WARPAINT ETIQUETTE @warpaintetiquette - Tumblr Blog

Suit of Swords, by Sara Kipin on Tumblr and Society6

15/30

There is a tire floating in the Hudson. And my grandfather, the young man who reels it in with a knob of driftwood, is lean with horn-rimmed glasses. His father was a mechanic. I imagine him stealing away from the shop to follow the prints of hooves in the Pleasant Valley mud; he never told me how he left to become a dairy farmer. I imagine him at the table with his father, silent as he chewed through liver and onions, his fingers crusted with grease and rotten wood chips. His first cow must have been an ivory chalice; a half-blooded affair with knobbed knees. His first barn a nest for raccoons and scrubbed whitewash. He must have sighed as he dragged bales of hay alone--one day he would have children for this. He can longer eat fish from the pond--his cattle have caused it to become congealed with algae. But the lights in his house are yellow and warm. His new wife wraps rough cotton around wounds from a cow who gave him trouble while milking. The rain is a comfort: it brings corn. The moon is a beacon: it means raccoons can be treed. He stays away from liquor: it ruins the work ethic. Now he would tell anyone that his way of living was good. Good nights and good, early mornings-- entrenched with bitter coffee and mixing bowls of cereal. The beat of the hooves in the barn is a song, and the radio is never off--it comforts them. I imagine nights when a cow gave birth: the lantern in his hand, marking time with the bony legs of a newborn calf. Always a sigh of relief when it is a girl. Always a thumb outstretched to be sucked on. Always hot milk waiting when he returned. A surge of excited children waiting to hear the stories of all the things they let themselves imagine.

14/30

"after Felix Pollak" She dreamed of an ex boyfriend. There was a gap in his teeth. You should get married, said her boyfriend's father. It means you are still thinking about him, said her mother. You answered the phone when he called after you broke up, said her mentor. You took advantage of him and his quiet nature, she thought to herself. (she didn't tell her boyfriend, so he didn't have anything to say) I don't think you ever loved him, said her best friend.

13/30

my mother once gave me sage relationship advice: take whatever annoys you about him and multiply it by 100. that is how you'll feel about it in ten years. according to this calculation, i will be fervently angry when he doesn't argue back at me when we fight. i will loathe insufferably the fact that he never washes the french press when he does dishes. i will boil when he is quiet in a room full of people. i will dramatically proclaim about how he leaves his watch in a myriad of unpredictable places. i will seethe and fume, but he will tumble on to the couch and spread out his arms, waiting for me, and we will together divide 100 by itself.

12/30

"You see, a man fights for far more than the mere hope of winning. Better, far better, to know the fight is totally, irreparably, incorrigibly in vain." -Cyrano de Bergerac "We are a way for the cosmos to know itself." -Carl Sagan There is a scene in a play. A man who has loved a beautiful, willowy woman his whole life is dying. And he sits in a yard, leaning like a thirsty animal into a ladder-backed chair, and watches her. And in this movie or play, he is bleeding from his abdomen in great surges, and he valiantly wrenches himself upright in the chair so this woman doesn't see his weakness. And, reciting poetry, he spills himself to her as his body spills onto the underbrush in the darkening autumn. His fingers are peeling paint which has lost its grip. His lips are the bank of a stream which has flooded. And the sad and human thing of it all is that this woman never notices. She sits like an ancient and gentle constellation on a rusting bench, glancing up from her lap from time to time. And she is admired and studied from telescopes both grand and expensive, but there is something too far away about her. Her chest never dares to take in his words. They would be too much for her corset. Too boiling for her red cheeks. Too many lightyears away for warmth to reach her in this lifetime. But he recites his opus to her cold cheekbones. And the leaves are falling all around them; one alights in her hair. He leans slowly, a boat heaving with the tide, his mast struggles to brush it from the strands. I do not know whether or not he is successful, but she doesn't notice anyway. And the whole play has been like this. Every audience member is tired of hearing his incessant voice. It is as if we don't want to see the stars come out every single night. As if, when we got tired of them, we could pull the blankets over our heads and relish in the blank chalkboard darkness. Their voices are never ending to us in our brief, gasping stretch of time. And as I sit and watch, I know that I think I am beyond this love. He croons at her--leans in her direction. Comments on the rosiness of her cheeks. Quivers his eyebrows at the sound of her voice. And everyone is tired of watching. The leaves fall down; afterwards they are picked up and bagged and we forget their rustling for a few months. The man dies; his friends cry for him, and he returns to the stars. I wonder how to stop this. To take her chin in my hands and careen her face towards his. To make them scream together, in unison, at the trees. How dare you die now. How dare you. This futile revolving. This "almost touching." This space between pine box and cold hand. Shovel and dirt. Earth and stone. How dare it not stop for us and force us to taste it. To gag on it. To die while choking on it. This is science. Blood. Tragedy. This is why we torture ourselves with quiet and unmoving. How dare it let us be our own masters--ignoring and waiting and celibately pursing our lips, feeding our delicate skin to the ground like a leaf drips after a light rain: pore by pore by star by star.

11/30

What time do you come home in the morning? What time do you think about removing your socks? What time does the sun rise? Do you know? What time does your mother wake up to ask you for cigarettes? What time do you get on the subway? What time does the J train come? What time does first period start? What time do you start drifting in and out? What time do you lose consciousness? What time do you ask the teacher for a pencil? What time do you give up on your late assignment? What time do you spend on homework at night? What time do you think you are going to college? Are you going to college? Do you know how to get to college? What time does the clock say in your bedroom? Or is it broken? Winding itself back and forth the lullaby of the moving earthen crust.

10/30

The first day of sunlight in New York

We grabbed a dirty blanket and grapefruits.

Sat next to the blonde girls sunning their bread loaf thighs with red cheeks

Ate apples and the sun baked at our backs

The first day of sunlight in New York

The trash began to pile up at the corners

The subway is filled with beach dresses

The man makes margaritas in the meadow

For sweaty patrons

The first day of sunlight in New York

I remember photosynthesis

Place my house plants on the back steps

My forearms are thirsty--the grass makes marks on my bare feet.

-Tomanocy

9/30

"Mary Anne" hey, get some snapping morning bustelo smear it into the glass her hair tumbles, acrobatic, she picks it out like that bring me a loose shirt to sleep in please something from the bed i can wrap in her mouth sizzles with red pepper and the sharp sound of cucumber i only need the couch, the wifi password your dog will curl up next to me, wet-nosed her ipad makes her face glow when i pass through on the way to the bathroom, her fingers quiet i folded your bedsheets, pushed the used cups to the side. i just need to get my jewelry she opens her bag, shoves her whole stomach inside--berries for breakfast, she smiles i always smile, she says, turning her nose ring with a delicate swipe. and thank you for letting me stay always, she stays. always, i hear her breath, like raspy love, in the other room. she is coming tonight. -Tomanocy

8/30

After The Death of Socrates by Jacques-Louis David Behold! The beginner's mind-- an iron pan with no grease. A cat at the moment a rodent appears. The rim of glow around the halo.The tide of black around a blue eye. Today--I noticed his eyes, how question marks are embedded in them, and as I am made to handle the goblet he says to me: I have known you. I think of the water well where I first saw him--baking his marble white skin in the sun--and there is this thing about philosophers--he held in the corners of his eyes a youth fit for a child. The wrinkles at the sides stretched tightly as scrolls. He nodded in my direction and he pointed at the stars. The stars aren't here anymore. They do not listen to the screams of men. How many bricks in this basement have seen blood and recoiled from it? How many men have been asked to administer death? Is this great man crying in his mind? Why doesn't he ask this to stop? In this basement there are chains and he requires none of them to rebel. He is a shackle of men. The only prison he bangs his head against is the stars.

7/30

"Sickmaid" -After Christina's World by Andrew Wyeth The boy in the house has black eyes. The boy in the house holds a fistful of bolts. A mouth full of brown water. A face full of the nickels I slung at him after I caught his hands slithering down my shirt. When I ran, the rolls of coins from the drawer emptied from my hands onto his face. He screamed like a dying fox--his contagious sickness rotting through his fingernails like the pages of a book in a bonfire. And I backed away from him-- nothing but a white-tailed deer-- a sickmaid. When I climbed down the ladder he shoveled his hand into my hair, hanging out the window, starved for some stringy kind of warmth. His legs then folded beneath him like paper and I jumped to the stubble of grass at the side of the barn. The white in my knuckles grinned at me. The blood in my knees spilled onto the barbs of the fence. My hands are bobbing closer to the dirt. My vision is closing like the beam of a lighthouse. My ankles rip away from me and I am falling. I look back at the house. All I can picture is his hand--thin as a day-old newspaper. Spinning wet, grotesque webs down my shirt. -Tomanocy

6/30

He hops on the subway

Pockets full of M&Ms

Offers one to the lady sitting next to him

She wears headphones

Can't hear

Shoves away his hand, afraid

He chews quietly

Recedes.

She hops on the subway

Pocketed iPod

Downward glances at scuffed booted lad

He is careful now

Doesn't dare look

She chances a smirk and a flash of stiletto, brazen

She gives up

Recedes.

5/30

My hair is browning cornsilk dipped in cardamom seed-- pickled beet-- acorn cap. It is perm grown out-- chopped off-- it is lying flat as reed. Swamp of fragrance-- coconut oil & day-old shine. Lather of conditioner and finding foreign-colored strands on the bathroom sink. Bangs cut myself crooked in the mirror with a youtube tutorial, little hairs stuck to my cheeks. The back of it is starving for the collars of my shirts and the front of it is gulping my eyebrows. A lesson in the feminine. A pocket full of glances missed by the men on the street. A fist full of the times I woke to fix the bedhead before he saw it. I am standing and waiting in front of the mirror. A lioness returned from the hunt with a kill confused as to why she hasn't grown a mane yet. -Tomanocy

4/30

He is cut from the chiseled block of Michelangelo; as if the edges were slightly forgotten--ruffled. The jaw line is off-kilter--billowing. His locks of hair are fat Italian branches heavy with olives. I am climbing a ladder to him--every word I hear him say, I wonder what book it is from. His bookshelf looms like a trail-marking cairn in the apartment; I must pass by it, but I have no idea how delicately it has all been put together. -Tomanocy

3/30

"Things other than the Great Wall of China which are Visible From Space" 1. the piles of plastic Arizona bottles lying somewhere after being thrown away in corner trash bins in Brooklyn 2. the lit-up screen on my iPhone the night I fell asleep with it on my Brooklyn rooftop 3. my mother's backyard and the circular garden she always said she wanted to convert into an in-ground pool 4. the runways of the airports I've left from 5. the droop of your neck after you lost the weight 6. the distance between you and her 7. the distance between us 8. the Mississippi River 9. the Grand Canyon

10. that one long road I drove through the red sand in New Mexico

11. the tree stump where I buried my best friend's worry dolls after I stole them in first grade 12. the keyboard where the oils from my fingers betrayed the keys I typed the most 13. the ache the rain leaves 14. the footsteps on the wet sidewalk 15. the exorbitant amount of lights lit up in New York City at night 16. your window lit up at night 17. the night 18. your face 19.

2/30

"When I pass by the shrine in the park." Is it the gum wrappers in the drain? The melting paper the rain breaks down. The drooping branches I hear in April calling to their lovers-- the wind-swift branches of the stiffer autumn winds. Do the trees remember the hurricane? Do they get offended when spring shies away from them? Is it the people? How they decorated the trunks with long candles in memory of some fallen brother? Was it lonely to spend the nights with brushed gold frames housing fuzzy photographs of a fallen uncle at the trunk? (A former tree-climber) Is this the spring that the Giving Tree has taken? Did the leaves cover his mustached photograph slippery, with dirt-encrusted rain, by accident? Or with purpose. -Tomanocy

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