The Collaborative Genius of Lioness and Bird

It's us! Lioness and Bird on our new and improved Collab blog. Read, submit, enjoy, ask, whatever your heart desires. Much love, Lioness and Bird.

[wide-eyed-lioness]

Mountain Glitter

There’s a lightning bug trapped in my room It’s the first one I’ve seen all summer They always remind me of fairies or of lost souls coming to say hello in the dark Blinking an unknown message Reflecting off every smooth surface I use to trap them in mason jars To show my family what I could do And to admire them as they lit up my sister and I’s room On the side of the mountain they glitter Sparkling over the ripples in the creek I swim in And comfort me Reminding me that I am home.

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Things never said that demand to be felt

truth

night wind

the way salmon swim upriver together

starlings gathering in flocks at dusk

Aurora Borealis

the way the sky looks w/minimal light pollution

when you cry & they start crying w/you

lipstick on coffee cups

the way bears know when to hibernate

funerals

cold that penetrates your chest & throat

the comatose state when you’re right on the edge of sleep where thoughts sort out

the physicality of empathy

river water creating rapids over rocks

toes tucked into the riverbed

when poetry does not make sense

ache from poetry that does not make sense

winter trees

your fingers trailing mountains of my spine

the way we never know who’s at the door

but we let them in anyway

trees waking up

your sleepy hands

your wide-awake hands

this body in relation to yours

how the heart beats alone, fighting always

birds flapping against the kitchen window

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Ars Poetica (fragility)

7.125 billion beating hearts and not one can express to the other the muchness of pinprick sky peeking through naked winter branches

not one could build a bridge across the gorge between sunflower kisses and ones borne of September

not one would be willing to tell you where their love goes on holiday, and whether it is

sun on mountaintops or stained glass ground into sand or the way not one can draw a perfect circle without help

the one in this chest wants to tell you that ours is whispering with no light; it is a box marked FRAGILE THIS SIDE UP that keeps getting tossed on its head

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Why We Are the way We Are, Rachel Anne Morris

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Ephemeral

New York left me burnt out like

the cigarette hole in the knee of my jeans,

like the contents of the envelope that held

most parts of my dog (not the important parts).

I moved back to the mountains, back outside,

back to a reality of breathless birds and

pygmy daisies dotting the backyard, sky and

earth. There are so many things for me in

Appalachia that don’t exist in the spaces between

coffee shops and stock-still apartment buildings.

There are so many reasons to be. There are

so many reasons to be, and most of them

are green and open and smell like dirt.

The gaps between teeth and fingers and rocks

on the riverbed make up this skeleton, this

wayward muscle structure. Our bodies pulse

with light; ethereal goddesses are we.

In New York, we were white noise.

Here we are the loudest, the brightest,

the beacons burning through the air,

fireflies blazing with the knowledge that

something’s gotta give, everything’s gotta give,

we all gotta give to feel.

We bite into fresh tomatoes that we stole from

the neighbor’s farm, sticky with sweat and

yellow seeds, stoplights on the corner of 49th.

We know it all. We are the rebels of the

wind gales and bug-bitten legs.

We are so real I can taste it in the water from

the Maury. We are so real that we blend in

to the light. The sun stains us, but we are fast.

We are birds.

We are light.

We are.

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What was left, or What they did to us, Rachel Anne Morris

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DIY Being: a tutorial, Rachel Anne Morris

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voicemail, Rachel Anne Morris

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The cacti on my windowsill are better at being people than I am.

Most of my poems start with “I remember” which is superfluous because all memories are poems without trying to be. This poem has a honeysuckle heart, a mountaineer- that-dies-at-the-top heart, it drips only once but oh my it’s gold on the inside of ten-year-old cheek, it climbs only once but

                                 m                                       y

           g                        od

the view                     the heat lightning in this heart                     is hyperbole for what happens when                     it senses danger & also                                                   love.

                    the thunder                                 m                         yg

                                                                       od mygod

                                                                                the thunder does not                                                                                 rage                     the thunder, my god,                           how she whispers,

how she wakes us so.

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Submerged in something that’s not quite sleep and not quite not-sleep. Breathing my name, or something that’s shaped like and smells like my name, into the creases of my palms: Arthur, Arthur. I could make a mix CD with the sounds I hear at 6:30 in the morning. I’m definitely a morning person. The sky is perpetually grey here. It makes me feel grey, and not in the way that you think feeling grey feels. Blurry but alive and thankful. I’m perpetually playing in the dirt. Always. Always. There’s something in me. Something twisted and deep and it might be blue but it might be violet or soft, pulsating orange or maybe all three. Mary’s hand feels so pretty. It looks rough and mannish and callous, but it feels pretty. Do you know what I mean? Her fingernails are usually long and crooked just like she is.

            I remember being some kind of young and watching my Grandfather get on a train to leave for the countryside. I remember his heavy, withered hand, waving, always waving, and I remember wanting to be the spaces between his fingers so I could make him be okay. Not just feel okay, but be okay. I don’t remember crying, but I wanted to be the spaces between his fingers, and I remember running and running and running and running away from the train station and dropping to my knees in the sand. You know how sand feels pressing and rolling over itself underneath heavy knees in jeans? That’s what it feels like. That’s what sitting here with Cameron and Mary feels like. It’s satisfying. It’s real and right and just. I think the miles of endless flat are what made him miss the hills and trees and everything green. Grandpa needs green like I need grey, like I needed to be the spaces between his fingers. My heart is running and running and my sentences are running into each other, people on the streets of cities I’ve never seen nor longed for, brushing sleeve against sleeve in the cold.

            A sudden gasp of wind splays my hair across my forehead. Mary starts. She props herself up on her elbows next to Cameron. Cameron runs his fingers through her hair.

            “What time is it?”

            I shrug. A strip of yellow-orange sits on the fence of the horizon over the grey mass that may or may not be sea. I need to be that just as much as I needed to be Grandfather’s finger-spaces. Be good, be good. Always. I think there’s a ghost-smile tugging at the corners of my lips because Mary laughs and says:

            “Boy, you’re really something.”

            She hops up and Cameron follows. I push myself up without brushing the sand off my pants. I want evidence. I want it to show up everywhere like sand tends to do. The yellow-orange pulsates outward, covering half of the grey with glow. Be good.

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Humility

There is a photograph on the wall opposite the back door, stiff, not hanging but rather sticking, just so, in a way that lets you know its importance. A portrait: a long-haired acquaintance that this house has long since forgotten; a pale-cheeks-with-crooks-for-bottom-teeth portrait, clean- fingernailed hands floating over each other across a prop; a say-cheese- or-else portrait; a silent-lamb portrait, the epitome of humility; a picture of a me for a mother who wanted nothing short of excellence; a picture of a me for a me who wanted nothing more than to give that mother nothing short of excellence.

It is here, just as you cross the threshold that you see this trophy-child, this child labeled “smart,” this child labeled “gifted,” this child labeled “pretty,” this child labeled “a good kid,” this child labeled “perfect,”

this child.

This child is this child and this child is weeping, weeping, this child falling to its knees, this child, who used to be its own catcher in the rye, this child is here, falling, sweating, curls flat-ironed straight and freckles powdered, this child falling to its knees, wrists bound tight in endless prayer, “Please let me get A’s.” This child pressing its humility-soaked palms into its stomach, flat, bulging, this child always forming its tongue perfectly around the word “censorship” and understanding that it is less painful to suppress than to disappoint. This child writing “the final frontier” across its rib cage, thinking that if you cracked it open, the void would sight into the air. This child cold, crucified, one nail through each wrist, one through both slight, stubbled ankles, the tear tracks down this child’s cheeks tasting of salt and humility and the words “Please let me be skinny.”

This child sitting on an elderly, floral-print couch, wondering how the hell to answer the question: “How does that make you feel?”

Oh, Lady Humility, how thou hast forsaken me!

I am trying to be kinder to this body even though it doesn’t always feel like mine.

I am taut violin strings; this heart is violent, Beethoven piano keys. These insides are lovely, dark, and deep. (And I have promises to keep.) These arms, these legs are not wickedness, this stomach is not wickedness. These shadows cast in crevices, in rolls of body on body, in crooks of elbows and knees and spaces between toes, these shadows are the afternoon darkness that befalls a house before the rain. These eyelashes are moth’s wings. This stomach is not wickedness. This skin is wet pavement, is the wrinkled pages of an atlas stuck in the glove box in the middle of July.

Oh, Lady Humility, how

the picture does not change.

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When did this body become a home? When did this body become a Ferris wheel of ghosts and skeletons of everything I’ve ever loved? When did this body become the un-perpetrator, the un-used, the un-imaginable of painted parks and recreational raspberry picking? The wind rolling over it is green, looks green, smells green, sounds green, feels

green. In all ways this body a home, a sanctuary filled to the tip-tops of the stained-glass portraits of something Holy, pew after pew after pew of un-darkness and un-sleep. In all ways this body an un-massacre at Pottawatomie, pieces of body coming back together; Show no mercy, show no mercy with your un-hatred,

a process known to most as “forgiveness” but known to us as “un-nothing” and “un-death.”

When did this body become a clock, withershins, Benjamin Button? When did this body become infinitely ethereal un-knowingness, un-precedented, un-perfect? In all ways this body a wanton sacrilege to man, an

un-doing in the middle of the Maury, a beauteous sacrifice, bestial once and then un-bestial once more with every tick mark scratched on the concrete floor. When did this body become so wholesome, this mind so positively un-abashedly toxic, this mind living vicariously through this body? When did this body become a temple, a perfect orchestra of crooked fingers and crooked toes? Yearling,

darling, pretty as a peach pie on the picnic table in July, when did this body become un-covered, un-apologetic, un-apoplectic love for nakedness? In all ways this body bleeding a constant drip, sticky, saccharine blood, calves riddled with mosquito pinpricks, nose riddled with un-gracious freckles. In all ways this body a slave to its lemonade-tongue, stealing kisses inside an un-polluted sky. When did this body become so perpetually and irrevocably and un-retrievably

mine? In all ways this body mine, mine own, never having been so, always someone else’s sometime skin but now mine own, a wooden crack-pot heart of un-sinking, un-fallible weakness,

an un-rotten rib cage of un-monstrous weeping, weeping, forever weeping, the willows singing to this body. When did this body become a graveyard for the un-dauntless, a battleground for volunteer firemen, swept through by un-relenting un-fear, un-wasting prophecy left half-blank and shaking in the rain of perpetuality, trying to find another word for un-beautiful that knowingly means its opposite. This body always a lover, sometimes a fighter, smoking from behind un-tired eyes:

burning.

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Would you believe me if I told you that this came to me in a dream? Rachel Anne Morris

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5.March.2014

I am frantically shouting through the halls that this is who I am my body is not a temple my body is not a prison my body is not a home my body is not a case my body is detached and forlorn my body is a goddamn bird’s nest tucked away in a deathless pine

I am sitting on the couch in the therapist’s office. I am breathing in a soft light. I think it’s yellow, but I can’t tell. It seems to transcend real color.

"When you’re ready, open your eyes."

I don’t really know what it means to be alive because I’m constantly reminded that we’re all dying. Is the definition of living constantly dying?

I want to plant flowers in the empty space between my lungs. My eyes burn with pungent sulphur.

"Where am I?"

I don’t know much of anything I don’t even know if this poem is over I just know that I’m cold and alone and trivial.

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Knock, knock. If/when they let you in through the front door, it’s a gift. Most times they only open it wide enough to let your nimble body slip between the door & the frame. Some people never lock it. Some never even close it. When you feel welcome, it is a gift. When you come to the door, barefoot & naked & silent, that’s when you know. When the sofa fabric pattern is etched into your skin, it’s a gift. It is a gift when the static pouring from their ears turns into something tangible, something you cup in your palms at this infinite picnic.

& it sucks because it will destroy you & sometimes the only thing you can do is say I’m sorry & it is meaningless & arbitrarily socially customary but when you come to the door, barefoot & naked & trembling, holding it under your fingernails, it is a gift.

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Obsessive (compulsive) disorder: A note to self, Rachel Anne Morris