fia

writing, among other things

[feral-ballad]

Julia de Burgos, tr. by Jack Agüeros, from Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos; "Moments"

[Text ID: “Me, inside myself, / always waiting for something / that my mind can’t define.”]

[fiafiafia]

hummingbird funeral by… me again. Who else up feeling normal AF

[fiafiafia]

silly class assignment ! Shakespeare watch your wig!

[fiafiafia]

fat wad of hair (in the gutter) inspired by a fat wad of hair i saw in the gutter

[fiafiafia]

i can’t talk im crawling inside a fig and dying like a wasp OK!!! By ME!!

[feral-ballad]

Kate Baer, from And Yet: Poems; “Idea”

[Text ID: “I will enjoy this life. I will open it like a peach in season, suck the juice from every finger, run my tongue over my chin. I will not worry about clichés or uninvited guests peering in my windows. I will love and be loved. Save and be saved a thousand times. I will let the want into my body, bless the heat under my skin. My life, I will not waste it. I will enjoy this life.”]

[weltenwellen]

A Conversation with Richard Siken by Thomas Hobohm

[weltenwellen]

A Conversation with Richard Siken by Thomas Hobohm

[feral-ballad]

Naomi Shihab Nye, from Fuel: Poems; “Hidden”

[Text ID: "If you tuck the name of a loved one / under your tongue too long / without speaking it / it becomes blood"]

[fiafiafia]

everytime i peel a pomegranate i think hey they should make this easier but then i remember that every preparation of a pomegranate to be devoured is an exercise in Being Patient and Gentle. And a meditation

[fiafiafia]

Time

When I was small I used to curl my little buzzing body into the crooks of orange trees, my lanky legs knocking against the fruit, thick-skinned and fragrant. I used to twist my neck this way and that so I could rest my head on the tree’s twisting limbs and Catch the sunlight as it tumbled through dark waxy leaves. There I used to let myself fall totally quiet, and still, so as to become nothing, just to worry my mother. When I grew restless, the cracked clay dirt beneath my feet used to carry me across fields, worlds, and when I tripped and scraped my knees pure silvery time ran down my shins and seeped into the earth and more trees grew from my little god blood. I remember, I remember time used to catch in my eyelashes. Time used to swirl down the drain where I spat. I used to slice time into slivers, drizzle it with warm butter and honey, top it off with sugar, and eat it decadent on a star. I’m trying to say, here is youth, and here is youth bludgeoned to death and stuffed in a body bag. When everything is quiet and no one can catch me committing the horrific act of hoping, I dream up a reality where going back is possible. A knot stubborns itself in my stomach and, like a child when the party is over, I cry and cry. I think pathetic, childish things: but it’s not fair. When time makes time for me I sit with it all night. I whisper names into its open mouth. I bring my knees to my chest and feel it crashing and falling all around me, still, in mighty tidal waves of metric verse. I let it wash over me completely and rhapsodize its holy song humming in my heart. When time puddles in my palms like water, I ask it a question and try to find an answer that would fit in your mouth. Something that wouldn’t bump against the teeth or restrain the tongue. Me and time, we tear at you like blades of grass. But time tells me that as the stream bleeds into the river bleeds into the sea it all becomes love, eventually, everything down to the glitter in my bones, and time tells me I can feel it in those sudden bursts of light that surge and swell inside my ribcage with a ferocity that can only be expelled through a violent physical jolt. Time takes my head in its hands and reassures me that if I sit with it a little longer, this will all become as natural as prayer, as natural as breath.

[crushedfingers]

Snow and Dirty Rain - Richard Siken

Close your eyes. A lover is standing too close to focus on. Leave me blurry and fall toward me with your entire body. Lie under the covers, pretending to sleep, while I’m in the other room. Imagine my legs crossed, my hair combed, the shine of my boots in the slatted light. I’m thinking My plant, his chair, the ashtray that we bought together. I’m thinking This is where we live. When we were little we made houses out of cardboard boxes. We can do anything. It’s not because our hearts are large, they’re not, it’s what we struggle with. The attempt to say Come over. Bring your friends. It’s a potluck, I’m making pork chops, I’m making those long noodles you love so much. My dragonfly, my black-eyed fire, the knives in the kitchen are singing for blood, but we are at the crossroads, my little outlaw, and this is the map of my heart, the landscape after cruelty which is, of course, a garden, which is a tenderness, which is a room, a lover saying Hold me tight, it’s getting cold. We have not touched the stars, nor are we forgiven, which brings us back to the hero’s shoulders and a gentleness that comes, not from the absence of violence, but despite the abundance of it. The lawn is drowned, the sky on fire, the gold light falling backward through the glass of every room. I’ll give you my heart to make a place for it to happen, evidence of a love that transcends hunger. Is that too much to expect? That I would name the stars for you? That I would take you there? The splash of my tongue melting you like a sugar cube? We’ve read the back of the book, we know what’s going to happen. The fields burned, the land destroyed, the lovers left broken in the brown dirt. And then it’s gone. Makes you sad. All your friends are gone. Goodbye Goodbye. No more tears. I would like to meet you all in Heaven. But there’s a litany of dreams that happens somewhere in the middle. Moonlight spilling on the bathroom floor. A page of the book where we transcend the story of our lives, past the taco stands and record stores. Moonlight making crosses on your body, and me putting my mouth on every one. We have been very brave, we have wanted to know the worst, wanted the curtain to be lifted from our eyes. The dream going on with all of us in it. Penciling in the bighearted slob. Penciling in his outstretched arms. Our Father who art in Heaven. Our Father who art buried in the yard. Someone is digging your grave right now. Someone is drawing a bath to wash you clean, he said, so think of the wind, so happy, so warm. It’s a fairy tale, the story underneath the story, sliding down the polished halls, lightning here and gone. We make these ridiculous idols so we can pray to what’s behind them, but what happens after we get up the ladder? Do we simply stare at what is horrible and forgive it? Here is the river, and here is the box, and here are the monsters we put in the box to test our strength against. Here is the cake, and here is the fork, and here’s the desire to put it inside us, and then the question behind every question: What happens next? The way you slam your body into mine reminds me I’m alive, but monsters are always hungry, darling, and they’re only a few steps behind you, finding the flaw, the poor weld, the place where we weren’t stitched up quite right, the place they could almost slip right through if the skin wasn’t trying to keep them out, to keep them here, on the other side of the theater where the curtain keeps rising. I crawled out the window and ran into the woods. I had to make up all the words myself. The way they taste, the way they sound in the air. I passed through the narrow gate, stumbled in, stumbled around for a while, and stumbled back out. I made this place for you. A place for you to love me. If this isn’t the kingdom then I don’t know what is. So how would you catalog it? Dawn in the fields? Snow and dirty rain? Light brought in in buckets? I was trying to describe the kingdom, but the letters kept smudging as I wrote them: the hunter’s heart, the hunter’s mouth, the trees and the trees and the spaces between the trees, swimming in gold. The words frozen. The creatures frozen. The plum sauce leaking out of the bag. Explaining will get us nowhere. I was away, I don’t know where, lying on the floor, pretending I was dead. I wanted to hurt you but the victory is that I could not stomach it. We have swallowed him up, they said. It’s beautiful, it really is. I had a dream about you. We were in the gold room where everyone finally gets what they want. You said Tell me about your books, your visions made of flesh and light and I said This is the Moon. This is the Sun. Let me name the stars for you. Let me take you there. The splash of my tongue melting you like a sugar cube…We were in the gold room where everyone finally gets what they want, so I said What do you want, sweetheart? and you said Kiss me. Here I am leaving you clues. I am singing now while Rome burns. We are all just trying to be holy. My applejack, my silent night, just mash your lips against me. We are all going forward. None of us are going back.

[cosmicdebaser]

scenes from an italian restaurant, billy joel

introduction to my father’s house, bruce springsteen

[papayajuan2019]

the night is still young. i can do yoga and use my oil pastels. i can cut another fruit. i can write in my journal. i can make a poem. i can invite the figure outside my window in

[mongeese]

In the club reading poetryfoundation.com

[fiafiafia]

good-bye note

I

It’s hard to believe in a place like this, this town of shining gas stations and minimarts, but there are holy monuments everywhere you look. All over. Sanctums, shrines, divine altars, towering symbols of divinity and reverence, everywhere. Everywhere! Beneath the lavender glow of that street lamp on the way to your house, shining lilac and alone in rows and rows of lights colored dull white or foggy, headache yellow … the cobalt blue cross jutting out of the dirt on the side of the road, adorned in satin ribbon and never without fresh marigolds … the bakery, with its cadmium walls and humming ceiling fans and the Holy Mother keeping a watchful eye over the bread and conchas ... even the air buzzes with worship when the midnight train wails through the valley as long as you remember someone else is losing sleep over it, too. 

II

It’s been a winding, neverending summer and all the bass-boosted car rides have left my head throbbing with nostalgia. Everything once dull is now caked in a layer of hot pink craft glitter. The asphalt beneath the stinging sun sparkles just for me! Every grimy park bench is a velvet-cushioned throne! We are the queens of quarter rolls and busted Bluetooth speakers! I am the patron saint of crumpled dollar bills at the drive-thru and chipped plum nail polish and 3 a.m. sap-orange glow illuminating a face and barely mixed drinks of neon and pure sugar and signing master promissory notes in purple glitter pen because I am just a girl after all –!

But the endlessness is now ending, and everything I own is stuffed in big cardboard boxes and black trash bags, everything except my hands;  I fiddle my thumbs and decide to write, or rather, give in to the compulsion to write. Scratch the itch, make my bleak attempt at expelling my thoughts to a single page and diminishing them to mere scribbles of ink. It does not work and none of it is coherent: Something, something, angels and dust devils, something our clocks aren’t the same anymore, something something something rest stop, waiting room, new car, miles and miles and miles and you. The words swirl and swirl above my head, too murky to see through and too diaphanous to reach up and seize one without all the others crashing down in an impossible clump. 

Miraculously, one unravels itself and 

descends, 

cool and indolent

like a swaying autumn leaf 

right into my lap. 

III

The thing shapes itself into me, fifteen. Baby-faced and knotty hair the longest I’ve ever had it and those ugly shoes I refused to let go of until the one sole came clean off. I was wearing someone else’s clothes and trekking through the heat, you know that notorious valley heat that makes your skin too tight? Makes you think, I don’t need this? And all the grass is dead and yellow so of course the grass is greener on the other side? – anyway, I don’t remember why I was subjecting myself to the heat but I do remember how I ran my fingers along the cracks in the sidewalks that drop off into nothing, how I pressed my hot forehead to the crisp dew of a convenience store mini fridge. I remember gravel, scraped knees, and the perfectly fine, why-would-anyone-leave-this-here-we-should-take-it cigarettes on the gravel. I remember how I resented my being here, but at the same time knew I was standing in the middle of something ancient and undeniable. It swarmed me from all sides and made my throat tight and my hands hot. I was wading knee-deep through something with layers and layers of history; if I looked close enough, I could see the rise and fall of a gentle, steady breath. I could wrap my fingers around the spine of the thing and feel every vertebra. I felt it in the creaking of the stairs, the routine picking of the almond and orange trees, and the inscrutable shared looks that cut straight through me like I wasn’t a person, but a translucent cloth loosely draped over a name. There was nothing for me here, nothing of substance, and all of my dreams were of places I didn’t recognize. 

IV 

Somewhere between then and now, something shifted. Soft, slow, so that I didn’t realize things were different until one day, I noticed a euphonic chord of rightness gently ringing through the few, rare silences I found myself in. It was during those moments of quiet when I was separate from the world – alone but never lonely – that I started running into people. All the time, in my own special way. 

Not necessarily physical run-ins, and I’ll explain this: there’s something eternalistic to it — here is so cramped that the edge of every hour overlaps with the next. Today and tomorrow are always bleeding together. So in some sense, wherever I stood I knew you were standing right there with me. Somewhere in the past or future, you occupied the space I was currently existing in, or at least one day would. I’d be doing something as insignificant as sorting through avocados in the produce section and bam! I’m hit with this ineffable feeling that fills me with an eye-watering conviction, telling me you’re near in that hard-to-place, transcendental way. I felt it gleaming around every corner, down every road, solid and sturdy and never called into question. Simply there, beyond the shadow of a doubt, no way it could be anywhere else (are you beginning to see how this could be the start of a religion?). 

Now when I look away, the image is still burned in my retinas. When I close my eyes, the haloed form flashes against the black of my eyelids, like when someone pulls their hand away from yours, and you can still feel their warmth tingling in your open palm long after they’re gone. Or, when you find yourself in an empty space that was once occupied and you are acutely aware of this, though you’re not sure by what, you only feel the distinct absence of it dancing in the air. 

V  

Allow me to paint a portrait of a house, changed:

The passing sight of it used to spark pure light within my chest, fondness all over my face. There, there.

There, where you made it your own in whatever small ways you were permitted. Trinkets marching along the windowsill, pictures of all the things that make your heart jump blue-puttied to the walls, love-battered books slumped against each other on the nightstand, your mother’s naivety displayed on the dresser, your father’s sharpness stuffed in the closet. A perfect model of the inside of your head, as I like to imagine it. 

But now the house I drive by is just a house, something once rich with depth now completely flattened, and yes, it’s inhabited all the same but the windows are different now. Feet pad against the floor every morning and night but none of them match your unique rhythm. The plants out back stay watered but never by you. Where do you put a feeling like that, when the person you’re supposed to give it to is no longer within arm’s reach? What do you do when you, too, are contributing to that ache of goneness? How can you treat it like a simple fact of life when there’s a knife twisting in your gut with every mile between you and the place you begrudgingly call home? And my friends and I, we all keep bear-hugging and repeating, It’ll be okay. It’ll be different, but it will be okay. It will be different. 

I leave tomorrow.

The simple sweetness of it all leaves me aching for something more violent. Give me a stabbing final crescendo, give me words hovering and trembling above our heads until they burst, give me hissing silence in the aftermath. Broken glass. Exit stage left. 

I remember a conversation I had a lifetime ago when I still wasn’t allowed to sit in the passenger’s seat:

“And then,” Dad explains, hand on the wheel, eyes on me, 

“Like that,” he snaps, 

“You’re older. And you’re wishing you weren’t. Like that.” 

He snaps again. I blink. 

Like that. 

[lunchtime79-blog]

this laundromat was the most beautiful place i have ever been. i have been 2 the sistine chapel