I'm glad you're not as sad anymore because as beautiful as that second poem was, I don't want u to ever be that sad again because u are the most special flower
you think i haven't noticed
the way your shoulders fall around you
like an avalanche when,
by some mistake,
i speak too loudly-
when i upset the delicate balance between gentle and abyss;
but, my darling,
i have held your hand too tightly
not to notice your crumbling knuckles.
i am quite familiar with
your sandman touch and ocean-breeze breath
but surely you must know you are not seashells;
you do not crumble when abandoned and outgrown
by those who only carry you on their backs while you are needed.
my darling, i know.
i see you searching dirty sidewalks for jagged pieces of
the sky you expect to fall every moment
and i see your lips smudged with
black coffee you sweeten with rattlesnake venom
(yes, darling, i taste it when we kiss)
and you-
you have tried not to make a home out of me
but in quiet moments i feel your fingernails leaving skid-marks
on the inside of my rib-cage
you have left yourself here like a signature
and when i begin to test the silence it is
your voice dripping from my lips,
my tongue a hostage,
and darling, i do not want it back.
i will crawl from my skin and make a home of seashells
if it only means you will notice beautiful weather again;
because, darling,
if the sky has not fallen by now-
if the mountains still stand, if
our voices haven't pushed them to the sea,
if you are still breathing by now,
it means there is air left-
so fill your lungs. let grief mingle with sea salt and sulfur.
let your spine uncurl while you engage in a battle with gravity,
and let yourself win
(because you have never been anything short of miraculous).
let your weight crush your plush living-room furniture
then brush aside the screws that come loose-
there will be time, later, to deal with those-
but now, my darling,
now it is time to be swallowed by
goose-down throw pillows and fleece blankets
and woolen socks you knitted yourself one winter
and your own wet breath
now, it is time to crumble-
collapse-
darling,
you have never been an avalanche.
you are the immovable bedrock beneath.
and when the time comes for the sky to fall
it will be you
it rushes
to meet.
I am always in search of ways to begin.
I began soft, small,
with skin beautiful in every
way conceivable-
balled fists, crumpled nose, squinted eyes
like we all did.
I began by riding the wave of the explosion
that shook time awake,
that created something out of nothing in a way
I have not been able to emulate since.
My molecules were born from chaos, from empty space,
I landed here by serendipity
like we all did.
I began the day I switched elementary schools
for the fourth time
and showed up in overalls and unbrushed hair.
Later that day, my mother asked how school was
and I replied, "Fine," then burst into tears.
Four months later, when I switched schools again,
I cried the day they made me leave.
I am always in search of ways to begin.
Clear canvas, new paints, new brushes;
sometimes there is nothing to see until I build it,
and sometimes happiness feels like
a home-cooked meal a little too heavily spiced,
and sometimes my loneliness feels like a pillow fort;
my sanity, abstract art;
my health, a homemade birthday card;
my friendships, a teetering tower of blocks.
I am my own maintenance man. I do my own repairs.
Because, yes, my skin may be beautiful
but my blood is not.
When I break I find no glory in staying broken.
Yes, I have broken.
Yes, I have written, sometimes,
to distract myself from the bleeding,
written bad poetry and stories and newspaper articles and songs
and scripts and picture books and letters.
Yes, I have written suicide notes.
Yes, plural. It was not bravery that made me tear them up
but it wasn't cowardice either.
Yes, sometimes I am blinded by the city lights
I have always loved
and I have to take the train home with my eyes closed,
and I listen to its unsteadiness on the tracks
and I think it feels like I felt learning to ice skate
except no one is waiting to catch a falling train.
Yes, I've been lost and maybe I am still
and maybe no one wants to tell me I'm following the wrong map.
Yes, I am lost and
yes, I am beautiful and
yes, I am better now than before and
yes, yes, I am still in search of ways to begin.
I have grown tired of endings.
The kids in the middle school call him The Soldier.
They quiet down from a mile away when they see him at the far end of the hallway near the janitor’s closet. They watch in silence as he walks, crooked, halting, pulling a garbage can or two behind him, leaning heavily towards his good leg. The way his jaw is bent makes it look like he’s half-smiling all the time; one corner of his mouth is always pulled at a sharp angle up towards his ear. The kids know better than to trust it.
The old custodian, the Soldier, he remembers youth and walking straight-backed. He remembers a time before the bullet in his knee. When he thinks back on life before deployment it’s like a dream, like the delusions fed to children before they’re ready for life to begin. He remembers his hair shorter than it’s ever been since, in a uniform cleaner than anything he’s worn since, with a girl more beautiful and faithful than she has been since.
Dreams don’t last like nightmares do, though. Now he goes to bed in his apartment alone at night, every night, and before long he is dragged from sleep by screams, by the ghosts and shells of bombs long exploded. He startles awake before it is light to a bullet in his knee.
The kids in the middle school call him the Soldier. They only say it in whispers after he’s walked past already; they know better than to let him hear. The kids in the middle school have seen the way his cavernous eyes darken further than it seemed possible, seen the unscarred side of his face curl downwards into a scowl seemingly cut there by a cruel, sharp knife, heard the guttural sound more like a snarling bear than a man roll from his throat like thunder. They don’t want him to hear. They’ve made that mistake before.
“Hey, Soldier!” a boy bellowed. (Or did, sometimes).
The Soldier turned quickly, stumbled painfully on his crooked leg as he turned to face the kid. (It was more than one, at more than one time, but they all had friends, and they all grinned straight). The kid saluted, clicked his heels together, drew himself up taller and straighter than the Soldier could. His friends laughed.
He never said anything at first. It was always the dark eyes, the lowered brows. The Soldier had a habit of spitting before he yelled, but the yelling always came. The kids in the middle school never remember what he said and it doesn’t matter. They remember the face contorted with rage, the crumpled fists, the mouth wide as if a cannon had blown it open. His voice sounded like a semi-automatic rifle, and the words felt like bullets, digging deep into middle-school skin. The kids remember the teachers coming to pull them backwards away from him, not getting too close, pulling them backwards into the class to teach them about wars past in a different way. A way with more tact, and care, and softness. The kids in the middle school remember the names of the battles won; they always forget about the battles lost. They guess that the lost battles all look like the Soldier.
The teachers in the middle school never speak a word about it. They don’t try to guess what it was like in the desert. Sometimes they glance sideways at him, study him like a poisonous insect they don’t want to get too close to, wonder how he happened. They’ll never ask. It might be best. They figure he wouldn’t remember anyway.
The kids in the middle school stay away from the Soldier. They do not know they are building his battlefield.
The Soldier’s walk home is one without sunlight. He keeps his clean shoes clothed in shadows.
There’s a coffee shop he hasn’t visited in twenty years on the corner three streets down from the middle school. It has a red-and-white striped awning so old that the name, once printed in white, is worn to a point of illegibility. Sometimes, he passes by and thinks maybe, he should go in and ask about the name and get a cup of coffee- black- but the closer his feet take him the more he sees Claire’s face in the windows. They used to go there together. She’s always smiling when he remembers her. She used to paint her lips red like cherries, he thinks, like roses, but he only thinks that because the last time he saw her was before the war, before the color red stopped reminding him of soft things: the curve from her waist to her hips; strawberries; her gloves in the wintertime; the teapot on the gas stove in their apartment; her cheeks, blushing; her shoes when they went dancing; her fingernails; her lips; her lips; her lips. Red, he thinks, is sharp now. Red always means something loud, something fast, something lost in the end, and he thinks maybe both ways are right. Both are the same.
So he walks by the coffee shop and keeps his feet in the shadows.
There are other things in the shadows, too. People. The Soldier can pick out the veterans by the loneliness that sits beside them, and when he looks into their eyes- which he rarely does- it’s like looking through a window into his own apartment where he lives alone. It could have been me, he thinks, the Soldier in the sea of other soldiers, and he drops change into the tin cans beside the hopeless. It could have been him. But then again, it could have been them with the girlfriend who left them for some asshole in a suit and tie while they were halfway across the world, struggling to survive, with a picture of her in their pocket. It could have been them with the shattered kneecap, the constant limp and the pain with every step. It could have been them with the nightmares; with the shaking and the cold sweat and the sitting upright in bed alone at three in the morning; with the broken lightbulb over the kitchen table that they wouldn’t bother to fix because they always eat in front of the TV anyway; with a back that curves sideways and isn’t good for anything but hurting; with the pictures of Claire on the mantel that they can’t look at but can’t take down either; with the kids in the middle school who create a bubble of quiet when they are close and then laugh when they’re out of earshot; with the unreturned calls from a psychologist who eventually gave up; with the suspicious sideways looks from girls on the sidewalk who clutch their purses tighter when they walk by; with the occasional letters from the US government piling up in the trash; with the gun kept carefully beside their bed; with the anxiety; with the dirty windows they won’t touch because it was always Claire who cleaned them before and maybe they still think she’ll change her mind and come back; with the silent phone and the empty journals and nothing on TV and the socks with holes in them and the dirty fingernails and the empty apartment. But, he thinks, maybe it is them, too.
So he drops change into the tin cans beside the hopeless. And he walks the rest of the way home in shadow, watching his clean shoes. And when he gets there, he unlocks the door with the old brass key in his pocket and he pushes the door open, hard, because it sticks. And he walks in and locks the door tightly behind him. He doesn’t turn on the light.
The last time he saw Claire, she was smiling with tears in her eyes and the Soldier was dressed in a newly pressed and ironed uniform. She had stood in the narrow, crumbling doorway of their apartment building while he had turned to walk away, but she had pulled him in for one last embrace while the taxi driver leaned on the horn. She had slipped something small into his chest pocket: a little framed photograph of herself, as the Soldier would discover later.
“Remember me,” she had said, “whatever you do, please. Write me letters.”
“Remember me,” she had said. So he did.
“Write me letters,” she had said. So he did,
She never answered the letters. Maybe they had stopped being delivered. Maybe the address had changed.
Dear Claire. I’m here and I’m safe and I love you.
Dear Claire. It’s hot here. The guys are all right but most of the time they’re real quiet. I think we’ve lived together too long already. Imagine that, huh? We’re never gonna be like that, not when I come home. I dunno if I ever told you this but I’m gonna marry you when I come back. Maybe that week. I dunno how I could possibly wait longer. Missing you already hurts like hell. I look at that picture of you every day. I love you.
Dear Claire. I’m so goddamn tired all the time. I don’t think the war is about what they’re telling us it’s about, and you can feel it. The guys wanna go home. I wanna go home, too. It sure would be nice to hear from you, Claire. I love you.
Dear Claire. Bombs don’t sound so bad from a distance. It’s like popcorn, kind of. Up close it’s a hell of a lot worse, but I haven’t gotten too close. At least, not yet. It’s funny- I miss a lot of things from home but I sure as hell don’t miss popcorn. I never want to have popcorn again for as long as I live. I still miss you, though. Please write back. I love you.
Dear Claire. I’m not the only guy not getting letters back and the rest of them are making me nervous. I’m sick of being nervous. Please write back. I love you.
Dear Claire. The letters aren’t sending, maybe. I know it’s a mistake, so I’ll send them until the goddamn post office starts working again. Please write back. I love you.
Dear Claire. Please write back.
Dear Claire. I wonder how you’d react if you got a telegram about me. I can’t imagine you’d be too fucking distraught. Please write back.
Dear Claire. I still have that picture of you in my pocket, right where you put it the day that I left. I still look at it every day. It’s hard as hell to love you right now, while the fighting’s getting closer and I haven’t gotten any letters from you, but I still do. I still do. You know I haven’t even written my mom? I guess she must be worried sick about me. Tell her I miss her, will you? Please write back.
Dear Claire. I keep remembering funny little things from before. We used to go dancing together, and I can’t dance but you always looked so beautiful. I could have just watched you forever, honest. And you used to wear these shiny red shoes dancing, and I’d watch your feet like they were fire. I don’t know if I ever told you, Claire, but I really loved those shoes.
Dear Claire. I’m shot. Goddamn bullet in my knee. Can’t even walk right. Maybe you haven’t missed me while I’m gone but when I come back do you think you could love a cripple? Please write back.
Dear Claire. I’m coming home soon. I can’t fight if I can’t walk right, I guess. I don’t care. This is the last letter I’m sending. I’ll be home soon. I hope I’ll see you.
It was raining the day that the Soldier came home to no one at the airport. He hailed a taxi and paid before asking the price with everything he had left in his pants pocket. The apartment building stood stark and lonely against a raging sky. On the doorstep, as if waiting for him, was a pair of red patent-leather dancing shoes, worn-out and gleaming dully in the cold mid-afternoon light.
watch the way we cross streets together-
hand in hand,
though you're far too old for that now
and your fingers sometimes try to squirm
away from mine.
i just hold on tighter.
my sister,
you walk too quickly for your own good
and i worry you tempt fate-
or bicycles, or drivers.
you insist on staying
small/out of sight/compressed
even though the light held in you threatens to split you open,
an over-inflated balloon
about to pop.
my sister,
i have seen the suns in you escape;
i have seen them dissolve without your
universe of a body to live in.
i know you watch every disappearance.
i know you notice the spaces they leave.
i know you're lying about it-
my sister,
i know you're expecting advice.
grow.
that's it. you are not big enough.
i see you broken, i see you stretched
too thin/too young/too vulnerable/too small/too small
and here is my advice:
you can contain the sun.
my sister,
i see you sit smaller in your seat so others
can admire their voices loud
(above yours).
i see you make yourself mouse.
my sister,
i see you mountain.
i see you crashing stream. i see you every color of the wind.
i hear you when everyone else leaves the room
and it's just us, quiet,
our breath and tea cups.
my sister,
i see you, love overflowing.
my advice:
grow.
your love is too precious to spill.
i have seen the puddles at your feet grow dirty with
dust/ash/time/neglect.
my sister,
i see you in fights with every reflection
but don't you know that fighting mirrors will only shatter glass?
and don't you know that fighting still water will drown you?
i know you're angry. i know it hurts
and overflows and spills into
fists/exploding suns/one bursting heart.
i know how small you are. i've seen you confined, compressed.
my advice:
grow.
you can contain every kind of fire
you can create, if only
you can create space
for oxygen.
i just filled a journal. cover to cover, no blank pages, no empty space, for the first time in my whole life. it took exactly one year and one day to do but i did it
I remember the headstones, the names written in a language I never learned to read.
I remember burning without light.
I remember my hands were darker then, and I watched them twist, hands like snakes, like the striped cylinder outside the barber shop. I didn't see her but
I remember her- but not her face. She was ghost to me, incorporeal, she was vapor, smoke.
I remember my hands, twisted, reaching, snakes without prey.
I remember works spoken in a language I never learned to listen to. Louder than I was used to.
I remember her hands, soft, gentle, I remember my broken bones sharp against her skin.
I remember the graves didn't match with us. I remember words in a language I don't understand.
I remember fruit. They dangled like Christmas ornaments, like fairy lights.
I remember summertime. It was summertime.
I remember words like needles. I shut my eyes to block out the blood but I could still hear her. Her voice moved, lurched, strange, uncomfortable.
I remember headstones.
I remember mirrors.
I remember we were on top of a mountain and our feet never touched the ground.
I remember silent.
I remember loud.
I remember both, at once, maybe, maybe one on top of the other.
The way a universe is created is this:
first, there is nothing.
Then, all of a sudden, there is everything.
At first,
everything exists together, a heaping ball of light and mass called
a singularity.
Then, the universe explodes.
You see, we exist in the explosion.
Each piece of us is trying
to escape, to hurtle into space, to fill nothing with something.
You see,
my body is too small for me. Sometimes,
I think I am splitting at the seams.
Then I remember I am the universe,
exploding.
You see, we exist post-singularity and the universe is expanding.
Each moment,
every particle that has ever existed is,
on average,
more alone than it has ever been before
in the whole
of the history
of time.
I'm only trying to say that holding hands is important.
I'm only trying to explain that the tightest hug is always the best.
I'm only trying to say that the hardest part of a kiss is pulling away.
That's when the singularity ends.
That's when the universe explodes.
You see, the amount of usable energy throughout the whole of space
is decreasing every moment.
The tendency of everything is towards chaos.
We will exist when the galaxies crumble,
burnt out, we will be
recycled, rebirthed, renewed,
we will die many times before all energy is gone.
This is not friendship.
This is not love.
This is rebellion.
These embraces are spit in the eyes of the laws that govern everything that is,
this is me saying no,
this is taking energy back.
If I could die in the heat of a star's embrace,
I would run out with my arms open, run into the sky, through
nothing
back into
something.
You see, when I run, I keep running.
When I burn, I keep burning.
Call it inertia.
When i enter an embrace, I hold everything together in my arms,
I draw the whole world close, I become
a second singularity.
Then, the universe explodes.
You can tell when cranberry sauce is done
by the way the air will smell like the first cold day
in November.
You’ll know that it’s perfect when
your grandmother pours it into mason jars
that you hold still with determined hands
and discover that the pan is burnt.
First, get the cranberries.
Your grandmother will tell you when you’ve found the right bag.
She’ll hold two bags beside each other
and you’ll point to the redder one, but you’ll end up buying both
because one won’t be enough.
Your job is carrying the bags to the counter and when you wait in line,
you’ll ask for chocolate from the dish beside the register.
Your grandmother will mess up your hair and say she’s got chocolate for you at home,
but she’ll buy it for you anyway.
You will finish it before you reach the house.
Next, you have to find the right pot.
When you hold it up to the stained yellow kitchen light bulbs
it will gleam like the moon
(and will have the spots as well).
It isn’t quite clean yet- it never is- so you scrub it with the rough side of the kitchen sponge
until your grandmother messes up your hair
and says that now, it gleams
in the yellow kitchen light bulbs
like the sun.
Turn on the stove.
In the pot, stir together a cup of water and a cup of sugar
until the water is on the verge of boiling.
Try not to let the sugar burn the pot
(but don’t try too hard-
scrubbing the burnt pan with the back of a sponge
is half the fun
when you get to the end).
Pour in the cranberries.
At first there will only be water
with cranberries floating like bubbles at the surface.
Then they will begin to pop.
As the sauce gets thicker, stir,
keeping the sauce from sticking to the edges.
Trade the spoon back and forth,
your grandmother to you.
She will tell you about how she learned the recipe from her own grandmother,
and how she likes the way you make it now better-
you make it sweeter than before.
You will have the story memorized by mid-afternoon
and you will remember it long after your grandmother forgets.
Once the cranberries have burst, taste the sauce.
It will be too bitter.
Add cinnamon and nutmeg, and taste it again.
A few tries later and you will taste the cranberry sauce, done,
and it will dance through your mouth and drip on your chin and slide through your bloodstream
to tingle at your fingertips.
Your grandmother will spoon a heap right into her mouth
and smile as it warms her cold bones.
You will find yourself wishing you had waited until summer.
Later, you will be glad you didn’t.
You will hold the mason jars steady while your grandmother pours the sauce.
There is far too much for the Thanksgiving dinner
(which will only be you, your parents, and your grandmother
because everyone else is away).
It doesn’t matter, though.
You will scrub the burnt pot smooth until it gleams like the sun,
and she will tell you about her childhood and her grandmother
and how cranberry sauce tasted seventy years ago
and you will remember the stories
long after your grandmother
forgets.
she said to me:
"we are the nowhere-goers, the walkers of dead-end streets."
i never understood the tension in her fingers
curled around a cup of coffee.
she used to hold my hand like it was her only anchor.
when i held her, she would fold into me like,
suddenly, the universe had disappeared, dragging her along with it.
i could never keep a grip on her for long.
she said to me:
"we keep talking even when there is nothing left to say."
i did all the talking. i mumble when i speak,
but at least i mumble poetry, at least words bleed from my skin
and flood my cheeks with color.
she paints self-portraits of ghosts in gray scale,
it's incredible, really-
they look just like her.
she said to me:
"you don't have to do this, you know."
when she would spend long nights screaming and sobbing
about boys who would never remember her name,
only the curves of her body,
i was the one who held her hair back in the bathroom.
she is the reason i do not go to parties--
they are never parties by the time they are over.
i think that if sadness is a bullet,
she is the gun. of course i have to do this.
of course i have to do this.
she said to me:
"i am the same as they are."
she had my trust. she had all my trust.
i never doubted her for a second,
even when her blood swam in alcohol and her eyes clouded,
even when her fingernails left marks on my arms
because the universe was disappearing and i,
i was her only anchor.
i never doubted her for a second.
she said to me:
"you're wasting too much time on me."
she said to me:
"i am never going to get better, nothing is ever going to get better. can't you feel the sky collapsing? don't things turn to dust when you touch them?"
when we were small, we would race along the beach and she would beat me every time.
when we went sailing at summer camp,
i would fall asleep on the bow of the boat
and she would take the rigging in one hand and the tiller in the other
and chase circles around the edges of the lake.
in temple, on saturday mornings, she would sit next to me
and we'd whisper to each other in between
the prayers, the blessings, the music.
she said to me:
"i don't believe in god any more."
i have never felt more like a child than i did at that moment.
when i went to shabbat morning services that saturday,
i could feel the anger
burning from the empty seat beside me.
i stayed silent between prayers.
she said to me:
"i'm fine, i don't nee your help any more."
she doesn't answer my phone calls.
i see a lot of pictures of her, now, with people who are not me,
a lot of older boys and pretty girls.
she is a nowhere-goer, a walker of dead-end streets.
i can see it in the photographs.
she said to me:
"i don't need your help any more."
i never doubted her for a second.
she doesn't answer my phone calls.
I hate the way it scratches at my busy mind and blends thoughts away until they bleed into a rough and trembling expanse of gray and gray and gray. I hate that shouts flash white, that they clear my mind in a moment and snatch the world away as if it were a shoe and I a disobedient dog. Sometimes I wish that I were deaf, just for a few hours, so that I could focus on something for more than a while. But silence is no better. I hate the silence as well as the sounds. I hate the emptiness it brings, the sudden mask of black when you realize, for a moment, the noise is gone.
I lied. I haven’t always hated noise.
I’ve always hated silence. I hate the way it gnaws at the inside of my ears, the way its hands drag my attention backwards over my shoulder, nervous against my will. When I was younger, I hated going to bed. I was never afraid of monsters, of course; I was brave, I thought, brave and naive and stupid. I wasn’t afraid of anything. I was afraid of nothing- which, of course, is completely different. I hated when my mother would leave my room at night after she brushed my forehead with a goodnight kiss. I dreaded the brass click of the doorknob and the low wooden clack of the door in its frame, but most of all I hated the silence that inescapably followed. It was so full of nothing that it suffocated me. It choked me. It dragged my eyelids apart until my dry eyes screamed against it in protest. I would yell for my mother just so my voice would break the silence and she would come rushing back in that calm, shuffling way that mothers always seem to rush, and she’d switch on the light and suddenly the air breathed again. There was the cadence of night; cars scraping by outside and a ticking clock and the hum of the heat. My mother would feel under my bed for monsters. We both knew there was nothing there, but she’d do it anyway, and kiss my forehead again. Before she left my room she would switch on a night-light and leave me with the dull glow of noise, and then I would be able to sleep.
I’ve always hated silence and now I hate noise too.
Sometimes I wish I were deaf, just for a few hours. I wonder if the deaf feel silence the way I do. I feel silence like my mother has left the room and it is dark and there are no colors left. I hate that in my new apartment, the curtains keep the night out and the silence in like an electrified fence around a cattle pasture and I am the lost dog that somehow got herself trapped inside with the cows. Are they hostile?...maybe not. But they are bigger than I am.
And I feel noise like a dirty whiteboard eraser. My thoughts will be scattered, confused, but I will never forget that there was something there to begin with because a stain will always be left behind.
I lied. I haven’t always hated noise but I’ve never hated sound- which, of course, is completely different. I hate that no sound has ever been as soft and careful with my whiteboard thoughts as the sounds of the night-light my mother switched on when I was a child. I hate that there is no sound as pale as the goodnight kisses she used to leave on my forehead, how they danced from my forehead to my toes in swirls of pastel and how she never saw them. I hate that she never saw me, that she never understood the white of the shouts and the gray of the humming and the black of the silence and all the colors of everything. She never saw anything but the silence. I hate how her blindness made her deaf, too. I’ve always hated silence.
On days when it rains, when the constant city buzz of headlight-blaring yellow taxicabs is almost drowned out by the knocking of droplets on our roof, or on nights when the stars are visible through the foggy haze of street-lamps, I can sometimes hear my dad humming Beethoven’s 9th off-key to himself in the kitchen. Those are the good days. Those are the days when my muscles don’t cramp and curl up like middle-school fists before a fight, when I don’t feel my heart and lungs compress like they are trying to swallow themselves. On normal days, sweltering sunny ones where mid-summer sunlight burns through even the thickest curtains, getting out of bed in the morning feels like pulling an ancient oak from the ground with my bare hands. I can only think about how terrified I am of opening those curtains to let the light stream across the tiled kitchen floor. So I live for the rain. I live in the dark. I live alone but for my father, who hums when the stars wink and flirt or when the rain comes tumbling down.
I stumbled out of my room one damp morning (one of the good days) in mid-September to the heavy scent of burning tobacco from my father’s wooden pipe. In the kitchen, pots and pans clattered against each other and the marble countertops as he took them out of the overcrowded cabinets and stuck them back in haphazardly. Something suspicious and vaguely orange fizzled on the stove, spitting sparks and oil out to mix with the scent of tobacco smoke. He didn’t notice when I stepped, barefoot, onto the unwashed kitchen floor into the midst of his beautiful disaster. The pipe dangled from between his stained teeth. He hummed symphonies to himself, tasting masterpieces on his lips, working in absentminded bliss with low eyebrows and busy hands.
name me monster for i am ugly,
i will hide, alone, until they drag me out into the sun and make my eyes burn.
i will try to break the cages they make for me (always a little
too small).
name me actress for i am ugly,
i will be washed out under the stage lights
until i paint myself a new face above my own- a brighter one,
with red lipstick and golden eyelids (but,
you know, my eyes don’t glitter like the make-up does
but, you know, the audience can’t tell.
they will sing and laugh and clap along
besides.)
name me sister for i am ugly,
i am the role model who taught you to stay inside when rain threatens
(but, you know, it never seemed like a threat before).
i am the blood you find in the bathroom sink before it has had time to dry.
i am the lock on the door that keeps you out of the bedroom we share.
(i am sorry that my sleepless nights were yours, too).
name me nothing for i am ugly,
i am ignored by strangers on sidewalks. i am ignored otherwise.
did you know that when you walk in darkness you do not
cast a shadow? i do not cast a shadow.
i yell my name into canyons.
i yell nothing into canyons. i hear it reverberate back.
name me everything for i am ugly,
i am a hundred thousand whirling parts that stick out in every
direction. i cannot help it,
i will try to break the cages they make for me.
i do not love. i am above,
i am confusing and exciting and ugly.
name me beautiful.
i fill the universe up but cannot fill my own shoes- r.z.
areudirty
blakekathryn
annaxmalina
kianamaiart
snowghoul
izzy806
baratheonpilled
