#tess walsh

[icedcoffeeowls]

I've always felt awkward when people ask me about my writing. Inevitably, people will ask me, "So what's your story about?" and no matter what the story, I'll suddenly feel an overwhelming embarras...

Read about the novel that I’m working on!

[theteacuptrail]

May Worshippers :: Tess Walsh

It is four thirty in the morning and I am holding hands with spring time. Robert Frost is a marble in my mouth and May is a fickle month, unamused today, peeking out in between clouds but never reaching out to stroke our hair.

I am walking with a boy named Jack; he has spikes on his jacket like a stegosaurus and when he exhales, his breath comes out like a dragon’s cigarette.

We are not talking. I am still in my pajamas. I am not tired but still dreaming. I wonder if this is the feeling other people seek through medicines.

The boy named Jack touches my elbow with one finger like he is testing my temperature. I look at him pointing to a crow with a guitar finger.

The crow has a puppet’s head. It cries with a gutter sound and spreads its wings. Each feather is a different shade of black.

The boy named Jack puts his hands in his pockets and starts walking away. The crow opens its beak, pink and ugly, and screams after him. It jerks its head to me and seems to be pleading. I walk after the boy named Jack. The crow follows us.

Jack tells me the sun will be punching through the clouds soon and we can pick up the pieces if we reach the top. There are wet leaves plastered to our shoes. The air smells like moss; my lungs are growing mold from breathing in and out. The boy Jack does not look like a leaky dragon anymore. He is on a mission. Almost smiling.

The crow is at the top already, waiting for us. I wonder if all the trees smell like maple and newborn babies. I can feel May. She is shy, hiding, leaving the fringes of her cold shoulder on crumbling logs. We try to reach her. I look for weeds and buds. I forgot how damp the springtime is. I wonder if she is crying because her sister December has died.

Run run run, says Jack. His arms are up and forward. He is trying to hug the sky. He is standing on top of a cragged rock and I’m trying to run and I wonder if he will dive out onto the trees just so he can haunt this forest.

There she is, May’s lovely face peering up from the hills. Is it safe?

Yes, we tell her, the boy Jack and me with our hands up. She is the only god that matters. Yes, it is safe now. Come. Hurry. We’ve been waiting for so long. 

Tess Walsh is currently pursing an English degree at Saint Michael’s College in Vermont. She has a birthmark shaped like a turtle and believes in ghosts even though she has never seen one. She blogs at misstesswalsh.wordpress.com and is on tumblr as icedcoffeeowls.

[icedcoffeeowls]

girl scout cookies

baby dolls, lollipops, fairy homes made out of rocks--

pink jelly on cheeks like blush

too many dresses were never enough.

princess plastic and make believe

all that glitter and you still can’t see.

I’m a princess, I’m a clown

I wear Mommy’s heels with my dress-up gowns;

I ask you to my tea party but you always say no

because boys have better places to go.

baseball games, exploding cars, 

comic books and men from mars--

my brother gags at bows and rolls his eyes at Disney; 

when he goes out to the field he never seems to miss me.

I watch him from the window

when he plays in mud

and Daddy always chuckles

when he comes home stained with blood.

I’m not allowed to go with him

So I sit inside making teddy bears be people;

astronauts and brides.

My toys are dumb and so are girls, 

that’s what Brother says,

and the only time he likes me 

is when I bring home cookie boxes. 

thin mints are his favorite

and Mommy buys them all;

he eats them messy with his back against the wall.

I dropped one in the kitchen and he picked it from the ground--

he smiled and said my name 

and I wished Girl Scouts had cookies year round.

[icedcoffeeowls]

a college love letter

Have fun with me.

We can watch a show or two or seven on Netflix, ignore emails and workshops and alarms. I will help you with your laundry if you help me not to cry. We can eat ice cream in the middle of January and breakfast at three in the afternoon. I'll tell you about my favorite dinosaur while we're drinking nail polish alcohol straight from the bottle with one lousy gas station cigar and two teddy bears I've been napping with since pre-school, and you can teach me how to play video games and bite my hangnails and how not to cough after I take a shot. We'll always be partners in pong, no matter how many times I let you down, and let's drink every time we take a drink to wash down the taste of bad beer. Have fun with me. 

Work with me. Hold my hand in the library when it's five am and we are both exposed sockets with bad coffee. Tell me I am not a failure even when I fail. I can help you with your adjectives if you can show me how to be a better verb; we'll write your math equations in the snow and you can try to explain them to me from the window. Your essays and assignments, your bruised eyes and sleepy shoulders--bring them to my door, I have enough paper and pens to write the wrongs if you de-fang all those big bad numbers trying to eat me alive. Let's crack spines, each other's and the textbooks', and spell out a novel with just each others' names. Work with me. 

Sleep with me. 

Crawl into my bed with those two teddy bears and put your cheekbone against my shoulder blade so there will be a pink spot in the morning. I don't want anything less than your stale morning teeth and your sandpaper eyes and your unspoken shake as the alarm tries to come between us. My checking account as $11.34 in it. I'll spend it on condoms and candy if you want. My bed is twin-sized but we can both lie down if our noses are touching. Let's touch noses. Sleep with me. 

Be scared with me. 

Tell me you have nightmares about student loans and your parents' couch and a loneliness so cold your fingertips turn purple. I'll give you my last cup of Ramen noodles and we can practice remembering how to breathe, sitting on the floor with our legs crossed kindergarten style. Your sister is insecure, your best friend is selling drugs, you haven't heard the words i love you in three months and you're starting to worry you won't ever hear them again. I will draw a tic-tac-toe board on your back and show you sometimes we can't help but lose, like how my father lost his temper, like how my mother lost him, like how I lost faith in the word home when I was six and my teeth fell out. I'll face your father with a smile like cement. We can invent fortunes and click our teeth together as we wish for them to come true while knowing they won't. Get drunk to swim in the facts instead of facing them. Let's treat the word future like a swear. Be scared with me.

[icedcoffeeowls]

what i mean when i say i need protection (and not the sexy kind)

that night we sat on the floor of your room, sipping cheap vodka straight from the bottle, and you told me you didn't believe in god. i said okay. 

i wanted to tell you that you have an accent like my father's, like warm sand running between my fingers on a beachy lemonade type of day, a voice dusty and strong and something to believe in, but i just said okay.

sometimes you tap me on the hand or the arm, lightly, persistently, when i don't pay enough attention, and chant my name. i just say what. i would like to fold up those tapping fingers into mine, have you tap out messages on my ribs and hips and vertebrae instead, but i just say what.

you swear like a sailor, and your eyes are the color of coca cola with one sip left in the bottle. you say fuck, and you blink, and then you say, fuck, sorry, and i say whatever but i want to say, fuck, i don't care, fuck, just kiss me, fuck, just fuck me. but i don't. i say whatever. 

my last boyfriend, he had your name but the only type of soda he liked was jack daniels, and two years later i can still hear him telling me to go home, and i can still hear myself saying please. two years later and the words are still branded in the ears of my memory, not to be drowned out by your cheap vodka. you're one of those boys with an apathetic shell, and i'm one of those girls who hides behind jokes, and i don't think i could bear to have new scars in my ears or my mind, so okay, what, whatever, i'll keep taking shots with a straight face and you'll keep touching my wrist with your pump-iron hands, and we'll look through the window at the snow, falling like a drug, falling like love, and you'll say, look.

and i will, and i'll say, nice, even though i won't look at the snow. lying is protecting; in this case, i'm not sure which one of us needs it more.

[icedcoffeeowls]

Home for the holidays

It’s two AM and I’m sleeping in my brother’s twin bed with mismatched socks and a paper cup of ginger ale. The cat is a comma around my hip, implying that my sentence is not yet over, and I am listening to my brother breathe.

I am trying to breathe, but I’ve never managed to quite get the hang of it. Some people are just born knowing what to do and how to do it; their lungs are like the sky and their minds are like the winter’s first snow fall, perfect and clean. I love those people. I hate those people. I will never be like them, and it’s not because I am romantic or more evolved to the tremors of pain in the wire-crossed air, because I was dragged to hell and back in more formative years, but simply because my brain braided itself just a little too tight and now I’m stuck with lungs like cinder blocks and a mind like barbed wire.

I am a hazardous construction project; I hope I am in the process of becoming something better than the empty space I was before.

Do people get better or do they get tired?

There is a hangnail on my right thumb and I am picking, picking, as I lie here and my best friend is a little bit drunk and he is calling, calling, and I’m rejecting each one even though I know it’s not chivalrous to reject help, any more than it is selfish to receive it. But he is a little bit too far away and he is a little bit too drunk and a little bit too in love with a girl who is not me.

Tonight I ate a home cooked meal and my father was too tired to make conversation and my mother kept touching my arm because I am a piece of her which moved away and now I only come home for the holidays to wear mismatched socks and make toast at two AM, a ghost of a girl who used to live here and now listens to her little brother breathe to see if she can figure it out, figure out how to continue her own construction so one day she can be a person with lungs like the sky and answer her telephone calls with the words “iloveyou” rushing out like an arrow, like the only thing she’s ever wanted to say but didn’t know how.

[icedcoffeeowls]

A list of things I need

1. Muffins fresh from my mom's oven, all sugar and spice. She never used measuring cups, just her hands. We eat them at noon after church; we eat them at five in the morning, all hungover and happy. 2. The front seat of my best friend's car, the radio throbbing like a heartbeat as we run red lights and make dolphins with our hands, riding the airwaves. She has never cared about the boys or the blood or the unexplained phone calls with me saying "can I stay the night?" And her saying, "of course." We eat a lot of jello. It doesn't taste the same without her. 3. My brother's English homework, sentences smashing together and murdering all the punctuation. It's always been up to me to hammer out his words; he's been tripping over them ever since he learned how to say "sorry." Late nights at the kitchen table with RedBull and Ritalin, textbooks and test scores, with him and his smart mouth, me and my smart ears. We are like the crayons from kindergarten class. 4. My dad's dents in the leather couches after a Sunday of football, shallow craters that the cat curls up in to stay warm when the world gets cold. I wish I could be the cat. 5. The pick-up boy with baseball caps and backpacks, saying yes baby and please, baby and me saying that I'll be less crazy. 6. The only blood relative that bleeds the same way I do, redheaded by choice and removed by luck. The east coast is a long thread with two knots too far apart. 7. My nana's quilt, fifty years old and lavender with the sun sewn in its seams. It keeps you warm on the worst days. It is fueled by kryptonite and too many sleepless nights. 8. A bottle of cheap wine. 9. Hand-written apologies from boys with bitten hearts and bruised jaws. Some of it was my fault; some of it was self-inflicted. 10. Just a little more time and a lot more luck.

[icedcoffeeowls]