass,
a car crash sound as the trucks roll over and explode in slow motion.
Hello darling, sorry about that.
Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we
lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwell
and how I ruined everything by saying it out loud.
Especially that, but I should have known.
You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together
to make a creature that will do what I say
or love me back.
I’m not really sure why I do it, but in this version you are not
feeding yourself to a bad man
against a black sky prickled with small lights.
I take it back.
The wooden halls likes caskets. These terms from the lower depths.
I take them back.
Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed.
Crossed out.
Clumsy hands in a dark room. Crossed out. There is something
underneath the floorboards.
Crossed out. And here is the tabernacle
reconstructed.
Here is the part where everyone was happy all the time and we were all
forgiven,
even though we didn’t deserve it.
Inside your head you hear
a phone ringing, and when you open your eyes you’re washing up
in a stranger’s bathroom,
standing by the window in a yellow towel, only twenty minutes away
from the dirtiest thing you know.
All the rooms of the castle except this one, says someone, and suddenly
darkness,
suddenly only darkness.
In the living room, in the broken yard,
in the back of the car as the lights go by. In the airport
bathroom’s gurgle and flush, bathed in a pharmacy of
unnatural light,
my hands looking weird, my face weird, my feet too far away.
And the the airplane, the window seat over the wing with a view
of the wing and a little foil bag of peanuts.
I arrived in the city and you met me at the station,
smiling in a way
that made me frightened. Down the alley, around the arcade,
up the stairs of the building
to the little room with the broken faucets, your drawings, all your things,
I looked out the window and said
This doesn’t look that much different from home,
because it didn’t,
but then I noticed the black sky and all those lights.
We walked through the house to the elevated train.
All these buildings, all that glass and the shiny beautiful
mechanical wind.
We were inside the train car when I started to cry. You were crying too,
smiling and crying in a way that made me
even more hysterical. You said I could have anything I wanted, but I
just couldn’t say it out loud.
Actually, you said Love, for you,
is larger than the usual romantic love. It’s like a religion. It’s
terrifying. No one
will ever want to sleep with you.
Okay, if you’re so great, you do it—
here’s the pencil, make it work …
If the window is on your right, you are in your own bed. If the window
is over your heart, and it is painted shut, then we are breathing
river water.
Build me a city and call it Jerusalem. Build me another and call it
Jerusalem.
We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not
what we sought, so do it over, give me another version,
a different room, another hallway, the kitchen painted over
and over,
another bowl of soup.
The entire history of human desire takes about seventy minutes to tell.
Unfortunately, we don’t have that kind of time.
Forget the dragon,
leave the gun on the table, this has nothing to do with happiness.
Let’s jump ahead to the moment of epiphany,
in gold light, as the camera pans to where
the action is,
lakeside and backlit, and it all falls into frame, close enough to see
the blue rings of my eyes as I say
something ugly.
I never liked that ending either. More love streaming out the wrong way,
and I don’t want to be the kind that says the wrong way.
But it doesn’t work, these erasures, this constant refolding of the pleats.
There were some nice parts, sure,
all lemondrop and mellonball, laughing in silk pajamas
and the grains of sugar
on the toast, love love or whatever, take a number. I’m sorry
it’s such a lousy story.
Dear Forgiveness, you know that recently
we have had our difficulties and there are many things
I want to ask you.
I tried that one time, high school, second lunch, and then again,
years later, in the chlorinated pool.
I am still talking to you about help. I still do not have
these luxuries.
I have told you where I’m coming from, so put it together.
We clutch our bellies and roll on the floor …
When I say this, it should mean laughter,
not poison.
I want more applesauce. I want more seats reserved for heroes.
Dear Forgiveness, I saved a plate for you.
Quit milling around the yard and come inside.
I bring up Chet Baker and he goes on and on about
what a good-looking man he was when he was younger
but he did heroin, imagine that?
it should have been enough to be talented
not to mention good-looking
in this world
to keep you sober and straight
imagine that
reality is so subjective.
me: did something turn into the pig
Corey: dont know what you say
me: was there “something” that’s now “the pig”? honestly i havent had a stroke but i dont know how to ask this without sounding insane
Corey: whats the pig?
me: thats what i want to know
Corey: omgwtf
what was something before it was the pig
me: i dont remember 
Corey: or do we know if something is the pig at all
me: im pretty sure the something was there
Corey: show me the pig
me: let me try
-5 minutes go by-
me: yeah i don’t know.
Corey: i want to believe
I may as well
There are two very different poems in my head. The first I wanted to share yesterday but it didn’t fit the theme, I couldn’t work it into my flow. I am not writing so I am borrowing other’s words and dressing myself in them and letting that be how I express myself. It’s like wearing a friend’s clothes because I don’t feel like doing laundry and lord knows I’m out of socks, again.
“The Suitor”
We lie back to back. Curtains
lift and fall,
like the chest of someone sleeping.
Wind moves the leaves of the box elder;
they show their light undersides,
turning all at once
like a school of fish.
Suddenly I understand that I am happy.
For months this feeling
has been coming closer, stopping
for short visits, like the timid suitor.
—Jane Kenyon
The second poem I will be reading Thursday night when instead of sharing anything of our own we’re sharing another’s poem. It is about Death, but instead of Death being cloaked and adult, death is personified as a little girl. She reminds me of myself, she reminds others of me. This quick little piece has more soul than most humans. I’d like to explain in concrete terms what it is that makes it easy to know her,.. It’s like meeting someone and feeling like you’ve always known them and I hesitate explaining that to anyone else, because it sounds foolish. She’s a little naughty, a little silly, a little sweet. I just happen to be very similar.
“Death comes to me again, a girl”
Death comes to me again, a girl
in a cotton slip, barefoot, giggling.
It’s not so terrible she tells me,
not like you think, all darkness
and silence. There are windchimes
and the smell of lemons, some days
it rains, but more often the air is dry
and sweet. I sit beneath the staircase
built from hair and bone and listen
to the voices of the living. I like it,
she says, shaking the dust from her hair,
especially when they fight, and when they sing.
—Dorianne Laux
pretty little things
I should write about the cemeteries but I don’t. How it’s cold in the morning now and the first few photographs are shaky because I’m nervous without understanding why. How the little girl who chalks my graves only uses pastel yellow or blue. She presses her little belly into the dirt and traces a grave for a good twenty minutes while I stand off to the side waiting patiently; fiddling with my camera and rubbing my toe in the dirt. I should write about much I enjoy kneeling in the muddy ground, how I’ve never felt more beautiful than when I’m sticky sweaty tired and documenting a civil war era gravestone. Each day ends with unused pink chalk. The girl refuses to chalk pink because she says it’s expected of her and it makes me ashamed of my pink sweatshirt, makes me hide my ring in my pocket. Some days end in a tantrum; a low, deep wailing that carries through the graveyard and seems wholly appropriate. She carries a passion I haven’t heard in years. Some days end with me jealous. I take the pink chalk home.
I should write about the museum. How I’ve begun to imagine life in the rooms as I present them to the paying visitors. The way I’ve never believed in ghosts but wish to be haunted. Someone rattle the windows. Someone please stomp the floorboards. How I gesture wildly when I speak about the enslaved carpenters, presenting immaculate dovetailing and precise angles. Look at these columns. Look at this house. Only three roofs in 150 years. Only three coats of paint. How I sometimes long to open a closet door and find a snake perched inside, waiting to be discovered for his performance part of the tour. How I’d love to see the reactions on the guests faces. To bring something new to the tour. A new history to this house.
I ought to write about autumn. How it’s been here for two months and I am still incredibly unprepared. I’ve forgotten, since last year, how too cold hurts worse than too hot and it takes me a good twenty minutes each morning to rise from the bed and undress into the cold, cursing and whining. I am unprepared for what the holidays bring. Days home, days with my mother, days without Jake. Days without Jake. I ought to write about being lightly smitten as if it were a food condiment. Lightly buttered, lightly salted. How the definition of the word smitten is grievously or disastrously stricken or afflicted. How the definition of the word could also be struck, as with a hard blow. How these definitions have never been more appropriate. How I keep that to myself.
Right now, no more than three feet away, there’s a sweet little puppy watching me type and yearning for a walk. She doesn’t know it but we’re going the moment I finish writing this and close the laptop for the night. We’ve been together about 51 days and it’s love. It’s so easy to love something when it gives you a new purpose. I do love my freedom. But this is anchor, and the sweetest most licky kind. She’s an anchor and I’m fine with that.
A friend likes to joke that I, like many others, came to Florida to retire. I left behind a job that I’d have had forever, a relationship that would have worked somehow and everything I had known my whole life. And while I never have once regretted Florida I often regret feeling like I couldn’t have lived my life back there. Life here has the slowest pace to it. I work sometimes. I volunteer more than I work. I go to school for fun. My days are planned around dog walks and good books and more peace than I thought I’d ever been allowed to have.
The shock of things not working out how I’d planned lasted months and I stayed busy enough and drunk enough to never complain. We’re in the same town and never see each other, I don’t even know how he feels about the fact that I stayed. There were never words past it isn’t working. I’ve never seen his face after that day. I talk about it easy now but there were days when I couldn’t figure out what came next or how I’d get there.
I don’t know when the happiness came, but it wasn’t immediate. And things aren’t all goodness and glory; the tremors are back and it gets harder to hold my hands still. I have 40,000 words due by the end of this month and I’ve not written a word in weeks. But the leaves are falling and the coldness is coming in and there are birds whose chirps and calls I’ve never heard before. I don’t worry about love because in the history of men and women there’s always been something even if love never results.
About three feet away from me she’s now sleeping because I’ve taken too long. It’s hard to know that balance; I’m still getting my own timing right but it’s becoming more and more apparent that really what I need to do is just get up and go.
literary daddy-issues, bukowski style.
If you know me well then you know about the Bukowski thing. How discovering him at 14 felt like permission to write the way I felt I naturally do, to go for spirit instead of style. How I often joke that a girl like me doesn’t have Daddy Issues, that because of how I’ve let him influence me I have Bukowski issues. He’s the reason I date assholes. How I find myself looking for similarities; moving to Florida at age 24 to write and live and to get some stories in me. He writes about Los Angeles, and love-sick me for my hometown, I eat it up now more than I ever did before. I find myself mentally driving down those battered boulevards which surely haven’t been cleaned since he traveled them decades ago. The way he writes about those south bay poetry-sluts pacing the summer streets and knocking on his door. I know those girls. Or at least their granddaughters. I’m looking for a connection with a man who I know would’ve loved me, not only for my looks, but for the way I poet, the spirit that seems to come bursting out of me as if the seams need to be resewn. Last summer I remember walking in San Pedro and seeing the girls with their shorts so tiny they show the under-ass crease and thinking, This is what killed Charles Bukowski. Not alcohol, not writing. It was these waxed-tanned legs that eventually connect to hips all the way up to the low cut, thin strapped tanks sliding down the one shoulder, showing nearly a breast and surely a bra. And I love it. His prolific love of pussy birthed a lifetime of poetry.
I’ll be honest, the bajillion years of schooling (in addition to my mother) have taught me the basics, the classics, the actual rules- but Bukowski sort of reminds me to just fucking write. Just get it down on paper even if it doesn’t make sense yet. Just write even if you’re writing about the trip to the grocery store to get beer because you might capture a moment where the woman at the checkstand asks if you’re a mama and you pause for a moment and almost answer, “I should’ve been” and it’s awkward and you’re haunted for days until you accidentally vomit it all over your witty little online journal thing. There’s no denying Bukowski was a foul individual and he should hardly be a role model to a innocent young poet like myself, but goddamn if he didn’t just get the words on to paper. And on a night like tonight, where it’s Sunday and nearly midnight and there’s a word drought and more than half the writer-poets out there will be without a single word down on paper tonight, it’s enough to just be writing.
“Awesome,” he said, “Very Impressive. I love it. It’s very honest you fucking nutcase.” Now that’s a review. That’s a reaction. That’s what I’m looking for.
I want to know what I make folks feel. At any given time this statement is true. It was definitely true tonight when I showed a friend something horrible I wrote and waited to see her reaction. I wanted her to emote and I wanted to see it on her. It was also true tonight when another friend told me I was talented and insane, as if there’s any other kind. His reaction was to my last entry, which I worried folks wouldn’t understand. I assume this is natural, this wish to see my art come alive. I like when i make folks shift uncomfortably in their seats and avoid making eye contact with me. I also like the people who look too closely and wonder about me. How I came up with this line right there, why i thought it would work and why I took this chance.
I guess the biggest thing I’ve learned about writing is you’ve just got to be like, Ok I’m going to get a little fucked up and this is going to hurt but I’m going to be fine. I’ve said it before that it’s about faith. Faith in yourself, that you’re capable, faith in your characters- that you’ll get them the life they deserve. You have to suffer for your art, but it doesn’t have to ruin you. I tell myself this everyday.
Seashells
Fuck yourself up and pretend you’re a man,
Cigarette scars and lateral wrist designs says nothing more than
You know how to put on a good show,
You want people to see that you’re this
Wealthy, successful man who isn’t going home alone
To empty wine bottles and silent suffering,
You’d like to believe we all think you’re
Good-looking and self assured, concerned and grateful,
The son of a beauty queen with unattainable standards,
Disinterest in those beneath you, and pride from the insults
You bestow to those who are cursed with taking care of you
As if you know it’s less out of love that they keep you,
Than it would just be nice to go a year without a sad boy funeral,
And its common knowledge that the grass around your grave
Will only thrive from Whisky Neat,
Never a fan of mixers, whether liquid or human,
Watering down your selfish ways,
Your pain held near and dear to your heart,
Arms like railroad tracks linking the past to the future
With fists held strong like battering rams
Against this good life you never asked for anyways,
I’m glad I never held you close, put my head against your chest
And listened like your body was a seashell and the beat inside
Told stories of all the seas you traveled before
Buying Beer
The checkstand on the end is open and that’s the one I choose. The cashier is bored-looking. Heavyset, dark circles under her eyes, she looks a few years older than me, maybe my age. She looks me over slowly; just me and my six pack of import beer, 7pm on a Friday night.
She asks for my ID and she watches me.
I’m always uncomfortable with cashiers. They take you in. Your life story. They read it from the shape of your wallet, rip in your jacket, the merchandise you bring to them.
She nods to let me know she’s approved of my age and says, “May 11th, that was Mother’s Day.”
I say yes and she smiles, “That must be hard. Are you a mama?”
It’s two months past and she knows that date like only a mother would.
I haven’t answered yet and she’s still smiling.
What’s too much?
I should have been. It didn’t work out. It was another life.
No, I answer politely.
The register opens and shuts and we’re done.
What must we look like to each other?
Her: Fat, tired. Age undetectable. Her shirt is too large and the dirty stains make her look so worn.
Somebody’s mama.
Me: Young. Nobody’s mama. All the freedom in the world, buying a six pack of beer and going home alone.
City Love
We are both cities.
You, more town than city,
Quiet, traditional, so structured,
More hamlet than town,
Peaceful, gentle, the safest place to lie,
I could walk barefoot through your streets at midnight,
Pace cobblestone pathways heel to toe
And be granted sanctuary inside your walls,
I know you, you would not tell
You would hold tight to me
As if I were your denizen,
Giving me your name
As if I was naturally yours.
We are both cities,
Myself, more prefecture than city
Lively, diverse, questionably defined,
More province than prefecture,
Loud, quirky, precariously alert,
You could travel endlessly,
And be lost within the crowds,
Just another face and you would happily disappear.
You know me, I would not tell.
I would not give you away and you could dissolve into me,
As if you were my citizen,
As if you’d always just been mine.
