#newmanuscript

[thelittlelabradoodle]

Please join my Facebook event as I read to the kiddos from my award-winning picture book, Puppy Pickup Day and share the manuscript for book 2 for the first time. Link is in my profile and pasted in the comments. #authorhangout, #bedtimestories, #newmanuscript, #readaloud, #kidlit, #puppypickupday, #jointheklub, #thelittlelabradoodle https://www.instagram.com/p/Bv7ZMB6Hu75/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=9thgpp8xno0l

[adventuresinwriterland]

Writing while I wait... #airportlife #amwriting #newmanuscript

[tearinmyside]

NaPoWriMo, Day 11

When she goes out

She has to match her socks with her shirt and her pants. She has to cement down the three hairs sticking up on the back of her head. She labors over how her shirt hugs her waist, calls herself a sausage. She carries her cell phone in her back pocket without fear of smashing the screen into a web of disjointed images. She tries on mens hats and looks better in them than I do. She buys unsweetened iced tea from places that manage to fuck it up. She plays Candy Crush in the passenger seat until she passes out.

[tearinmyside]

Maybe this is madness underneath my skin

So I dig through the pale with knuckles pinked and bony and look for the parasite that keeps my synapses off kilter. Pictures and pages distract temporarily until the need to cleanse returns, like an after dinner purge. Everything that reflects disgusts. I drift into the crevices in the paneling, study gaps in picture frame corners, recount each corner of bread swallowed and the leaves littering the bottom of steps. In the almost silence, my thumbs crack - bear every burden.

[tearinmyside]

Come bail me out of this godforsaken precipice

I watch her cat eyelinered eyes flutter in the strain of the artificial light at 1am. Her body, a still, pale softness surrounded by a deep sofa embrace. Her forehead tilted back and exposed. I want to make a ritual of kissing the taut flesh, watch the anxiety's release, let the glow highlight the perfect inches between the blonde waves of her hair and the exhausted, pinked toes that are shoved between flattened, old seat cushions. In this moment, I do not have to cast a line to find convincing words. I slowly drag switches down, open the blinds to let street lights become night lights and twist my body into a comma on the floor along side her - listen to the voices tell me that this slippery slope will leave me as empty as the freezer, where two ice cubes sit in solitude among three empty trays. I listen to the sound of her sleep breathing and it's too late. I tumble into freefall and hope that by morning, she catches me.

[tearinmyside]

So...fuck it. I've decided to just call the new chapbook...

Siberia. There you have it.

[tearinmyside]

We'll stand above the sea

watching the slow, afternoon tide creep up the dirty brown sand, sending tiny clams to surface. Bottle caps and seaweed at our feet and seagulls scavenging just inches away - do they notice that our hands are unlocked? We are invisible ornaments among the pale and tan bodies throwing frisbees and footballs. Our history now washed back into the ocean - a letter in a bottle, unanswered.

[tearinmyside]

How many coffins before there's a crown?

I've died several times since you drifted into the ether. Pieces of me buried in your backyard, by the garage. Bicycle tires leave tread marks over where I fertilize, my bones browning in the ironed earth. This last time I believed you'd stay was the paring knife in my throat, the blade destroying the carotid, my words buried with what you dismembered. I have bled out into the kitchen sink. A whisper falls like a tree in an empty forest - unheard.