They Say Shannon

...The pen of a thirty-something year old woman, and the heart of a ghost.

[havingapoemwithyou]

Sabbaths, 1993, I by Wendell Berry

[theysayshannon]

how i want you

a man can fake finger knots and tongue-licked lips, his body compassed toward me. he can fake gentle, the blush way he holds my words in his palms. he can fake the skin-on-skin feeling, the breath blanket that falls after. but he can’t fake “i love you,” “i love you.” —the same damn thing, at the same damn time. it happens unknowingly in the moment. it’s here real unplanned. that's why when you say—they probably bitched still, when i say they probably bitched still, or, there it goes, as there it goes spills from my mouth— i look at you like existence, and touch you like obsession, breathless, i pull you to mine.

there's something intimate about cracking your knuckles on your partner’s thigh—on my thigh.

there is something intimate about knowing the moment you want to kiss me. you tilt downward, your eyes overcast, and your horizon-line lips sunrise, bright wild crisp.

there’s something intimate about you loving the things i hate about myself—my flesh, its faded stripes, the rolling hills of somewhere no one lives.

there's something intimate about your fingers exploring, climbing finding holding me as they confess you’ve never wanted anything more. and even though i don't won’t look at myself that way—still, all i want is you to grab me full, fast and hard, deepen my valleys.

there is something intimate about getting lost, and realizing everything has kept going. i want more time in the day. i want more time to explore. more time to epiphany, to sink, to dissolve. more time to memory. so when you say you want the sun down at seven—that it would be a good time for night to come— i think, how what why, when i want more time in the day to taste your movement. more time in the day to breathless echo with you.

[theysayshannon]

Nothing lasts forever

Don’t waste your money on a day that may have to eventually enter a court room. The judge will line it up next to maybe nine others, and when it’s your day’s turn, she’ll ask it if everything on the paperwork is accurate to the best of its knowledge, if it agrees to this, and when it simply says yes, she’ll adjourn you, and the day will unravel right there like it never existed, like it never meant anything to begin with. So then where did the black and white photographs come from, of you dressed in lace with a man and the tear down his cheek. Where did the soap scum that waxes the shower caddy come from, because you sure don’t use bars of soap. Where did the water bill go, now cut in half - you've done nothing different. Now everything’s lost or found. Don’t waste eight thousand dollars on photographs, or one thousand on plane tickets, or even one-hundred-and-something on an appointment at city hall. You can’t hold onto anything that money buys, but if you still had the money, at least you could hold onto it.

[elvedon]

@nosebleedclub prompt #22

[theysayshannon]

Ode to a Confession

lucy's a badass matt sings, and she's full of the life she's going to lose. we listen to the song he wrote about lucy before she died, or after, i don't know. she's dead. lucy's dead i guess, and sitting on my couch i tell you we all die, and then after, everyone wants to perform. everyone wants the world to know they love you, when they didn't let you know they love you. and sitting on my couch, your lips they open, they shut, soft softer and your words, your tiny noises, they ask, "do you want someone to write a song like that when you die?"

if i knew how people would react if i knew the song first if i knew everything i guess i tell you "if i knew you felt this way before i died, if i knew you were going to do it, then i'd feel better" i might even want it i guess. you say you'd want everyone to know me, to know the parts of me i shared with you. how i am a conversation at midnight, the time stretched way too long. how i am a blueprint for adventure, but also the very place you call home. how i am a mystery. and in this moment, i want more than anything for you to love me aloud like that. so yes.

but sitting on my couch, my lips they open, they shut, soft softer and my words, my tiny noises, they say, "you might know all of me, but to the people who don't, will your truth sound like a performance?" the thing i hate most about death. there are no open shut lips. no soft softer words. there is no answer. you tell me when you die, that you do want a memorial of words. you are some kind of ostentatious maybe. i guess i don't know what i am.

but what i do know is i can promise that with all my words, my even bigger noises, i will write you a shrine.

i will tell everyone you were a two-way mirror, reflective and transparent at the same time. i will tell everyone you were a horizon line, the meeting point, a crucial marker. i will tell everyone i love you. i will tell everyone i love you. and i will tell them over and over again until everyone knows it's real.

but i will always tell it to you first.

[cryptotheism]

god fell out of heaven yesterday and we all started making fun of him bc the corpse is only like 5'3''

[inkskinned]

i have been thinking about this, because i am 5'2 and was raised catholic. in churches, the body of christ lingers ever in the air, on the back of our tongues, in every sconce and shadow. close your eyes. can you draw the shape of white jesus - bent and always muscled, rangy but masculine. i know the slant of his body from every tortured angle. his serene and pleading face - underfoot and rising above. white jesus is always either a baby or he is a 33 year old man, and the halo is goldleaf. jesus on the crucifix is almost always depicted sagging, a little hollow between his back and the wood of the cross.

god fell out of heaven yesterday, and fox news wasn't pleased about it, because god was 5'3". in our picture books, god takes up the whole sky. god can lift a mountain. god removed my brother's rib. my father is a deacon and showed me a diagram of the piece that adam used to form eve, and now "all women" have extra ribs. i was 7 and wanted to talk about if faeries are real or if trees can hear or if magic works, which was not favored. good catholic girls do not look like white jesus. they do not look like white old father-god. they might look like mary (virgin, always an adult, always demure). my brother is 6'0", so the lack of a rib did not stunt his growth. maybe i am smaller because the weight of eve's sin is pulling me down.

they didn't want to do an autopsy on god, which was ironic, because, like, didn't we say god made us in his image? and if god has (according to transubstantiation) been inside my body, can't we, like, get inside of god's body? that feels fair. i was mad particularly because when i tell people i am nonbinary, they talk about cutting open my grave and peeling back my gender so all the pulp of it shows. when i am dead, they tell me, they will uncover my "real" gender like a butterfly and pin her to the board. but god was 5'3".

the problem was that god was 5'3". first of all god was measured in imperial units which was kind of fucked up. the corpse landed inside of a townhouse in baltimore, which was bad for the insurance adjuster. that was not how the rapture was supposed to take place. also, the rapture is not covered under insurance, before you ask. the corpse of god was left overnight due to a confusingly-worded twitter update. i got in my car and drove south for over 9 hours, listening to the radio and my audiobook. i'm re-listening to graceling, but will always take good fantasy book recommendations. the radio said god's body made a strange hum - the announcer said like. well. it sounds like the living room fan from my childhood.

fox news had to say it wasn't god, because god is a man, and men stand up to pee. they had on male experts who talked about how yes, of course, god might have fallen from heaven, and yes his halo has singed through the first layer of the earth's crust - but this is probably not god. maybe one of the angels. micheal? rapheal? god cannot be 5'3", god lifts the rich from perdition and allows them passage into the fine life above us. god's body would be brave and tough and rugged like a lumberjack on a papertowel roll. god's body couldn't be like this - whalefall. nobody knew what to do with the body, so he was just lying there, alone in his crater.

i have a lot of reasons to hate god. i am not here to defend any part of the faith nor of god. unfortunately god was 5'3", and i am 5'2". and i guess some of us maybe felt the same way because i wasn't the only one getting out of the car. we all gathered around the crime scene tape and just stood there and looked at the body of god, who is a small man. god wasn't rotting correctly - his skin was flaking off like feathers overlapping. did i tell you? my girlfriend and i both saw the same god in our dreams, long before we met. we both described the experience as many hands.

all of us who were there bent down and picked up god from the rubble, which was blasphemy. we put him down in a clover patch. a bee rested on his cheek. what do you say at a funeral for god? he didn't look like jesus. people got mad then, because it wasn't funny anymore. they didn't want us to put god on the tombstone, and that made me laugh, and i suggested INRI. unfortunately i was raised super catholic, so that was only funny to like 3 people and of course the honeybee.

i think god would have liked swingsets and public transportation (when it works). i think he would have liked bodegas and good grilled cheese sandwiches. i think he would have lost his mind about dumplings. think of the humor behind getting god stilts or showing god mariokart. it is warm in baltimore so the ground is thawed. we talked about putting god under the ground and under many rocks, which is ironic because like - back in the cave you go. but it felt wrong to close him off from open air. god should sleep with his chest towards heaven, right?

god ruined my childhood and bored a splint through my eye and now i can never see this world without flinching. when i brought him in the clover i still laid him down with a care that almost felt parental. he was so small, is the thing. it was important to be gentle.

[theysayshannon]

WOW.

[theysayshannon]

Town to Never Visit Again

You left me straight-mouthed. On a day. The sun was feathered. You said goodbyes are for good. You made sure it was true. And then you dissolved. To me. You were blood on the highway. Something destroyed. As everyone sped past. Thick and slick and splattered. Nothing but a stain.

[theysayshannon]

We Live Many Lives Through Our Lovers

Whenever I listen to Explosions in the Sky, I am reminded that there was a time when I couldn’t give the summer light up. I was young, but not young enough, and I still bit my nails. I lived in the future, until I didn’t. Actually, I lived in a college dorm. The same dorm I had met my fiancé in. One night, he told me our wedding was off – we wouldn’t get married. Something about my sins because I didn’t believe in god, a god, his god. I still didn’t believe in god as he waved me goodbye, probably hugged me goodbye, I don’t remember anything but goodbye. He goodbye-d me and I thought everything was over. And then I met you, a you who spoke with me, a you who laughed with me, a you who laid me down in the dark and played me a song. We stretched out next to the moonlight that leaned in the window, my dorm room floor our spine. You were the first man I’d ever fallen in love with and I knew that when we laid there, the speakers trembling and your skin a warm blanket against mine while the song enveloped me in that moment, your words were a postage stamp. You could have sent me anywhere and I’d have gone. Wherever you said. We listened to the song for eight minutes before you kissed my skin in a way I had never known. The song was a foaming smithsonite blue. Nights like this were on repeat throughout the summer. Hot days, sun skin, I didn’t have to think about the past. I couldn’t take my hands off you. I was made tousled with your lips. Then you told me one day that you wanted to marry a Christian girl. I was still godless. That day, I’d run through my memories and run through what went wrong. What was wrong with me, and for another month we’d try to make it work, but I would never be your expectation, you know? Me in a navy-blue sundress, a different blue than the song, we decided we were over almost as quick as we started. And then his old echo knocked at my mind, you know, the one before you, and then your new echo knocked at my mind too. You might understand me better if you heard the echoes.   You wrote me letters, praying for my salvation, and I put them in a box like it was something worth saving. I read my dead mom’s old love letters until I finished, last month. it’s been ten years, I still have that box, and I read your letter last month. My husband doesn’t know. Your ear was talking when we laid in-between the sounds of that song, so long ago, and even if we have made it out, into a world much older now, made of much longer time, a world where I no longer bite my nails, I will remember Your Hand in Mind.

[theysayshannon]

Short Talk on Mona Lisa

She is a portrait, is she a portrait or a rumor, she's a rumor and she hangs on display in the Louvre, where the tourists go to visit her. They snap photos, purchase mimics in the gift store and forget that she was once a story is she a story or a person, she's a person and she is from Italy where she never got her painting. Passed on from person to person, it was never hers but she's on tshirts, magnets, and bags and she was stolen once, before she was bought by France. Please remember, she used to take baths, eat slices of bread, and I'm sure she's kissed a man. She was a wife once, before a widow. Her mothered body left for song by Nat King Cole and the All-American Rejects and maybe others. Her lyric is kept under strict conditions, she's in a bulletproof glass case. Her skin like porcelain, her skin might break. The Mona Lisa is one of the most valuable paintings in the world.

[theysayshannon]

Where Women Get Their Mouths From

I used to write important things on the wall, depending on who you ask, pulled words from mouths, sacrificed ideas. That is to say, I used to be a teacher.

Now I use words to paint a picture that my boss wants, tell the schools in need what we’ll do for them. I’m a marketing coordinator for an architecture company.

I’ve always been a woman.

It’s not the first time I’ve looked around at work and noticed this. It’s almost entirely women. It’s tables that troubles get placed on, the empty bottle of whiskey, and commands turned into guidance - things you’d like to hear. This is despite the company being made up of more men, or maybe in spite of it. I work in marketing, right next to HR, and I’m surrounded by women who are paid to communicate.

It’s not the first time that I think about how this department is mostly women. Because women are communicators, of course.

They spend their whole lives listening to a litany of complaints, directions for what to do: leave the boys alone (boys will be boys), don’t gain weight (it will sink you like an anchor and you won’t get very far), blue is a boy’s color (someone should have told Mary). We are taught what to do so often that life becomes a quiz, environmental training. Expected responses are the answers, they will work, they will be what get little girls an A, so we learn to communicate.

The office is decorated in colored rubber ducks, kid’s paintings like on the fridge, and loud mouths dressed pretty. Some kind of cross between a playroom and matriarchal house. Women. Be nice, they told us when we were young. So nice we’ll be, in an office full of the only women in the company.

[theysayshannon]

A Man Like This Seriously Exists in the World

They say that morals are when decisions get undressed and still look good, he said. But they aren't real, this history professor continued, no, decisions never look good on their own accord. Society wraps them   in a Burberry trench coat, so stylish. But decisions don't like Burberry and society's tellin' them to walk around in these coats as if they do. Society will dress these damn decisions and send one or two home with you like a child's been born. Society forcing morals on you. The same history professor also said, women shouldn't have the right to vote because their husbands, they must have husbands, right? Their husbands would use the pen at the voting booth to sign 'I love you' to their wives. A husband would never vote out of his wife's best interest, and if his wife voted too, she'd just clutter the polls. Throw out the wife from the equation and let the man make the decisions. So many people, they are leeches, think everything's easy. They want everything handed to them, they want everything so badly to be out of their control, or in their control, those are really the same thing, and control will hold you hostage. Now will you please hold your questions. I have no answers, I just told you everything I know to be true.

[theysayshannon]

Your type:

I will flirt with the idea of it, I will lay it like perfume across my neck which is the closest I’ll get to punishment I will dial its keys and let it ring, but its my tremble on the other end, my curse that answers it was only half past the moon when your eyes sunk and then I’ll lay in bed with your tragedies, my hands wrapped around their throat it’s a conversation they’ll tell me I’m sinking we're both sinking because we’re in the same ship the same spine of a ship and it’s fracturing until we’ve come loose

[theysayshannon]

Men Aren’t Even the Worst Problem a Woman Can Have

She thought his bare bones were beautiful but he was too busy using them to build a fortress that keeps her out.

He’d ask her to come over, buy groceries with him. She painted him a gallery wall for his apartment and asked if he liked it. The dog barked and his freezer was full of fake ice cream he ate for meals.

Men let women waste time like it’s currency, like they owe it, and women will pay to have the house built.

[theysayshannon]

a woman whose husband died drowning is now facing water

days roll onto themselves into nights like a pillbug. days are long and tired, treaded, and waterdrops on a page. i'm the leftover stains.

your skin felt like the soft flesh of a peach your skin against my fingers your skin against my tongue your skin was something sweet and then the drip down I could peel your skin with my fingers open you,

the water rung you dry. a compression so close and I stand here the edge the edge of fate my stained self, peel me open, take me.

now here i say take me like you love me too take me like your own.

[theysayshannon]

At the Bottom

Imagine you’re right by me in the row with only twenty-five others on board. A window’s on your left and so you show your cheek, look down at trees, the engine roars and I look at the watch wrapped on your wrist to count the minutes. Your hand waves to ask, “A Bloody Mary, please?” and I insist on flipping pages: scenes of sand, waves, masts in a travel magazine. I don’t hear the pilot, but we drop, a woman screams something about engine failure and fear. I reach for you, while everyone shrieks. Seems I have to ask, are you all right? I hear more screams, another drop. You don’t say a word.

[theysayshannon]

Love Letter Written While Watching the Breaking News in the Evening

Two sofa cushions sagging centered, some

honey rings cast on walls from floor lamps, nets of shadows, family photos hanging in the living room where we are sitting, legs crisscrossed on top of each other, under the rush of sounds that means there’s breaking news. The screen cuts black, to court, a boy threaded orange. It doesn’t matter which boy, no, it could be any boy, his hands against the desk. His lips cut like a superstition, a judge in front. The scene flips back. These are

no ordinary days, the newscaster says on television. He talks about how we can grow a better day tomorrow now, through thoughts and prayers. Some cars go past our front window, the world still shutters. Newscaster’s now standing next to a repeat image from weeks ago, a canvas of carnage, bodies on display. Turn it off, you say

to me. A button tap, the screen pulled closed, an envelope of silence and you draw my name into a whisper beside my ear.

If these are no ordinary days then why do they look like the last. Another sad investigation, while a hand slides up my leg.

I turn my head and kiss you on your lips.

[theysayshannon]

Yellowcard’s or Motion City Soundtrack’s or another band just like them’s concert in a theatre that’s not in Detroit

walk up to the front door

before an old marquee; a line down the block, a building made with bricks.

we get inside and lights are ripping like a crack down the black of the theatre

energy igniting energy a crowd spills bees from the hive surrounded by buzz

we’re at the edge of it all, bleeding into it.

and Vans shoes black jackets piercings like a yearbook the whole place is a ticking time bomb and then

x band says hellooo De troittt! but we’re in Royal Oak or another city like it. They say De-troit’s the best! the crowd cheers.

they say this to every city.

the lights blow a split-lip kiss and the stage is bruised black and the drums break thoughts we’re all in.

A loud synthetic sound, say

what???