An Inch @aninch - Tumblr Blog

Sometimes she liked to pull the dry skin of her knuckles across the white walls of the shops she waited in, happy to see, time and again, a small, red smear of herself left behind. She signed it like any other artist might. She wasn’t sure the her blood type would be enough.

She tied her fingers into straw bundles and fed them to grazing cattle

she just needed things to be grey for a bit neded them to fade off, to lose sheen to stop badgering her with her own unimportance --was there nowhere left to be small anymore?

They say "she is walking in heaven's light" and I imagine her shining like a beetle or an oil spot, a dark reflection of a hundred captured colors glistening. If you draw angels like beetles in Sunday school they get after you, though. They tell you about white light and halos and smiling, clean women and men and children. They don't know a thing about thin-film interference. They see my paradise like an unclean kitchen, infested, instead of a warm aired jungle full up with buzzing and living. Maybe that's the problem--maybe their heaven is just too full of being dead to house beetles and me happily. Maybe we're too busy buzzing to fit in there at all.

keeping little things

He came in late and skipped clocking in. He passed the rest of the kitchen staff in a rush and headed for the back office space, for the girl whose night shift he was there to relieve. He found her and started to apologize. "I woke up in 20,000 pieces," he said. "I hardly had time to count them all before I came in, but there they were. --I mean, there I was. ---I mean, here I am," he fumbled with his apron ties and shrugged his shoulders. "Semantics." The motion shook a few more pieces loose. He blushed and bent over and tied them up in his shoes and tried to laugh. "I used to save funny shaped stones and extra bubblegum this way. I used to put baseball cards in my socks, too. --I'm glad I still remember how to do the useful things sometimes. ---I'm glad I still know how to keep little things safe." The girl nodded and handed him a stack of empty glasses and asked him to be careful with them and to keep his eyes peeled for chipped edges. She took a towel from her back pocket and put it around his neck and said there might be a few things he'd have to dry by hand before breakfast began. She took a pen from behind her ear and licked the tip and circled the spots on her hips where she used to keep feathers and buttons and quarters stuck between her skin and her waistband. She took her hair down and walked to the front of the shop and clocked out. She listened carefully to make sure there was no dropping sound.

Shook

I feel it like a train a block away when I am stationary and focused too hard on my own frailness I feel it like unbearable reason I feel it and I drip from my own fingertips into emptied cups that I quietly watch waitstaff carry off because I let the ice water it all down anyway

#writing #shake #train #frail #dilute

She picked up loose, wet greens between her thumb and forefinger and felt hungrier felt like a rabbit felt like calling her sister felt like making more mistakes and unravelling quicker

She felt like the kind of sick you get from sitting on a hot bus all day

She felt like the filament in a light bulb waiting to be overused to rattle in the bottom against thin glass

She felt dramatic like yelling about how tragedy had built an igloo up around her overnight and how now she was insulated in the stuff She felt maddened at her urge to despair and complain she hissed at herself under her breathe

—I am blessed, I am blessed—

she did not feel convinced.

masticate

I saw morning drag its teeth across the two of us; tear through us with incisors grind us with molars leave us partially together but mostly apart; my ankle flush against your shin your chin away from mine.

#writing #tear #teeth #away #mostly

bits

I think that the skin on my finger is dead-- --it's weird to look at the bits of you that are already through with living.

I mostly do it when I want to feel ungrateful.

I grind my teeth on ice and bare my thighs to the sun and stare at the places where I should've gotten stitches and say "I could've stopped bleeding I

could've."

#writing #bare #living #skin #ungrateful

the way that

beautiful the way that oil under a car is beautiful swirling and turning i almost forgot you could turn those lights on she said she salted the ground with her words she flipped a switch the whole driveway lit and grew dirty the way that oil stained pavement is dirty

#writing #oil #dirty #flip

apprehension

Her hair fell in dark strands over her bent neck

stray black spindles, spider's legs straddling as she stared into the day old mug of honeyed water that had caught four flies

who could not use a single piece of their thousand part eyes

to meet hers.

#writing #spider #compund eyes #meet

Default

The milk was left out all night and I dump it down the sink and see myself more clearly in the coffee my eyelashes clumped together my dyed hair losing sheen my nails coming apart in layers like the cities in the news- -it is too early.

#writing #apart #nails #milk #cities

leave her

She forgets; she is never more sure and she forgets. It is the only way to be so sure. She is finished with remembering—she has found it…complicated. She would rather find nothing. Solid nothing. The thing that does not leave her missing words on her tongue or heat in her morning bed or coffee mugs in her kitchen cabinet.

#writing

Overripe

While you were gone the garlic sprouted and a lightbulb had to be replaced

Radio signals faded and static filled the kitchen

While you were gone orange peels curled into themselves and the water in the ice cube trays solidified

The cat got hungry and I fed him in the time I’d set aside to take the doctor’s supplements

While you were gone I ate under seasoned eggs and bruised like a peach.

Dictation

It was the type of holiday you spent with family There had been a mass exodus from her work over lunch She had stayed She tried to keep busy She found herself reading aloud what she had written in black ink on a yellow post-it note Mr. King called at one thirty with regards to the sculptures in the front lobby It felt odd, like a translation She kept going, she read the grocery list she had written in the morning Celery, bread, bottled water, apples—honey crisp apples, golden delicious apples, Fuji apples, gala apples—DO NOT BUY Washington apples Next she read the Wikipedia page of a dead, historically obscure man Potter rode a donkey to the edge of the bluffs, whereupon he leapt off the edge Then she read an oddly relevant shorthand memo the secretary before her had left behind in a bottom drawer Please do not call Mr. Potter at this number any longer, his office has been relocated To fend off the eeriness she read a Bible verse from one of those small leaflets they hand you on street corners if you do not look away in time Blessed [shall be} the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy ground On her way to the bathroom, she read a wet floor sign in three different languages Caution/Attention/Cuidado She wondered at every spoken word's ability to sound like a curse She did not wonder aloud.

Nothing

What wasn't prayer? She thought-- --even cleaning the sink even buying bread even spitting on the sidewalk and cursing even aching for someone. Especially aching for someone.

#writing #prayer #ache #even

not the sky

For the last six stops my train has been filled with only sleeping people. For the next two it is empty aside from me. This is how early hour express trains tend to go in this city. Some days I miss being in a place where mornings mean something--where they're more than just a nuisance. The rest of the time I find myself sleeping alongside everyone else.

I get off at a stop my friends jokingly call "The Far North". When I first moved here I heard people call it "The Last Stop a White Girl Like You Should Get Off At".

On the street I wait for the signal to change as water rushes by the curb from some source I can not find--I only know that it is not the sky. I see a crumpled napkin and thin, brown leaves float until they are stopped by a small set of chicken bones piled almost like someone had been trying to build a fire. I think back to building miniature tee-pees and log cabins on top of tinder and slowly setting them ablaze. This structure looks dilapidated and I imagine it in short-lived, uneven flames.

A few blocks from home a man leaving a bodega passes me and asks "Does he know how lucky he is?" "Does he appreciate you?" It feels sour to be thankful.

#writing #move #thankful #appreciate #train #morning #build

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