aftersalt.

I record my pauses here where other pauses may be met and observed.

[aftersalt]

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When I was first exposed to this body of work, it was akin to being suckerpunched: my head snapped back and equilibrium jarred, body tumbling down multiple flights of stairs, and all the while roughly banging into every banister in a seemingly endless descent. So, without much further ado, I present to you Richard Siken's poem, "Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out."

[aftersalt]

blot

I don't deserve forgiveness, but I dream incessantly of what it would mean or what it would cost. I had a friend once. She tsked, "It's no way to live," this ever constant terror observed from the fogged lens of my distance. How often can I excuse my own long absences, sparse letters and texts, the egregrious error of all those forgotten birthdays? To say that I've tried is a wilful, rotten lie, cached as drafts with each aborted attempt. In journals, I scrawl in cramped margins about my hand, of how it's always outstretched. Truthfully, I am as watered silk, beguiling to behold, fluid, and too slippery to grasp. Strange, isn't it, how we exist in the togetherness of our own separate desires, this anguished hope to connect. Tonight, we reach reflexively for friendship and come away as strangers.

[aftersalt]

I have never quite felt as if I fit into the seams of this world. Curious and curiouser, the thread spooled in me goes through the needle eye, ties itself: here, we possess the sharp end of my life, where I pierce and become maker.

They often complimented me. I would pocket the nice things they said. Had it been about my mind or any other abstract, I would have palmed and swallowed it down with my life, but this would not take. Their hands, firm, callused and catching, trailed the lines of my hips, closing around bone. My sensuality set them ablaze, those cinders a dark smear across my tongue. As with any lover, sex, the everything and nothing inside our movements, spoke of intent not so much in touches but with the volumes of tenderness that we discovered in the ascent to our peaks.

(Slowly. Like that, please, yes, just like that. Wait. Wait a moment. I – I need – God, but I need – yes. Let me be bare to you. Allow me to reshape my body to spell the rites of my desire for you to learn and take. I am giving you my private surrender. Let me show you how the world ends.)

Imagine every romance in your life living in a parenthesis. They fit the context of your life, but by existence in those curved beams, an editor could just as easily slash them out. I’ve often wondered about this: should any of these lovers have impacted me, are they the vapor within my thoughts or are they more solid than what I breathe? To imagine that there could be something more personal – more inmost than inhaling the essence, downing myself in their taste, through light leaks of the approaching dawn our whispers small revelations uncovered by our sweat – it is a negative space whose threshold I am incapable of crossing. Are we the mitered joint or am I the bezel of disconnect hanging in an empty gallery?

I am forever surprised by how human I am. This isn’t to say that I’ve ever regarded myself above others: I find myself at turns starting not at the actions of life but the feelings that they invoke when I am quartered in my sadness. When we speak of people, we talk of substance, character analysis, the history we assume encompasses their lives in any spatial matter, be it forward or in reverse. I’ve taken to looking at myself in the mirror, and as flawed as they were, irrevocably so, my parents exist with me by blood and bone. This home for a mothertongue born not from country but a matter of rifts, the separate points between experiences and people, it faces the careful undressing of love with the same resolute face of my father, the wistful beat of my mother, and the perpetual order of breaking that clangs like a bell tolling my final hour.

If I said that I didn’t ache for it, I’d be lying. This portrait of yearning shows lips that would drink fever, evolving with me in the heat. An extended hand reaching for the inside, understanding that there’s nothing to hold onto, yet moving deeper simply for the knowing. Those traveling feet reshaped by wanderlust still desiring a place of return after the journey fades. The bowed head, not in submission, but as the offering for us to pour ourselves into each other, to share and possess.

On this lonesome little planet, we as individuals intersect as the faraway nearby for someone without knowing why or whom or where, without caring so long as we can keep the faith that they do exist for us. It’s with a frequency that I loathe to admit how I reflect on what I have had, looking to the horizon whose only language is perhaps.

[aftersalt]

blue spell

He’s laughing.

His hand is in mine as I drag him faster and faster through the crowd, the sun coaxing sweat from skin, dribbling a little more around our ears with each galloping swing of our legs. The grip slips before I finally let go of his hands, and I curl my toes to cling onto the bed of my sandals.

With the intensity of summer swelter, you’d imagine that everything would dry up. Pruned skin zapped of moisture. Scratchy grass yellowed, all hackneyed ends. The water ghosting its creeping retreat, lapping a little less to sand lips of the shoreline, every four hours at a time.

It’s a coastal thing, being surrounded by water. It’s greenhouse-living, a glass dome topped over your home. Not a lick of cold air gets in but the sun thrums a ray – a guitar string plucked to gauge resonance – before surrendering the moisture.

He stumbles when I come to a screeching halt, and the people we’ve bumped into along the way grumble as they catch up to us. Even as we’re struggling to control our breaths, the exhales mix with giddy laughter.

People stare and think we’re a couple.

They don’t know – couldn’t know – about the one time Steven glimpsed another woman’s sex on a night of tight dresses and no panties, how he clutched at my arm and said, “But dear god, pussies are like pink, sweaty cauliflowers,” while her hips expertly rotated before a smooth sway on the counter above us. They didn’t see his look of sheer disgust tugging his features into grotesque caricature, eyes wide, rimmed with terror. How he later rested a hand on my shoulder that night and told me dicks were all around much nicer to look at, that he couldn’t for the life of him fathom how I was bisexual. We ended the night sloshed bellies full of gin, giggling over weird play-on-word names for musky cauliflowers and Steven conveniently forgetting I was a woman.

His chest heaves as he sucks another lungful of brine before speaking. “God. Remind me why I ever became your friend again? That was the fastest I’ve moved since, like, fifth grade gym class.”

My mouth quirks in the dying seconds of his laughter – he calls this the impish grin that gets the second free cocktail. Whiskey Grin, my friends call me. “You love me. It goes without question.”

Our arms hooked, I pull him towards the breakers where watermarked scores of sand drag the span of beach to lawless sea. My other friends often take long acts of wheedling to do anything that involves getting dirty. Steven, wonderful creature that he is, isn’t one of them. He folds himself neatly onto the damp sand, disinterested in the way it seeps into the backside of his white shorts. I eye the small child’s footprint hollowing out the smoothness and plop down, wincing at the bare contact. Though wet enough to be cooler than the dry spots beneath the glaring heat, the sand has the backs of my thighs broiling, angrily reddened, burn becoming another word for freeze.

“Plus, if after, what, some twenty odd years of living and this stolen moment of time is the first instance you’ve actually worked your limbs and lungs, I’m obviously doing you favors. Don’t be facetious and do keep up, love.”

“Unbelievable,” he says, chuckling all the same. “So what was the big deal, anyway?”

I point to the sky and with my hand still extended, my back falls flush to sand, digging my shoulder blades farther in until it molds perfectly to form.

His face furrows as he tries to find meaning in my gesture. He’s thrown off with every right to be; people always get confused, not knowing what I mean to say, even as it’s the most obvious thing to me.

“You ever think about time?” I ask.

At his deepening expression, I tell him to humor me and the pause stretches, a piece of silence only interrupted by soft footfalls of tourists seeking shade.

“Yeah, I do. A lot, actually,” he finally replies. “It’s weird how we’ve come to this place. Everyone moves here and stays maybe a year or two before getting restless. So much for paradise, huh?” He isn’t blowing out any candles when he sighs, but it’s long enough to keep a tuft of his hair suspended by the outer edge of his left eye. “Come to think of it, you’re prob'ly the only person I know who’s lived here as long as I have – it’s all so transient, you know? Everyone I’ve ever fucked is long gone. The friends I actually cared enough to hold back their hair? Yeah, fucking perish the thought that any act of intimacy would result in permanence.”

Somewhere in his thoughts, a violent turn becomes the vehicle for an anger long since shelved; it channels itself throughout his body, the miniature moats and divits he’d pressed into the space between us become barren rivers dragging the span of my torso. I still his hand and smooth out the granules of sand. He glances at me and exhales. I watch as it distends his stomach until the eventual inhale returns his shape. Reaching over, he takes his hand and runs it along my scalp, untangling the knots from where nape of neck meets the lower hairline.

“There’s a book I was reading a couple months ago. A collection of essays on the tangent of being lost.” I lean into his touch, shifting closer to him and close my eyes. “I… I wouldn’t say that I was shaken by it,” I continue, “but there was something so incredibly profound about the text that stayed with me ever after.

“What was it?” he asks.

“The author – reminds me of Sontag, actually – she was describing the intricacies of the color blue. The color of distance. She spoke of how ‘blue was the color of longing, for the distances you never arrive in.’”

“The vanishing point always out of reach. No matter how much ground you tread, that clutch of land begging travel.” He removes his hand from my scalp and wraps it around my shoulders, tucking me into him. “I can see how you’d be drawn to that,” he says. “It’s hell or high water waiting for me at the edge of mine. What’s yours?”

“What comes after the break, you mean?”

He doesn’t nod, but his lips shape to say go on, lopsided and mouth wry.

I take a moment to think about it, what that might look like. “Houses,” I tell him.

He squints. “Houses? Like an endless sea of houses?”

“Yeah. Houses,” I confirm. “I’ve never had roots. All luggage and taut zippers, the bare bones of possession. I’ve gone from place to place, knowing that I could never allow myself to be comfortable. My mind always leaving before arriving. Sometimes, all I had were empty dumpsters and abandoned sheds. In me is a choked desire for shelter in its truest sense. I see houses, and at the farthest point is the one rooftop with its shingles that feels right. Somewhere in my dreams, it provides shelter in that I feel safe, like I belong, like the things I own can be spread out. I’m always in boxes.”

From our spot, we have a clear, unobstructed view of the horizon, where haze and clarity spiral into dusk, the sky fire tamed as its indigo mother settles soft. I used to flood with this blinding sense of anger when I saw sunsets. They were the worst kind of defiance, the way they sunk was how the world came to burn. The sun was an embrace I didn’t ask for, indiscriminately rising and setting, unaffected by loss, burying present into past with its cycles. I couldn’t catch up. I’d wake to the overwhelming brightness of the next rise and slow blink to dust motes. I didn’t feel defeated, but I felt lost.

“It doesn’t take very long to grow up,” I say. “I was a kid once, and no matter how hard I try to pinpoint the exact moment, I can’t find it, that switch to becoming an adult.” Steven grips my shoulder and we both watch as the last group of surfers paddle back to shore. “I want a future where I can allow myself to grow young again.”

“Me, too,” he sighs. “Me, too.”

In the distance, a final burst of heat submerges the world over, the sea reflecting sky, the warm light exhaling in the only way it knows how, in sharp streaks of crimson and gold. I like to think that I exist there, somewhere in the outermost edge of blue, the shade of my blood and my soul.

[aftersalt]

@yourperceptions once asked me what my latest tattoos were and I rather rudely never answered.

across my left thigh: ‘Do not tell me the world is the same,/that life is hard as a stone,/for I have known it when it was a flower/potent, annihilating with promise.’ (Derek Walcott's The Estranging Sea.)

right thigh seam: ‘Ours is not a caravan of despair.’ (Rumi's "Come, Come, Whoever You Are.")

inside my left wrist: ‘That woman of unbreakable nerves who at no moment in her life had been heard to sing.’ (García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.)

inside my right wrist: ‘I know waiting is a hand closing slowly around needle points, but we need the patience of a frozen sea.’ (Jamaal May's "The Hum of Zug Island.")

sloping under my left breast: ‘Not a red rose or a satin heart.’ (Carol Ann Duffy's "Valentine.")

around the right side of my ribs: ‘Es el orden o la batalla este quebranto sucesivo?’ (Neruda's Book of Questions.)

[atroubledbison]

A Consistent Life

일관된 생애 태어난 뒤에 일관성을 가지게 되었다, 그것이 무엇인지 몰랐는데 눈코입의 위치라든가 뒤통수의 방향 같은 것인가 또는 너를 기다리는 표정

나는 정기적으로 식사를 했다. 같은 목소리로 통화를 하였다. 갑자기 슬픔에 빠졌다. 변성기는 지났습니다만

저는 살인자이며 동시에 이웃들에게 아주 예의바르고 성실한 사람입니다. 그것이 사회의 덕목, 정중하게 넥타이를 매고 예식에 참석했다가 취한 뒤에는 술잔을 던지고

가로수가 언제나 거기에 서 있는 것을 좋아하였다. 길고양이가 지나다니는 골목의 밤을 깊이 이해하였다. 나타났다가 사라지는 것이 매우 일관되었다고

오늘도 변함없이 죽은 사람들에게 조금 더 가까워집니다. 어렸을 때부터 독재자와 신비주의자가 싫었어요. 제게도 미친듯이 사랑했던 사람이 있었는데… 누구였더라.

내가 어느날 당신의 전화를 받지 않을 것이다. 술집에서 떠들다가 문득 침울해질 것이다. 살아가다가 이제는 살고 있지 않을 것이다.

아무래도 나는 어제의 옷을 다시 입고 오늘의 외출을 하는 것이었다. 거짓된 삶에 대하여 계속 무언가를 떠올렸다.

- 이장욱, 영원이 아니라서 가능한

A Consistent Life

I gained consistency only after being born, I did not know what it was Is it the location of the eyes, nose, and mouth, or the orientation of the back of your head or the expression I make as I wait for you

I ate meals consistently. Talked on the phone in the same voice. Was saddened suddenly. The time of my voice changing has ended I am a murderer and at the same time a polite and hardworking neighbor. That is the virtue of society, to join the ceremony while wearing a neat tie and throwing the drinking glass after intoxicated

I liked the fact that the trees on the street always stood where they did, deeply understood the night of the alleyways where the street cats prowled. To appear than disappear is  so very consistent Without fail, I grow a little closer to the dead today. Since I was a kid, I hated tyrants and mystics I too had someone that I loved like mad… Who was it. One day I will not answer your phone call. I will grow sad while talking loudly in the bar. I will be living and then no longer living.

It seems I had been wearing the clothes of yesterday once again to go on outings of today. I kept thinking of things about the false life.

- by Lee Jang-Wook, from Possible Because It Is Not Eternity

[aftersalt]

sailing

The currents are voiceless. They knock elbows, spreading sand and stone apart, first licking

tentatively the cliffs before the thrash — only from hollowed shells do echoes clang

within kept sighs of the twisted dark. Steeled strength grappling, tumbling — the gluttonous sea

reflects all it inhales — bellied out, the body is a throttled sonnet. Between

fingers, glimpse the rolling height of baleful spines, orchestrating movement, the refrain

of storm prayer discovering cadence. Greater vessels have been hulled, stripped to twigs,

the contempt of language trespassing a muted tongue. Consonance is a myth here.

[aftersalt]

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Isn't it strange to devour so many years, observing actual markers of that change, while never feeling full? I've turned 34 today. How wild is that? I don't have any silver hairs yet, not a one, nor do I have any wrinkles. My appearance has somehow superseded the body, where the only thing to note is the age of my eyes and the deepening of tone.

After all this time away from Tumblr, I've missed many of your arrivals and departures, and I regret not being around when my mutuals (and others!) were most active.

Almost wrote a thing, but decided it'd be better to speak, where this text just dwells as the footnote.

[aftersalt]

bravery

I think you like my nudity best when I call to the open sea. You hear the tremor of what I am losing with every bird peeling back the morning, who departs once the sun ashamed of its silent appearance travels daily to find tone, a voice: the tenor matching the underbelly of a felled fruit tree in August. More inmost than I and not myself was my perception of how we were when we were, a curling pith and our seed, the murky film of our pulp smeared on wrists as if a blood oath in runic score. This was patience. This was loving. This was my summons for cleansing, an intimate holding of salt with our wardings set in place. My clothes come off early this evening, slung across the clenched light of a memory where every honest look is limned like a fading sunbeam at the fanged dusk. With my third eye closed, I open myself carefully at the water’s placid edge and stand bare before you with my hair down, vulnerable again.

[aftersalt]

alive

Every year, my friends and coworkers alike told me to take it easy, that I didn’t need to work so hard without taking some time off for myself. It was no wonder that when I finally collected enough vacation time, I took to it with extreme relish. Hike after hike, I thought nothing of work. Instead, I revisited the quiet pockets around the island, hidden behind faded ‘No Trespassing’ signs, the dense undergrowth disguising worn paths, and a never-ending guard of trees shrouding the winding trails.

On the ninth and penultimate day of my staycation, a group of friends and I set our sights on Olomana, one of the few trails I hadn’t ever done before, infamous as one of the more treacherous public hikes and widely known for its three peaks. The Sunday morning that we embarked on the hike was bright, sun rays harshly beaming down on the long asphalt road, the heat hotly bleeding through the soles of our shoes as we marched uphill to the entrance. When we arrived, what greeted us was a tall, dented white sign, aged with missing letters spelling ‘OLOMA BEGINS HERE,’ covered in dirt stains, stickers, and penned graffiti. With breathless anticipation, we collectively strode forward, our surroundings swiftly transforming into a sprawling, forested jungle, full of lush, creeping ferns and looming ironwood trees, the red mud beneath our feet still tacky from the rainfall just days prior. We could hear the warbling chirps of distant birds echoing in the forest, buoying us with their cheerful song while the fresh scent of bitter pine and earthy petrichor flooded our senses.

Every step we took squelched and squished, our group grunting and heaving together as we treaded over thick roots and climbed the stacked boulders that made up the trailhead. Thin ropes tied to random trees bit into our palms as we used them to haul ourselves over serrated rock formations, leading us higher and higher until the land eventually leveled out, introducing us to the foot of the first peak. Although the rock face leading up to it was only some odd twenty feet tall, the boulders were jagged with shallow touch points, just the barest hint of a recessed path snaking its way for each of us to follow. Once we all reached the top, we made quick work of the way to the first peak. Alec and Natalie, the couple in our group, charged ahead, hardly even stopping to register the view, the dust clouds kicked up from brisk footfalls billowed in their wake. Brandon and I, however, lagged behind, spellbound as we were by the scenic landscape before us.

“Wow,” Brandon softly exhaled as he stood beside me, staring out in awe at the majestic silhouette of the Ko’olau Range, the deep grooves of its ridges a vivid verdant green, its rippling mountains flowed seamlessly into the shadows of the horizon. The powder blue sky boasted puffs of white clouds hovering over the patchwork of luxuriant trees, rolling hills and valleys teeming with life, and the wide expanse of rioting ocean waves crashing and glimmering in the far distance. “Can you believe how high up we are?” he asked.

“Don’t remind me! I’m fucking terrified of heights,” I yelled, smacking his arm. Eyeing a particularly sketchy slope merely a few short steps from where we stood, I turned away, moving towards a wider stretch of flatter ground up ahead.

“You? Scared of heights?” he guffawed, following after me leisurely, hands tucked into his pockets. “Why would you even go on this hike, then? – it’s all high elevation, narrow ridges, and shit,” he said with humor, watching as the outline of our friends turned smaller the farther they trekked on. “Is that why you invited me? Am I supposed to scrape you off the side of the mountain if you get spooked?”

I scoffed. “Hardly. Just ‘cause I’m scared of heights doesn’t mean I can’t function or that I need saving, you know.” With my left hand held out to balance myself as I walked, I gestured wildly with my right hand, sweeping it across my line of sight and continued, “I hike trails like this because I love the view, the air, the peacefulness. Olomana was something to challenge me. I wanted to push myself.”

We soon fell into a companionable silence while the trail began tapering to a point where we were walking on a tightrope of either slippery gravel or sticky mud that suctioned and caked our shoes. When we reached the second peak, we descended its steep slope, rappelling our way with the dilapidated, weatherworn ropes that past hikers installed. As the technical aspect grew tougher, our nerves unmistakably heightened with fear while we focused on unerring footholds, becoming more and more cautious in navigating the crumbling rock and shifting debris. This was the peak where most people reportedly stopped and turned back, afraid of the way it abruptly fell into a total plummet down the vertical bluff.

Whereas the previous hikes of my staycation were relaxing and cathartic, this hike was different. From the quick bursts of breath and heaving chest to the steady drip drop of sweat trailing down my neck, it filled with me a heady thrill. In the back of my mind, I knew this time off was precious and that I was meant to rest and recenter myself before returning to work, but as I gripped the rope, my body near embracing the mountainside as I clambered down the last stretch of second peak, my heart sang. I was never more alive than I’d felt then.

After reaching a stopping point, we sat on the ground, uncaring about the mud when we already had the whole hike on our clothes and limbs. The respite allowed us to cool down, snack, and greedily gulp down our water. We laughed and spoke about our progress on the trail, admiring the view from where we were. A fine mist had settled in, but the breathtaking beauty of the valley below us was no less diminished with how the sun reflected off each suspended droplet like tiny iridescent prisms lovingly stitched onto a shimmering diaphanous veil. Before long, we started to move again, though I felt the first stirrings of fatigue. The exertion from hours spent hiking had finally caught up to me. Despite how triumphant and exhilarated I felt earlier, my muscles protested as I maneuvered my legs over roots, ducking my head and arms around prickly tangles of thickets. For all that I was torn with the desire to recover just a little while longer, I didn’t want to hold the group back, so I kept silent and trudged on, deliberately drifting to the rear end of the group.

Between the second and third peak, we skidded and stomped our way across the increasingly uneven terrain, narrowly avoiding altogether sliding off the ridge, the sudden drop-off on both sides sobering us as it dawned how dangerous the hike actually was. We closed in on the distance to the third peak, soon reaching a section where we had to carefully edge our way around the curved side of a cliff. With only a frayed rope thinner than my pinky finger meant as our guide, it was in no way any kind of security. There were barely ten feet that we had to traverse, but the daunting aspect was that regardless of having the right side to lean on, the left was a sheer drop, and the ledge itself the width of a single foot. Brandon and Natalie went first, and as Alec and I looked at each other, I saw how he trembled, so I steeled myself to go next in his stead. Nervously holding the rope in my left hand, I braced my right on the cliff face, and slowly shuffled around the ledge.

It was halfway when it happened.

Unbeknownst to me, the rope was snagged on an extended part of the cliff so when I took a step at the midway point, the tension released and the rope swung, unlatching from where it was caught. With so little ground, I lost my balance, suddenly becoming airborne. They say that when you face certain death, you see your life flash before your eyes, but all I could think was, "At least my room is clean."

It was in the span of a single frozen second after the ground had been snatched from me that I realized my left arm was miraculously still holding the rope. As the force of my fall jerked me one way, my arm popped out of its socket; when it flung me the other way, the sharp crack of my left arm violently popping back in place resounded in my ears, the sensation jolting my side. I had the presence of mind to join my other hand to grip the rope and quickly assessed the untenable situation of the direction I was swinging, which was parallel to the cliff when I needed to move towards it. With no small amount of trepidation, I made a calculated decision to let my grasp slip at just the right moment, using the momentum to propel myself to a branch protruding several feet underneath the ledge where I fell.

I painfully collided with the mountain in a dull thud, my legs frantically scrambled with the small but sturdy branch before repositioning to let me sit with the rope clutched in white-knuckled hands, the branch tightly secured in the fold behind shaking knees. My entire body shook with terror when I summoned the will to look down, my heart lurching and furiously pounding in my chest. I would have fallen over 1,500 feet if my survival instinct hadn’t saved me, somehow acting before my mind could even process what was happening. The wind whistled in my ear, rustling my hair and disturbed a bed of rock; my eyes tracked the devastating path of the small, loose stones tumbling and tapping down the mountain faster than I could follow.

When I glanced at Alec still standing where I’d left him, I saw his head peeking around the mountain face, his expression a wild rictus of horror, his jaw clenched and grinding, hands anxiously twisting having witnessed the shock of my fall. Averting my gaze from his wide-eyed stare, I forcefully exhaled before rallying myself again. As stable as the branch seemed, I was still at risk and couldn’t afford to linger in such a predicament where any shift in weight could be the difference between living and dying. Using the rope to scale the cliff, I climbed up the ledge and once I was standing exactly where I had fallen, I knew that I had a choice: to keep going or to turn back.

There was a part of me in denial, refusing to acknowledge the strange building sensation in my left shoulder, the one that dislocated during my fall. I could feel how it burned and seethed, the warm limb turning leaden and rapidly losing its range of motion. I warred with myself, but in the end, my obstinate determination won out, so I advanced one halting leg in front of the other, my body angled towards the other side of the cliff, to where Natalie and Brandon unwittingly waited for the next person, to the summit of the third peak.

I’ve always scolded other people about taking care of themselves, yet never held myself to that same regard. As the throb in my left shoulder bloomed, the arm beginning to swell and discolor, I knew I’d reached a breaking point and that for the first time in my life, I needed to pause, except I couldn’t do it. After all that I’d gone through, I needed to make it to the third peak, to somehow manage to finish the hike. This couldn’t be how things ended. I didn’t want to get airlifted. I refused. For now, I resolved, I’d keep going. Someday – another day – I’d rest, but that day was not today.

[aftersalt]

My best friend texted me to ask how I was doing and I almost cried. That I have foresaken contact so completely that this small gesture would shake me this badly, I know that I am in ruin.

[aftersalt]

Perhaps this is the end. There could be more than one ending. I reach my hand out into the dark and I can feel the way each one writhes against my fingers. It isn’t so unlike the buttery lights of streetcars slicked over me during my passage through the night, until the dawn. Disassociation couldn’t be sweeter, knows the long vowel of my name and takes it down the alleyways I always avoid.

I know that I’ve dreamt of beginnings. It’s so easy to get entrenched with the preface, dive into the details that spell out desire. I’ve come to the realization of what is missing each time. And missing is such a peculiar concept. I know what it is to miss things of old, lost in the annals of time, to feel profound absence and miss the idea of something. But to miss real things – real people – that exist is almost unfathomable. The meat of the story is there. Mine is. It’s the reciprocal nature of how we share settings. That we might share a space for longer than one chapter, that we might even become a book, forget volumes, but just the one book, I plead that I could have this.

If survival was the only reason we cohabit this realm, then what is the point of aching? It is through suffering that I present my kindness as an offering, with learned patience that I understand the practice of living with myself. I should like to see that this is received and yet what I would like more is to feel it, to feel it so deeply that my soul splits and in that divide what was lost becomes yours.

[aftersalt]

a relic

The time it takes for clarity is two seconds. Two seconds after cumming, I’ve shifted from the slap of my collapse and curl into myself.

Ceilings interest me. When I was younger, I was often found on my back, be it on the floor or the bed, staring up at the spackled white. As my eyesight dissolved, the dust motes became less noticeable, the white a starker absence. There would be stories blooming through heartache in the skies I formed with the textures shadowed by the overhead light. In Lok’s room, though, there are old World War II relics that span walls in their sadness and a Russian flag draped across his ceiling, pinned from corner to corner, the frayed ends illuminated by the glow peeking through his curtain from his roommate’s balcony where everyone is laughing and smoking. I am looking, but I can’t see the ceiling (or the stars, for that matter).

His hand snakes its way around my waist. “You are so beautiful, you know,” he tells me, his cheek warm, coming to rest on my shoulder. “I don’t know what you’re thinking right now, but you should know you’re beautiful.”

I take the word into my scalp, twisting it this way and that way. It becomes unrecognizable. “Beautiful,” I repeat.

One of the small comforts I have unearthed in my skin is the feeling of touch along my neck, collarbone, running down, down, down, between the valley of my breasts to my navel and back up, cycling through the motions until the basin of my thoughts empties. My right hand loops, repetitive and wandering, and I breathe cleaner. I know he means to be tender. That I can be tender, too. It’s not like I’m bitter. Just tired.

“I would rather be haunting,” I settle on saying. “Beauty is so arbitrary. Is it fleeting or is it characterized by its survival? Beautiful people are everywhere, whether we discover it by sight or as a growing thing we have to nurture to see.”

I have his full attention now. He makes the sound of wanting to speak again, but I know that when he does, it’ll meander. I’ll forget what I’m trying to say and I know it’ll return only after this ends.

“Haunting, though,” I muse. “What stays with you ever after, like a dream. You don’t revisit the dream but it comes to you, goes through your lifetime. It isn’t – it isn’t always beautiful, sometimes frightening, but it stays with you as a presence. As a force. Unless you’re willing to submit yourself before it, beauty is only a thing of note. An observation.”

If it weren’t for the pulse, I’d think him asleep. I can hear his mouth open, the air catching. A slight creaking from the inside of his throat.

“Jane,” his voice rumbles, “I’ve missed you.” It cost him something to admit this. I can’t tell which of these words bears more weight, the I, having missed, or the you.

“How did I forget this about you?” he wonders outloud, tone incredulous. “How you spoke. What you thought. The depth to your sharing. The way you wrote me.” Moving to lay on his back, he removes his arm only to nudge his way through the pillows under my neck, fingers lightly circling my shoulder. “I was scared at the time so when I saw it, I never brought it up. I’ve always thought you looked like a woman in love and a woman on the verge of heartbreak. But at the same time. I don’t know how. It’s the only way I can describe it.”

“Like a woman in love and a woman on the verge of heartbreak, at the same time,” I echo back.

He looks at me then. “Yeah, exactly like that.”

I can feel the frown in my face, see myself on the outside. “And you say you were scared?” I probe him. “Why?”

He doesn’t answer me. I watch as he sits up, pushing himself off the bed, swiping a towel from the hook on his door to wrap around his waist before softly padding towards the kitchen. I hear the suction of the refrigerator opening, the clanking of glass. When he returns, he has two full glasses of merlot in his hands and passes one to me as he sits back against the headboard.

I’ve heard of people who have had doors shut in their faces. I have walked to the country’s border and felt the slamming of entire cities. Not that anyone would know this just by looking. There is poise and grace threaded through the whole of my being but today, I feel inelegant. It isn’t through cause and effect, but by a submission to rawness. In the silence stretched, my gulp is audible and a fragrant drop moves along my wrist from where the wine has spilt. With a curious expression, Lok observes as I turn my hand in different directions to create a pattern from the stain on my skin.

“Even this. What you’re doing now,” he gestures at my hand. “I’ve missed you,” he says again. The red webbing I’ve created looks kind of like Bolivia. He makes a motion as if to reach for my hand but thinks better of it at the last second. My heart should clench, I know, and it doesn’t.

We spit sparks when we first dated, although I am leery to call it dating. Earlier, before we made it to his place and as we walked side by side to his truck, he made a comment that I was the tallest woman he ever dated. Without thinking, I replied that technically, we’d never dated. He sounded offended when he said that he thought we had. I went on to explain that we were like the baby bird ready to take flight, but just as it prepares its wings, peering down at the distance between the nest and the ground, its second thoughts have third thoughts then fourth thoughts, settling instead on hopping around the brim while waiting for bravery. His face showed his objections but he didn’t refute me.

I’m honestly not even sure how we got to the fucking. We were sitting across from each other in the living room and must have been seized by the same flashback. In the passenger seat of his car. In the pouring rain out on Tantalus, at the top of the winding mountain pathway where any cars passing by could have seen us. In an alcove alongside the beach on a Tuesday night, a couple with the same idea in mind beaming their flashlight on us a fraction too long. Against the woodshed where his dad was working, obliviously sawing parts for a commissioned piece. In the woods, our campsite barely made, spurs scratches along my shoulders and branches snapping beneath my back, the awkward moment of sweat from the bridge of his nose plopping into my eye.

He’s more possessive this time, having dated other women, acutely aware of what I am, what I have always been. It’s rough, he’s rough, but even in this friction between our lives, he regards me differently, as if every moment might be the last. I could feel him lighting upon my eyes, not looking into them, but tracing the peculiar shape. My cheekbones, high and pointed, leading to my lips, his eyes seeking a brazen path that didn’t stop until we stopped, and even then, I still felt like I was being committed to memory.

Giving him a sidelong glance, his posture is languid with a leg bent, leaning against the wall with the other leg heavy, overlapping mine. I wait for him to finish his wine before I speak again. This, I think, was always what bothered me. That liquor was ever necessary for honesty.

“You were saying that you had been scared. I asked why,” I remind him, plucking his empty glass and setting it down on the floor by the bedside.

I used to like silence. After a time, I had too much of it. It was as though I was harvesting a farm whose life depended on a perplexing balance of absence and presence. Lok takes his time to collect his thoughts and all I can think of is how many acres this would fill.

“I went back to my ex after you,” he confesses. “Not immediately, but eventually. It didn’t work out.”

“Well, she was a brainless twit, wasn’t she?” I interrupt.

He smiles. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I wasn’t thinking. I met some girls on campus, dated them –”

“Casually fucked, you mean?”

“… Maybe,” he admits.

“A spade is a goddamn spade, Lok.”

“Touché,” he laughs. “Well, I messed around and couldn’t put my finger on it. Nothing felt right. I was bored with everyone, quicker than I normally am. Some random day, I wound up reading through our texts and I saw the pictures of book pages you snapped – the one you said I would like –”

“Oh!” I exclaim. “‘Paris Spleen,’ right?”

“Right. That’s the one,” he says. “And it fucked me up. I was flooded with images of you. There’s this one expression you make that I could never figure out. Popped up at weird moments, where nothing had happened, nothing I could think of that would’ve triggered it.” I don’t say anything, although I know precisely what he means. It’s the déjà vu marked by my clairvoyance where I arrive at the moment that my dreams play out. I don’t like to tell anyone about this, least of all the people I date, not because they’ll think I’m crazy, but because I know any progression in our intimacy will be stunted.

“I thought of that. And everything else, too. Your laugh. Your voice. Your fucking walk, god, the way that you walk. And I started to wonder why we ended. And then I realized that I didn’t know, not ‘til I thought about it some more.”

“And…?” I prod. “What was the conclusion?”

“I just… I wasn’t expecting you. I don’t think there’s anyone who could expect you,” he frowns at this.

“How could you ever know to expect someone? The life experience thing isn’t preordained, you know.”

He balls up the towel still around his waist and chucks it across the room, sliding down the bed, arms crossed under his head. “It’s like – like… how do I put this?” he asks himself. His forehead creases as he gazes across the room where a vintage war poster collage is taped onto the wall. Of all the memories from when we were hopeful potentials aimless in our movements, this, I remember. My fingers lazily sketching his image in my head, the long lashes, all his creases, the boyish muscles of his cheeks, puffed and grinning. It’s funny in a way that funny doesn’t actually belong, how soon and how easily you begin to forget what was once the cadence to the tenor of your thoughts.

“I’m not gonna lie, Jane,” he says. “I’ve dated a lot of women before you. Some of them were just to prove a point to myself, the really hot ones, the gorgeous ones. They weren’t stupid – far from it – but I could never be entirely myself. Took some time before I could identify the feeling, but I realized that I was repressed,” he fingers the lining of the bedsheets wound beneath him.

The back of my throat hums a sound of understanding. Nothing is new here, I think to myself. I will only ever enter cycles.

“And then there was you. You with your books and the hair that gets everywhere. I’d pull a strand out of my shirt and still be tugging on that shit a minute later,” he chuckles. “You didn’t follow any convention I knew. You never did what I expected and when you looked at me, sometimes, I felt like squirming. There was so much I never took the time to know about you. Aside from bits and pieces, I was afraid to pry –”

“A careless assumption, by the way,” I interject. “Had I been uncomfortable, I would have told you so and shelved it for a later date when I was ready to talk about it.”

“That’s – well… oh,” he fumbles. “I’m sorry.”

I don’t want to tell him that it’s alright, because it isn’t. I drain the last of my wine before setting down my glass next to his on the floor.

“I just had this idea of everything I wanted in a woman and you were it,” he sighs. “And you still are, even more now than before. You’ve changed. Everything that was lacking with my exes, I found with you, and suddenly, with all the shit going on in my life at the time, I didn’t think I could be what you wanted.”

While he’s been talking, I’ve been smudging the red on my wrist. It doesn’t look like Bolivia anymore, but more like the darkened, knobbly shape of a knee – a bruise, perhaps. Something in that tickles me: a non-bruise, false and staining. Just like this conversation.

“The good ol’ self-sabotage,” I say at last. “Lok, tell me something I don’t know about.” There is a keening quality to my voice that no one ever hears. Listening past the first barrier requires a willful intent that people seldom bother to steer with. “I’d like you to be bare.” I turn to him then, my index finger tripping the skin of his eyes down to his stubble, finally stopping behind his neck. “Can you do that?” I press him. “Can you drop all your instruments and allow yourself to be unstrapped?”

He takes my hand and measures it against his and the tips close over mine, encasing me. He studies the form of us with pinched eyes. No, his body admits, I don’t think I can, I hear his body language say.

At night in our sea, there is the jetsam floating beyond the deck, the soft erasure of my memory woven into wind, and already I am but a wild tale of siren song as he closes himself off from me again, just as I had seen it in the moment when we first kissed.

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

I don’t call it sleep anymore.         I’ll risk losing something new instead—

like you lost your rosen moon, shook it loose.

But sometimes when I get my horns in a thing— a wonder, a grief or a line of her—it is a sticky and ruined         fruit to unfasten from,

despite my trembling.

Let me call my anxiety, desire, then Let me call it, a garden.

Maybe this is what Lorca meant         when he said, verde que te quiero verde—

because when the shade of night comes, I am a field of it, of any ready to flower in my chest.

My mind in the dark is una bestia, unfocused,         hot. And if not yoked to exhaustion

beneath the hip and plow of my lover, then I am another night wandering the desire field—

bewildered in its low green glow,

belling the meadow between midnight and morning. Insomnia is like Spring that way—surprising         and many petaled.

the kick and leap of gold grasshoppers at my brow.

I am struck in the witched hours of want—

I want her green life. Her inside me in a green hour I can’t stop.         Green vein in her throat green wind in my mouth

green thorn in my eye. I want her like a river goes, bending. Green moving green, moving.

Fast as that, this is how it happens—         soy una sonámbula.

And even though you said today you felt better, and it is so late in this poem, is it okay to be clear,         to say, I don’t feel good,

until I can smell its sweet smoke,         leave this thrashed field, and be smooth.

Natalie Diaz, “From the Desire Field,” poets.org (5 June 2017)

Note: Natalie Diaz’s comments about “From the Desire Field.”

“The desire field is a space bloomed of tension—the body’s fire, and its smoke when those fires quiet (I am told they will quiet). In these ever-green wind-bent star-strewn blades of worry and field, spinning until lost, I can rename the burdens of my heart—and offer the body back to language, to be carried, to be grinded into love and what is good. What if I call my anxiety desire? What if I rename this terrible thing as wanting and blossoming with touch? Why not let all bodies—my own body included—be the beloved and possible of offering me a smooth place to rest?“

[aftersalt]

What of grief?

Grief is being caught in the closed maw of a void. There is no terror in this, only quietude, traces of possession, the belonging to absence.

It is the ambiguity of salt: a heavy swathe of cleansing held by two steady palms; or the way that smoke pervasively lances the senses, lingers as the suspension of shock.

This is where tragedy reinvents itself and becomes us. We give shape to this entity, creating its image to our likeness where we do not wear grief but rather grief wears us.

Grief is not a choice, but it is a vivid reminder for how deeply and dearly we loved the fixtures in our lives. What in us grief has stolen experiences an alchemical transformation of identity. It needs our permission to be laid to rest.

[mothwood]

The internal sense speaks at last and for the first time. The tent is printed with burning tongues and crowned with writing. Language arrives. The pavilion opens and shuts, contained but facing the outside. The woman is standing in her doorway, turned outwards, attentive, her body is given over to what is given. It is necessary to write the dative: TO. Defined by the closing of the volume on itself, the slightly open tent reveals itself. The body can write or say: MY. My body, my belonging, which behaves like a circle and turns in on itself. Monadic, the pavilion stands isolated on its island. Shut, open, it is revealed as singular. The body can say or write: ONE. Solitary belonging gives itself to itself and to what is given. Dense and blue, the body burns with stray languages. Empty like the tent, it leaves behind its jewels and regrets their absence: DESIRE […]

I leave behind my jewels, those that my body was wearing, those displayed by my partial bodies when they were a scent of roses, a shiver of sounds, a simulacrum in the mirror…I carry them and shut them in the casket. I miss them. I am nostalgic for a lost world, a lost paradise, an island between two seas, where the senses sparkle like a lake of gemstones. I speak now and shelter in the tent of language or writing. The tabernacle closes, its flaps are lowered. I live now in the prison of my language and the jewel-box closes. Having withdrawn beneath the veils printed with tongues of fire and beneath the crown of the written cartouche, the body which has left the world mourns it, the woman who leaves behind her jewels misses them, the beauty of the five senses lies in the black box while we sleep under the blue hangings engraved with fire. Solitary belonging, devoted to itself, no longer devotes itself to what is given, except to what language gives us - to what is said or dictated.

This is the first sentence, the originary, primary proposition, as original as the fault committed in the past by a girl on a paradise-island, as original and permanent. These are the first words uttered by the body when it becomes an interiority endowed with a voice, and is enveloped in flames and imprinted with signs, when the skin-tapestry or the skin-pavilion no longer bears on itself lilacs or cheetahs but geometry and letters. This is the sentence that causes the world to flee and the necklets to be abandoned, that excludes rabbits and goats and that chased us from paradise, these are the words which cause the senses to withdraw into a black box. Our only desire is that it be reopened. The woman-summation bids farewell to the world, takes the veil beneath the tent of language.

This is the first cogito […] I feel, I have felt; I have seen, heard, tasted, smelt; I have touched; I touch, I enclose myself in my pavilion of skin; it burns with languages, I speak; I speak about myself, about my loneliness and the nostalgia of lost senses, I mourn the lost paradise, I regret the loss of that to which I was giving myself or of what was given to me. Since that phrase was written, I desire. And the world absents itself.

This is the first, self-contained proposition, literally circular, the first stable unitary philosophy of identity. My desire identifies with writing, I exist only in language.

— Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies 

[aftersalt]

"a slip of key presses" what does this mean?

I remember the old, dated Macintosh computers of the 90s: the charm of the click-clacking keys, clunky and just a little resistant, flat black screen and glowing green letters all edges without curves, such was the render of that technology. I learned how to type on those in preschool, and my elementary school had a surprisingly sharp, no frills, required course that gave me a speed I still use that has other people laughing, ludicrous it might be that I could key a sentence faster – without error – than I could speak it. By this same token, I hold a lot in and don't often lend voice to the corridor of thought as I would, typing as I am now. I call and tag my words here as such because they're exactly that: a slip of key presses, something that could be left unspoken as either intent, gesture, or a mistake.