an archive

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untitled

and maybe i’m not living in the kind of world i always wanted. maybe more days are spent under the thick ocean of apathy than not, and maybe good days are rarer than i expected, but my god, when the plane dips and the fiery reflection of the sunrise paints the metal of the wing in a brilliant impressionist soup of blues and pinks and oranges, the ember sun a smear across the wavy lavender horizon, i can’t breathe from the beauty of it, fleeting but more real than any feeling i’ve had in years, and i think it might be worth being alive.

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simple pleasures

i am carving myself a place in the world that i can truly call mine, a little place where i can only blame myself for what happens to me. i have found that the world is mostly not a place of beauty but at least within these walls i own  i can keep a few things alive.

would that i could keep this world like an orange in my fruit bowl, safe under my purview for a while. instead i will watch the people i love decay before their time has come. there is little else to do these days.

i asked my mother once if she was happy and she told me she was content. as a child i could think of no greater tragedy than to live a life in the grey doldrums of contentment. now i think that i understand.

i am watching time slip through my fingers like sand and and all along i long for childhood, for the soft hibiscus summer of first love, for the simple joys afforded only to the young.

even so, i have learned to linger i hover in the doorway, savor the rich tang of my coffee just a little longer, take pleasure in the bright oranges sitting on the counter and the herbs that hover on the window-sill. i let my cat tempt me into playing with her for a few more minutes.

when you come to visit i will brew a cup of tea and we will talk of nothing until the sun goes down and i will be content with that.

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lobster tank

i often feel as if i’m going through life as a scientist goes through a cleanroom, hidden away behind the condensate my own breath leaves on my visor, my actions made clumsy as my fingers pull at the thick gloves. the barrier between myself and reality is colored in impenetrable yellow light, beautiful only at the beginning, monotonous at the end. when i go home i am caught somewhere between guilt and relief; it is a forest of respite, of books and tchotchkes and safety. it is extradimensional, i think. i know when i wake up i will be bathed in that disgustingly beautiful light, my mind a traveler returning from vacation, desperately longing for the safety of another life. it is just outside of my reach, flickering at the edges of my vision.  i see the world as something dark, now. nothing exists without the tinge of pain, of suffering. even the supermarket seems filled with death. at the fishmonger’s counter i have a sudden, violent impulse to smash the lobster tank, to try and save even just one creature. i push my fingers against the glass. it does not crack. i am so sorry, i whisper. tears well in my eyes. i am so sorry.

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speeding ticket

i found my moral backbone at a mcdonald's in jasper, tennessee slippery like an electric eel it burned me as i stared at the karmic backlash of a pink citation slip for going sixty-four in a forty-five

it's a steep price to pay for a kiss

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gasoline

when i drive now i feel the impulse to destroy, to speed into the sun, to end my life in a blaze of speed and steel and gasoline, a perfect futurist fantasy.

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Colossus

Sometimes I shock myself with how young I am, how new, how when I brace my fingers against Roman  travertine and limestone and concrete there are a hundred of my lifetimes cast into the columns and arches. I want so desperately to know them. I want, so desperately, to be a creature of beauty, ancient and poised, graceful, striking, a monument, standing still across the centuries, commanding attention, wielding that special, subliminal power that whispers in the empty spaces between corridors, that haunts the faces of caryatids, I want to

be something.

I am so very afraid, so paradoxical. I crave my youth, fear the tarnish of age, recoil from the thought of my skin blooming with patina, of adding to my collection of scars. I am a bumbling child amidst a sea of children, I think, torn between extremes. The truth of the matter is this: I want perfection, want even the most rotten parts of me to be carved from marble.

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susurro ad vacuum

I was sitting in the Target parking lot in the middle of the afternoon listening to the trains pass by on the tracks behind the garage, that simple clackclackclack of metal on metal a small tether to reality as I floated in the universe between the windshield and me, letting time slip by. I don’t know how to feel real anymore, I don’t think. Now I am halfway across the universe, dancing in between neon signs and women in too-high heels as cigarette smoke invites them in to earn their keep. The mountains are watching and I long to fold into their embrace, to slot my body into the space between their summits, nestled in a bed of moss, finally shielded from the tickticktick of the sun.

Down by the sea where concrete jacks pile high in some sick giant’s game, a petty break from the relentless waves, boys stand with their arms outstretched to the sea, reeling in fish through the trash that squirms at their feet, that gasps for air among the salt and the  sweat and the bugs and the cold slide of metal through flesh. I stand above them on the seawall, watch the boys run across their broken toys. The sea and I are one, then, calm and cruel and sullied and uncaring, a thing outside of the world, weary but incessant. The bus stop calls my name, but the times are wrong; sunsets and sunrises pass before I am back in bed, sleeping too little, sleeping too much.

I start to see the world through my camera lens, make it bright and exciting and new against the dull fog. Somewhere I am smiling in technicolor,  more than a shade against the shadows, and at night I dream of the forests, of disappearing into the greenery until it grows over me, swallows me whole, Daphne running from Apollo as he crashes through the delicate brush. Instead I stand too close to the bar at the train tracks, let the wind try to take me away as the train bullets past, rushrushrush, off to someplace else, unconcerned with the trouble that waits for me in the ivy by the retaining wall. If I fall by the wayside it will be a blessing and a curse, an unwanted reprieve.

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Autopsy

To my once-friend, my deceived, admirer of my carefully-crafted facade: I do not want your thanks, darling. I do not want your too-thin limbs to stretch across my shoulders, a snake unhinging its jaw, swallowing me in a rare moment of genuine affection (it almost consumes me. It is a near thing). The vacancy in your eyes startles me as you try to tell me a story in as few words possible. Hemingway would be ashamed. I flash my palm across your face, the slap I desire that will never connect. There is no one to see it, and so I drift through the fog, leave the murky water that has settled on your tongue, and hover in my grandmother’s condominium. I nod to to her dementia, her hallucinations. They feel so similar, now.  I do not miss you, but I miss my blindness of you, my acceptance of the caricature-cloak you seemed to wear. I do not want to know you as the infant we found where your heart should have been, but the autopsy has been  concluded.

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Valkyrie

When I come into power as leader of this world, my first decree will be to rid it of men who would touch me. Peter may let them into Heaven but I’m through

with the worms that bury themselves in my stomach lining every time a fleeting hand dares caress the curve of my spine. Try  to tell this earthly god she’ll be fleeing

from catcalls and unwanted advances even from up upon a throne (nothing can save a girl from men’s mating dances, it seems). This maiden, with cheeks unblushing,

will cast a plague upon the unwanted, the guilty, those who ought to be daunted.

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Scry

Think of it think of it like this, like Sun dogs and moonshine, like the sound of the word yes, harsh, soft, glistening on taste-buds; There it is, see? The warm chill of springtime gold against flannel backs, full of promise, of visions. I shiver in white, somewhere between little death and anticipation, trying to remember which side moves first. This is not a chess game. Plastic dances and plays a music-box tune; we set it aside for first communion and assign each other the role of God. This is all very far away from me, I think; I water the plants with champagne and they bloom into lilac and wisteria and lavender, flooding the floor. We swallow them up and sigh into the lukewarm wind with flower-kissed breath. We pray to each other this does not rot. Leave me be! I taste of salt and flesh and the tang of iron, I am not worthy yet. I have fractured my roots time and time again, said do not grow into the concrete, darlings, and snapped them up with gardening shears. Teach me to lay still in furrows and fields,  to stop running. Teach me to be worthy, yet.

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Content

Sometimes when you’re in the kitchen making eggs and your roommate’s cat is jumping at the blinds again I can see the future hiding behind the glare on the television screen, and it tells me about  rooms filled with sharp-edged graphite drawings and  plants, in mason jars and old mugs, and how our bonsai flowers in the spring even though you keep forgetting to water him and I keep forgetting to buy new soil.

And sometimes, just sometimes, I can make out the shapes of mismatched furniture and a fluffy dog, just like I always wanted; you run your hands through his fur and look at me and say we did it, and I say I always knew you would, and move a little closer, always; in the corner of the room I spy crumpled drafts of buildings and songs filling up  the waste bin, but imperfection is to be expected, I suppose.

The vision fades as soon as it’s begun, sometimes, and when it does I go to carry plates and salt and pepper and listen to you complain about that damn cat while the construction dragon that lives across the street bellows; I can feel something waiting for us, out there, just out of sight, colored like tangerines and blue jays and the cherry chapstick I use in place of lip gloss, and so I  press the bridge of my nose into your shoulder and hum, content.

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Paperwork

Why didn’t you leave? There are women who’ve divorced their husbands for less.

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Traces

Sometimes at night when the salt-stick of sweat drips down my throat to pool between my breasts I trace sigils on your skin, let the wet sink into flesh. I feel the wrinkled crests

of cotton sheets between my toes and think, maybe I am something new after all. I climb out of my skeleton to drink in the soft dancing-dust; it likes to fall

in ribbons through the stripes of moonlight that filter through your blinds. The night-chill catches me; caressing, and I press myself flat against you, light my fingers like matches

and watch the low-light echo across your chest, reflecting over the things I swore. 

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Feathers and Bones

You bounce your knee up and down, stare out the window, and I tie our fingers together, dreaming of sweeping stairwells and marble columns, thick like trees, arching up into the ribs of some ancient beast, the only heart left in its body the synchronized beat of our own. You take a step further into the belly, stare out of the sockets where eyes would have been, once, and the drag of your step makes it sound like there is life again.  Wings thunder across the apse, arcing, a momentary trapeze, and you laugh at how the winter adds feathers to feathers. I feel the catacombs beneath our feet, feel the tunnels, the miles of marrow and bone, the  discarded entrails.  You rub your thumb over mine, press our heart lines together, and I knock my leg against yours, quiet, as the landscape shakes outside.

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Wicker

Some people have fathers, and some people have wicker men, have something that looks like a man, but is something different, something easily destroyed. Late at night, in the car, when traffic stretches on like a taut rubber band,  ready to snap, my mother tells me about how she’s convinced he’s going to leave her.  You’re the one that asked him to leave, I don’t say, and she tells me he’s sworn he won’t go looking for nooses in the crawlspace under the house.  She doesn’t believe him. The shell of his childhood is stripped bare, couches and crocheted blankets and thick, oily paintings removed from inside, pulled out like  intestines.  We find whisky bottles in the back of the cabinet, and  she cries even though they’re years and years old, covered in dust. We smash them in a trash can and throw the remains away like dirty water, pitch it into  the sea. She says she hates the taste of vermouth, and breaks the martini glasses on the counter. We are standing in a glass house, now, tiptoeing around the shards. I take apart kitschy knickknacks to pass the time, pull the screws out of their backs and straighten the pieces, rub my thumb over the patina and wonder what’s hidden underneath the wicker.

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I would like to agree with the other anon! You're madly talented; never stop writing and being creative :)

thank you kindly <3

[anarchivism]

Yellow

She was an organ donor, but when the time came, the only part of her left to salvage were her eyes. The rest was too yellow, they said.

I wish I could remember her before she’d swallowed the sun; it screamed inside her bloated belly, begged for mercy, for freedom, but she wouldn’t let it die, just kept feeding the flames.

Sunspots blossomed on her arms, I remember, like little brown dandelions, and she wore the fat like armor, like it could protect her from the thing that was eating her from the inside.

They said she wilted on the hospital bed, deflated, drained of all the bile, a  loose sack of bones and browning petals, and  when they peeled back the layers with scalpels and knives

they found a bed of ashes where her liver should have been, wet with the muck of post-stellar destruction, fluid pooling in her rib cage, helium and acetate leaking out. They said, we are happy to tell you that

other people might make better use of her eyes, at least, and we could not help but wonder if they would see the world as she had, as a problem she couldn’t fix, and if they’d try to swallow it, too.