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Years ago, at a wine-tasting on a lush rooftop, the sommalière told us to rinse wine with wine when changing bottles with the same glass.

"People think you should rinse with water, but you do better to simply finish your first glass, add a small amount from the new bottle, swirl, drink and refill."

I think of this when I read an author whose prose makes my fingers itch. I know what comes out first will be imitation, straw-coloured and not gold. If it was good enough for Rumpelstiltskin...

What frightens me is the prospect of drought after that first flood, that I am, in fact, strictly a mockingbird, with no song of my own. It's enough to keep me from trying.

What frightens me is how eagerly I reach for opportunities to keep from trying. Wasn't there a time when I was fearless, I ask myself? And there was--and wasn't, like when I slept on the floor of the airport in Istanbul for all 13 hours of my layover rather than daring to go explore the city. I could have gone for one meal. I could have bought a metre of fabric, could have stooped to pet one street cat. Instead, I lay facedown on rough carpet in a short dead-end hallway adjoining a random gate, filled with self-loathing.

Why on earth would I be scared to try and tell my own story?

We sat on my floor. I was glad to have swept while he was out on call. He told me about finding out that his ex-wife was dating, how he struggled with jealousy, how it helped when they actually talked about it. He'd mentioned that the guy lived in the States, but when he said it was Alabama, I started laughing.

"So she's dating a..."

"A hillbilly! A Trump voter. Baby, she's dating a _swamp person_" I tipped backwards, stared up at the ceiling. "She voluntarily traveled to Birmingham, Alabama, to date a redneck."

"She didn't tell me why, at first. Like she told me she wanted to live a single life, and the first time she went she had this story, that one of her friends had a house down there, but the second time, I was like, 'Don't you want to go to Europe or something?'"

"To be fair, Birmingham is the Europe of north-central Alabama."

It felt good to make him laugh.

Then he said that he was working up the courage to ask me about what I was looking for, and we waded in. Some of it was rehashing, but we got bolder with what we shared. I told him about how I'd decided I wanted to date a woman, and how, lonely and sad, I ended up checking the "man" box on Hinge, and how I wasn't seeing anyone else right now but was having a hard time with the idea of getting into something serious with another man and letting that plan languish. We talked about polyamory. He told me the woman he'd been seeing in the fall was 46. He told me he'd started talking to someone else on another platform around the same time as me, and that he'd planned to reconnect with her towards the end of the month, and didn't know if he should reach out, and my heart dropped.

"I think I made some assumptions about what you wanted, based on how things have gone so far," I said, keeping my voice steady. No idea about my face.

"Well, I think that's one of the reasons we should have this conversation, to make sure our assumptions align with reality. So what did you assume?" (As an aside--I love that he goes to therapy, and that it shows.)

I worked very hard not to let it come out as a squeak, dropped my larynx. "I think I assumed that you'd want to date me long-term."

"Well, you assumed right, I do see that potential here. I would like to date you long-term, but I don't want to rush it."

My face twisted wryly. "Just a quick, uh, semantics note. I don't think you can rush that, I don't think that's how time works."

He laughed. "I just don't want to ask you to make any promises to me, not right away."

"No, but to be fair, I think a long-term relationship with me would look very different from your last long-term relationship. Like I'm not sure what those promises would even be?"

"It's true, and I definitely don't want to get in another long-term relationship like my last one! The thought of, you know, merging like that is very unappealing to me. I liked what you said about creating your own space, inviting people into that space. I think we're probably compatible in that way."

After, I shook out my shoulders, glanced at him quickly, decided.

"Ach, that was scary. That was a scary conversation. My heart just..."

"Do you want a hug?"

With my head nestled against his shoulder, he asked, "What were you feeling?"

"I mean, when you were talking about whether you were going to message that other girl or not, I just... You know, I want to work on feeling jealousy and possessiveness, and it just--OK. Have you ever been to Traffic Town at Parc Lafontaine? They set up this little former parking lot with like tiny stop signs and crosswalks and it's for little kids to learn about road safety, so they drive around in their little balance bikes or Cozy Coupes and practice stopping and being safe. And it was like that, like the smallest little challenge, the littlest test for jealousy and I just failed completely."

"You had a feeling of jealousy? Where in your body?"

"My abdomen, like my heart just fell into my stomach."

He named the region. "I feel it there, too. The gut-punch, right? But you're saying you failed because you had a feeling?"

"Yeah."

"I don't think it's failing to feel an emotion."

I poured myself some water. "Mmm, I'm pretty sure it's bad to have emotions, actually, Alex."

Memento novissimorum, noli oblivisci

My face is lumpen wax

With tears cutting down the hardened channels of my cheeks

I tell you about the trucks lined like long white teeth at the hospital loading dock

The yellow-gowned orderly closing the door behind him

And the fresh hell written in his stance

The neat rows of bodies lying in such a nearby chill

How many empty slippers are waiting in how many doorways

You close your book.

In Paris, they carried carts of bones down the rue d'enfer, you say.

Marianne wrote in her diary, Bones fell into my garden today, the priest is coming soon to pray over my roses

The body is a temporary dwelling place, the body is a shell, you say

In ten thousand years there will be new stone in the quarries below the city, those millions of calcified skeletons

The body is not the man, you say

My face is a new haunting, my face is a different type of ghost

I close the door behind me and I hear you open your book again

"My body is all I have!" I yell from our yellow bathroom, at my ashen face in the gilt-edged mirror

"If you put me in a tunnel I will come back for you!"

And you come and hold me while I stare at the box of masks, at the muted news

You whisper, "I love this precious body, but I love you more than time."

Through Zoom, my voluble prudish family sees him

pull the floppy orange cat to his chest

I watch my own face, mindful of its betrayals

And laugh with the gang, eyes occasionally darting offscreen

As it flops, lazy-bellied, grooming, unaware

The dream, in other words.

Later, the man dozing on the couch,

I hear the wet, warbling sound leaking around the stuffed mouse

As he pads up to play catch, his warm worried eyes

Cautiously grateful as I throw

Knowing something I can't admit to at the moment,

But in the meantime, watching the arc and leaping nimbly to fetch it

In the meantime, rubbing sadly against the hilt of my hand.

I'm that line of wet t-shirt you get from doing the dishes drunk, or too emphatically, or not at all

From leaning sympathetically against the kitchen sink while someone tells you something heavy, telling them

I'd rather be anywhere than here in this moment, but here I am being here for you

Lookit me, all damp.

CW: graphic description of sexual assault

I translated a self-defense guide for women, recently. It's a funny thing to work on, dredged up a good amount of stuff. Like pulling a shopping cart from the bottom of the river. The text urged women to act, and act quickly. To stop imagining how things could get worse and just knee the guy in the groin right away.

Idly, in between pages, I played back the memory from the time I was assaulted. I needed somewhere to sleep and didn't mind making out with the guy a bit, but when he rolled on top of me and yanked my pants down, rubbed himself insistently against me, I felt a heavy glass pane whoosh down in my mind. I said something, but I couldn't recall what it was. Sitting at my nice, safe desk, trying to have an argument with the words on my screen, and I couldn't remember what I had said to make him roll off me and slide his pants back on.

The argument went something like: this guide doesn't do jack shit for the contexts in which 90% of assaults happen. If I had kneed him in the groin, where would I have gone in the middle of the night? How would I have guaranteed my safety? Kneeing him in the groin would have meant abandoning a community that meant so much to me. Better to deescalate. Better to use words. I still believe that; it's one of the reasons I can keep some steel in my voice and think clearly when things start to go sideways. Through the fear and the agitation, I believe that talking is how to get to the other side, so I do.

Now, days later, lying in bed worn-out and weakened by too many days of quarantine and too little from P, I remembered what I said, that flimsy talisman that for whatever reason worked better than "No" and "I don't want to do that".

I'd said, "You don't even know my name."

Around 1 am I slipped off the bed and went to the living room. I got a glass of water and curled up with the blanket, scrolling aimlessly in the dim light from the kitchen. A little while later I heard him get up.

"Thinking about the thing with F?" he asked, pulling the blanket over him and my legs over his.

"Thinking about the thing with M?" I replied.

His roommate, my colleague. Raging, pointless, drug-out conflicts. I made us tea with two spoons of lemon balm and plenty of flowers, tiny spoon of honey in the bottom of the grandma mugs.

The next morning he woke me up holding the jar of instant coffee I bought to do cloud coffee a year ago. "Good morning, is this what you use?" I'm not used to waking up after him.

We went to a bird sanctuary an hour or so up the river. It was mild and thrumming with life, a few old folks out in the parking lots using telephoto lenses to get the ducks. We walked to the duck blind watching swallows dart and alight along the fencing, swathed in birdsong. A field of snow geese grazing, a muskrat unobstrusively nibbling alongside them. And the restless swallows dodging and leaping above.

We'd brought a little picnic and strolled along the narrow ridge between the ponds and the little irrigation creek, posted up on a beaver-gnawed log on the creek side. He'd brought a little cloth bag of rolled joints and we sat quietly for a while, watching a sparrow check us out, watching the sun glinting on the water, the little bubbles forming from pockets of mud unfreezing at the creek bottom, listening to red-winged blackbirds and robins and a wood dove somewhere in the tall grass by our feet. I slowly felt myself unclenching, sitting there in the sun. He'd torn part of the crust off his sandwich and solemnly placed it on his head, waiting patiently for the sparrow to come closer. It didn't, but it sang for us anyway.

We'd seen groundhogs ahead of us on the path on the way over and on the way back, one let us get within ten feet or so before she dove into her nest. We stood there for a beat, and watched as she poked her head back out, considering us. Slowly she came all the way out, her bright eye on us the entire time, then she scuttled off through the grass towards the pond. We saw her swimming alongside the path, keeping pace with us.

We drove back along the river, watching cargo ships appear in the gaps between the houses that backed onto the water. There's still plenty wrong and a lot of hard work to try and make it right, but in the meantime, there are so many beautiful things to see if you're willing to sit quietly and wait.

We'd picked an end point for the hike at the floating docks of a lake, but the stairs down were snowed over, the edges of each stair barely showing and the snow caked thick. Even grabbing on to the rails I felt my feet slipping out from under me. But the path off to the side looked interesting.

A few feet in, the sides dropped away to sheer cliff on one side and steep forested hill on the other. We were balanced on a hard-packed eighteen-inch knife edge with an open view down to the river and the mountains on the other side. At one point my foot went through a patch of soft snow and sent little snowballs flying down the cliff face while I clutched a helpful sapling.

The trail ended at a steep slide through the trees down to the lake. I passed my poles to P and slid down--the only sledding I've done this winter. At the bottom the snow was thick and falling fast, the forest totally blanketed. I couldn't stop grinning.

I told him I loved him that night in the enormous, uncomfortably soft bed in the cabin he'd rented. He answered quickly, almost under his breath, that he loved me too and something started to scratch and howl in a back room of my heart.

"I've always thought that it's time to say it when it starts getting hard not to say it," I said, wondering why my heart was still racing. "Still scary, though. It's like jumping off a cliff."

"So...did you land in the water?"

"I don't know yet. Like I think it's... it's scary because I know exactly how I feel, and I think you figured out how I felt,"--he nodded, smiling--"but I have no idea how you feel. Like I could guess, but I'll never really know."

I lay awake picturing a tall, slender man slipping down from the hatch to the attic, softly dropping to the closet floor facing the bed. Picturing an impossibly large...thing pulling itself up the stairs from the stone-walled unfinished room we found in the basement. The soft and regular rush of his breath beside me as I pictured bloody fingers wrapping themselves around the doorknob. I didn't need to ask my brain why it was doing this.

I'm often quiet in the car, and often thinking about something that makes me sad, the mental equivalent of tonguing a canker sore. I kept wanting to say, "It's OK if you don't love me yet, I just need to know if you don't think you will." But the miles went by and I said nothing, only politely noticing if he pointed out a hawk or a nice house.

He asked to come in to use the bathroom and I threw my clothes in the wash while he showered. I was in a towel on my bed when he came in to kiss me goodbye. I finally got the words out after he called me "my love" and the thing stopped howling in my chest, startled by the truth that it heard.

"Like I know there's a lot of pressure to say it back, it's OK if you don't."

I don't know why I couldn't get the "yet" out. It was important to me. I don't think it would be OK if he didn't, if he would never love me.

"But it happens that I do love you." He kissed me on the top of the head, pulled me closer. "I love you."

My face buried in his shoulder, I said, "OK, I believe you now," and the little thing in my heart was shimmying.

retrogressives

“the only thing my mother taught me was to never wear my hair down for a boy who didn’t read poetry; i tried telling you that my body was a museum of bones and teeth and heartbreak, i said poetry spilled! out of me like gasoline and only you could ignite the words, i wrote, our souls are metals in space, i wrote, our love is molded out of confetti and ash, i wrote, i am so alone i can taste the iron in my blood, there is a civil war in my wrists and i keep trying to vacuum the word cancer out of the outskirts of my mind, if we were talking in frequencies, yours would be of the sky and i would be nothing but sun, sun, sun my professor keeps comparing poetry to murder; i compare it to the way you said my name, i write, my mother taught me to never wear my hair down for a boy who didn’t read poetry; i wrote, i will always wear my hair down for you”

—

a mix of you, me, and us

(via irynka)

if I had to speculate as to the purpose of my fingers

(and who would, what a stone launched at what an enormous

stain-glassed house)

it would be to run along the weft, held loose but firm, finding the snag

smoothing the threads

(“Not to run along his nape, his spine, the line of his jaw?” Maria asks sadly, knowing the answer)

to run the lines of columns, find the cell that makes the bug, the formula

that breaks the sheet,

to see the lines of trajectory like a poem in the air, trap the moth in a pint glass and out the door to be eaten by

something else.

I ran my fingers

narratively, reflexively

through the threads of my own life, looking for the hook

the turn,

the beak

did i stop writing poetry because

was it the birth control

the thyroid

the cans of beer and glasses of wine and bottles of vodka?

Was it because things stopped happening to me

because

(my most embarrassing admission)

at parties I say, giggling,

“I work in accounting,” and,

“Actually, I enjoy it very much."

crying

on a bench in Central Park I thought triumphantly,

already like a ghost,

“This is something that is happening to me.”

I held it with a kind of destructive reverence

the feeling twisting

and clawing at the threads.

I let it build

a home

at the base of my throat.

the idea of

a baby and of no babies

if-not-babies, nil-babies

have the same heft

in my hand.

I stand at the fork and stare down

two equally dark paths

their entrances yawning and ringed with thorns,

their meadows strewn

with opium poppy

or Queen Anne’s lace.

I squint

at the stained-glass windows

and wind up.

We Were All Very Polite About It

The Mennonites boarded at Rouse's Point

passing like Moses through the border guards.

Lifted boxy suitcases into the overhead racks

putting creases in their wool clothes.

I type, "I'm sorry" to my partner and watch

the words float up under

"she's very cold".

I am going to a funeral, I am going towards

a separate pain.

We come up on the lake and I start crying.

At first, just the threat. I gesture internally,

like, "Are you kidding me?"

Behind me the murmurs of pleasant German.

Above the lake the clouds are a damp grey

blanket and I can feel it building.

"Pressure Drop" through my headphones--I want to say I fumbled it on, not knowing how to express the need, something as openly disgusting as soundtracking sadness--and I'm smiling. Fracturing tears. Still sobbing. Wondering if I

am ever going to feel something smaller, some reality in between nothing and everything.

The wind pocks the lake's surface precisely

like a steel drum, and I can feel

concerned eyes

on the back of my neck, the absurd

crackle of the conductor's radio

as a bearded man hands him two hundred dollars in cash for ticket fare

my headphones thumping

desperately

Coming out of winter like coming up for air

what grace that my friends can remind me, slowly

what year it is, who the

president is.

who i am and what i have done to the world

what i can, god willing, keep doing to it.

i am allowing their voices in, i keep wiping

thick orange wax free from my ears, brushing the crumbs away i keep

waking up and seeing slightly better. fewer cobwebs.

i am allowing myself to see the pain of the unexpected

i am reaching for different hands, now.

yesterday i stepped on the wrong pavestone and water

wouldn’t stop gushing out, like i tripped a

faucet.

there is so much water in the springtime.

we’re slippery bastards. we can find things we want to believe

in any season.

It feels like I wasn’t here, I think something

else was thinking for me, I think

I need to be more careful

in the winter. There is moving through it

and there is surviving, I don’t wanna have to.

There are calories involved in looking for danger, in

firing pointlessly into the night in staring fuzzily

at your own dead ends. In rejecting calls and forgetting. A thickening

tongue growing silent, trying woodenly to string words. Pinging only

with anger, cold rain on a hot engine block.

Listen I’m not love lettering depression, not triumphing the cure. That’s

someone else’s job.

just let me stand at

a belvedere. A widow’s walk. Cataloguing the grey. Noting with

great precision : did you see today

it went down at 6:56.

There are a limited number of ways to travel between Montreal and New York. The train is an exercise in luxury, creaking and rocking us all through deep woods and arcing alongside Lake Champlain. It takes 12 hours. We settle in. I have newspapers, magazines, but can only bring myself to read the old ones.

My phone has been buzzing with headlines over the last few days. A man with a machine gun has just murdered sixty people in Las Vegas and the President is throwing paper towels at people in Puerto Rico as though that will repair the water lines and the electrical grid. A well-known Québec politician has written an impassioned letter to Netflix customer service and published it.

I am newly 27, somewhat more tired than bewildered. I do not know how many times I have ridden this train in the past ten years. Countless. I am charming with the border control. We switch between English and French. He moves on to less impressive passengers and I take photos out the window : ruddy fields. Green-black branches, staccato pines. Later, the moon, rising into blushing and then mauve and then indigo clouds.

It is an accepted fact of Amtrak that the train will stop. For long moments in the quiet dark of cornfields and hayfields and fallow lands, the train stops. At times the electricity switches off, and we wait a beat for it to purr back on, sighing with relief every time. The safe return of the Wi-Fi does little to settle the Baby Boomers, who become restless and pace. It is obvious that they feel betrayed. I look out again and can’t find the moon, just black clouds.

I’m listening to music when I spot the conductor, ten or fifteen rows up. He is explaining something. I slip my headphones off.

“--and so, even if we had pulled away from the border after twenty minutes, we’d be in the same place we are now. They are working on it and it should be cleared soon, but they didn’t tell us until just now. Again, we apologize, but we’re moving now and we’ll keep moving and hopefully we’ll be there soon.”

He approaches us and I make my face a question mark. The passenger in front of me, the one who curiously told the border agent that he decided to come to Montréal “on a whim”, asks a question at the same time I do.

“These things take time,” the conductor explains to the passenger. “You gotta wait for the police, for the coroner. Usually it takes two, two-and-a-half hours to clear.”

“Someone died?” I ask, loudly. Other passengers rearrange the frustration on their faces.

“Not us,” he says, “it wasn’t one of ours...Someone got hit by a freight train. It’s--it happens sometimes.” He pauses, and then decides to add, “It’s never pretty,” for dramatic effect.

I look for the moon again, worried. Some childlike part of me wonders if it has winked out. If we have come to such a place in society as to no longer deserve the moon. But a few moments pass and the train begins to whuff and to churn its inevitable way along the rails. We cross the Champlain and the moon glimmers on back, its reflection heartless in the river.

“to men I now know are just rude, not magic”

Two Octobers, then, when I’ve left Montreal.

One four years ago, to Spain, my eyes dry and shining. One last fall, down the trampled old road to New York. Both capping years of dread and discovery, of growth and fear and late night walks and sweaty bike rides ending in strawberries cold from the fridge, of gardening and hopeful shouts and weary determination. Both to climates where I could keep the windows open all winter, shrug just-warm-enough into a thin coat and smile at the blue sky. Not freeze. Just chilled; like a custard properly set.

(One, I interject unhelpfully, run from a sinking maw of a relationship so stinking its shock waves still irritate my bones. One to a love, a comfort, to two instead of to one sitting by the window. To a lump presently warm under blankets; to a man with class to get to tomorrow.)

One, perhaps most importantly, with a Cat.

Both places with street eats, with avenues to stroll, de facto capitals with movie stars and politicians who act like movie stars. Both architecture and gardens and fashion and bluster. Both teeming; both unhappy in a fundamental way.

When transplanting a succulent, it’s necessary to leave its roots indignant for a few days, or weeks—hanging, perilous and dry, so you can clip back what’s encumbering it. So it can fit back, pertly, in the right pot.

When making custard, it’s important not to pour the milk in all at once or you get scrambled eggs. Unless you wanted scrambled eggs in the first place.

Two Easters, coming back to Montreal. One hectic and slaloming on a borrowed bicycle across town, getting stoned and eating a seder plate without saying the right prayers first, one knowing I wasn’t staying for long, one hurried hugs and unanswered texts to men I now know are just rude, not magic. One to come, one promising nothing but a bare room and a waiting table. One I can’t wait to see, one I dread seeing, one and the same.

iwriteaboutfeminism

We’re cutting taxes for the middle class. And I will tell you, we are cutting them bigly.

Donald Trump, I swear to god. (via iwriteaboutfeminism)

look i hate this man

i hate him so much. and yes, he is real bad at making sentences. and yes, his consistent failure to string together a coherent discourse is the least horrible thing about him.

but y’all know he’s saying “big league” right? Big-league.

insteadofdisappearing

i am watching you empty yourself to make room for this swallowing darkness. i am watching you play plane crash, play shrapnel, play sinking. what an unholy consumption, what an unclean way to leave.

here is a story: medusa walks into a bar. the bartender plays samson and delilah with her and cuts off all her snakes one by one but he doesn’t stop there. she has never come back to life.

you are kissing strangers and i am still trying to play savior but the only way i’ve figured out how to make this go away is if i stop listening but i can’t remember if i put cotton in my ears or you just stopped existing so loudly.

here is another story: achlys started therapy but she never took the pills and she has quite the collection now. sad girls aren’t good girls so why do we always expect them to be?

i am watching you cave in on yourself like a snowstorm, one-fourth ballerina but three-quarters tornado, all of you spinning. this is not survival. this is not the firework finale we were waiting for. this is the silent ocean after the titanic sank.

here is a story: persephone still lives underground. sometimes when she is sleeping, hades still tries to hurt her. sometimes when hades is sleeping, she still tries to scratch her way up to the real world.

i am still at home in bed, willing you to stop disappearing. i knew nothing gold could stay but i’d convinced myself you were close enough to silver, convinced myself that sitting at the bottom of a swimming pool meant you were becoming clean.

here is a story: i don’t know how this game works. i don’t know how this poem is supposed to end. i want to write the ending where i saved you, where i never let you go at all, where we rode away into the sunset on white horses with white dresses and white flowers.

here is a story: i hate the way this story goes. i still don’t know how to un-lose you. i wish days like this were cleaner. i wish it didn’t rain so much. i wish i’d never left the back door open, so many ants are getting in.

-Messiah Complex, Sarah Kate Osborn

me, to my landlord, to whom i am nervously showing the damaged refinishing in the tub : oh hey! would you like an Anemia Cookie?

landlord : ...

me : oh it doesn’t have anemia in it! It’s just, um

landlord : ....

me : ....

me : ....it has lots of iron-rich ingredients which are good if you are feeling anemic which i sometimes...do...

landlord : *wordlessly takes a cookie*

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