Small index beast

I see, I document and I make stuff.

[smallindexbeast]

Cutouts

Walls of sticky thread cling to me.

A hand ties Time and Creation together.

In the womb trees saw their branches.

I saw sand and stone.

I saw pools of rain.

Beneath the snow I saw a river overflowing,

Growing distant,

Expanding.

My city is crushed pearl,

My hands are covered in crushed pearl.

[smallindexbeast]

These letters are difficult to read

Because I am part of what is human.

And yet--

The lord itself is standing on a bridge rail,

The lord is all its caged creatures.

The earth spreads a cloth for us,

Woven of snakes,

We will wrap ourselves,

We will hibernate.

[smallindexbeast]

excerpt

The other person inside my throat

Is a canyon echo,

A Girl Army for the city

Where we keep shallow peace with grief.

People pray and say

I am the color Violence,

Like Sea:

Dangerous innocence

Strung with lights.

I think my ship is on fire.

[smallindexbeast]

My racing green joy--

[smallindexbeast]

[small book excerpt]

Now,

If you’re so brave,

Find comfort in this.

Don’t worry about burglars,

Or rain above the city.

In the middle of the night,

When the plates shift,

When the fever breaks,

When the sea begins to rise,

We will say to it,

You are beautiful.

And we know,

Nothing lasts forever.

[smallindexbeast]

Excerpt, from 2016

We fell asleep when the peaches were ripe

And woke with dry tongues in our mouths,

Dry leaves in our hair.

I would like to walk home to Western Massachusetts,

Put our books and clothes back in boxes,

Take them to the orchard

Where we first tasted nicotine on each other’s skin

And drank red wine from bell jars,

Stained our teeth.

Remember how we looked at the hills and said

“This isn’t where we end up”?

Fools .

In corn mazes we couldn’t see the horizon

But we heard the migration and we wanted to follow.

[smallindexbeast]

This is not the apocalypse

I am lining the beams with little gods,

corks that you say will go extinct.

Tell me again how we will escape the house of Baba Yaga.

Tell me how the rain will come down in one sheet,

Rolling dust up the road as we open all our windows

To breathe the silver-green summer storm in.

It will clean us like we’ve never been cleaned before. 

Tell me how the hills around us are still rolling,

Slowly like glass cooling over centuries.

I ask you to convince me the world will be alright.

But this morning I am watching you at the mirror,

Trying to tame your cowlick like it’s a tiny lion

And look,

The shadows are trying to stand up into daylight,

The mountains are changing shape.

Brown speckled birds have knocked down all our gods

But are building nests in the eves.

It might rain.

Let me tell you again how I love your cowlick.

[smallindexbeast]

The Process of Hunting and Gathering

I am afraid of my memories rearranging or dissolving. It happens all the time. So I am collecting the evidence as I go. It’s a constant motion of hunting and gathering, trying to preserve and make sense of raw materials. But there is a reason entomologists kill their subjects before arranging them on boards with pins stuck through their abdomens.

When I was a child, the stones I picked up every day from beaches, train tracks, the hole dug for the foundation of the nextdoor house that was never finished, I’d sort into egg cartons at night. Every stone had its own cardboard cup, labeled with the date and location of where it was found. Now I have rocks with no labels. They collect in my pockets, then jars, window sills, the filter at the back of the washer that I didn’t know existed until the machine stopped turning one day and the landlord called to ask me not to put rocks through the laundry anymore.

The summer L was hit by a truck, I lit a match every night for him even though I’m not religious and I’m not superstitious. I kept the burnt matches in a pill bottle until I knew what to do with them: build a tiny picket fence.

I save containers to help with the preservation. Altoid tins: for full sentences and photographs, songbird skeletons, grass that I traveled seven hours to trim from the overgrown backyard that was mine when I was a child. Rabies vaccine bottles: tiny glass receptacles that, if you can get the cap off without breaking the bottle, make perfect displays for ladybugs found belly up on the windowsill of my great grandfather’s trailer. You can fit one word in a vaccine bottle, so it must be selected very carefully.

I own one hair elastic, its purpose is to hold together a set of 200 index cards, color coded, each one with a noun that I like on one side and a corresponding sense on the other.  

“Atlantic | Taste”

“Birch | Scent”

“Praying Mantis | Touch”.

I pull a card from the deck when I need help making sense of the world. Sometimes I throw the deck out and start over.

My Buddhist mother tells me I should “practice non-attachment.” So I cut away all the parts of The New Yorker I don’t want to read, save only the most interesting or useful words: tactile, habitat, borealis, the word The in six different fonts and colors. I also save a picture of a honey bee: endangered.

I don’t know what I’m building. I think it’s a kind of nest but I also think I could be wrong. I’m building it in small sections, compartments, boxes and jars, small books. I’m organizing parts: twine, wire, magazine and refrigerator magnet words, the small bones of animals found in gardens, woods, attics, the dunes that grow from here, back to where I came from. There are also photographs of strangers and photographs of people I know very well. There are plastic creatures, glass from the ocean, moss, bricks, cigarette packages, puppy teeth.

[smallindexbeast]

Crater

Why are there bird bones in the ashtray this morning?

I let my coffee get too still and you gulp cold water.

Last night all I wanted was the smoke taste on your fingers

And today we can’t coexist in the same room.

In our backyard a hole is growing

I can’t tell if you are digging it

Or I am digging it

Or a long clawed creature with more instinct than we can stand

Is digging it.

The dog paces between us and whines.

You stand in the doorway and tell me I don’t respect anything.

I stand at the sink and watch fertile soil fall into the growing crater.

I tell you I respect that crater,

And I hope new birds will hatch out of it.

[smallindexbeast]

There are monsters in these waters

And you warned me they’d have teeth

I said I’ve raised piranhas in a drinking glass

[smallindexbeast]

February 2017

Has that giraffe had her damn baby yet?

Have the creatures in your mind settled for the season,

Stopped chewing and clawing their way into daylight?

Have my own beasts stopped calling to them?

Has the president died yet?

Have we thrown all our salt over our shoulders,

So it won’t sting our palms anymore?

We aren’t superstitious,

But,

Have we used up all our little tubes of paint,

Trying to chameleon this house,

Trying to hide these ghosts that keep altering the way they move?

Have you looked at the ceiling lately?

The rain is staining it.

Maps are shifting.

I can feel the earth vibrate beneath these floorboards.

[smallindexbeast]

February Ghosts

February is  when all the ghosts come back,

They stop on their way to Elsewhere

Trailing after the Canada geese.

An unsettlingly warm day:

They rise off the pavement with evaporating snow

And climb quietly through our windows

Just as night begins to freeze the air again.

Either you rearranged our cups or they did

I heard that shuffling in the kitchen last night

I felt movement under the door and when i asked,

Did it just get brighter in here?

You said go back to sleep.

They visit me on their birthdays

And I am relieved to see them.

Let me tell you the things I didn’t say when they were living.

[smallindexbeast]

Poetry. 

[smallindexbeast]

Peeling

Some days

my skin is like snake that peels off

and I am a nervous core

of tingling atoms underneath.

There is autumn outside,

moving through branches

and up the spines of terrified grasses

that don’t know ice but know to fear it.

 Below my window a couple breaks apart.

“You know what my answer is,” I hear her say

He walks East, toward the place where they started.

She stares up at the sky with crossed arms.

[smallindexbeast]

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