59

fed up torn up filled up

ill-up

pilled-up

thrilled-up

58

i guess it's half of being heartsick - the feeling of weightlessness followed by the dip of your chest into your thoracic cavity, the sweats that run salty multitudes out your skin, into the fabric of your clothes.

i miss you.

57

Good things about today

Telling the man at the paint store that the paint color was OK when it was perhaps not, but noticing his furrowed brow, cracked hands and slicked hair and deciding to give him a break even if it means that I will always look at the walls of my room in not-quite satisfaction

Making my sister perfect. Finding her the most beautiful dress, the most beautiful sandals. Being able to take the binder from my hair and the bobby pins from my hair to turn her hair into a wonder. Assuring her that her legs looked fine.

Hearing that song on the radio, the one we sing to each other. The heart break song. Malice filled. The one we sing to each other because we are in love and we are helium high on it and heart break seems such a funny, funny notion.

56

My shorts smell like sweat and outside, and mushrooms bubbling in butter, but I put them on anyways because they are a memory I wish to keep. I can smell them even as I stand above them, my nose elevated but aware still of their pungency and then I wonder if their smell has leaked somehow, onto my shirt into the skin above the waist band, and will it leave a stain of that summer day, blue and green and black, soaking into me, a tattoo of a time. I laughed when I went under the water, loud.

sometimes the wind, the water and the sky steal the breath from your lungs in little bits.

54

And I often wonder how meaning is assigned, whether in some cosmic designation, where it means something no matter what, hands down, world without end, amen. Or is it something you make, create for yourself, every single moment of the time you exist.

52

The smell of your parent’s house, a smell that brings tears to your eyes whenever you smelled it, so strong, so sweet, like the outside air and the sweat of seven and your mother’s laugh, how you can hear it from anywhere in the house and sometimes you can’t tell if it’s really a laugh or maybe a cry, and how this is the safest place on earth, and that if a nuclear bomb exploded you would want to be here, just here, smelling that smell and so you sit on your stairs and it’s so hot you start sweating behind your ears, a place you never knew could ever sweat and if you listen really closely you can hear your brother shift in his sleep, and your father breathe, so loud it sounds like snores, but really you know that he sucks in half the world with each breath, and you think that he’s trying to figure it out, even when he’s sleeping, and you can feel your sister’s itch, her skin beneath her blanket, like spaghetti sauce on pasta, red spread through the white in chunks, and you shift and the stairs creak, like when you were little and you would sneak down in the middle of the night to get a drink of water and you tried to be quiet, quiet, but now you are 20 years old and you don’t have to sneak any longer and this smell, this smell, like a magnet, pulling you always closer to it, expecting you to stay and stick, it repulses you somehow because you know you don’t belong, really, any longer, but you are sitting on the stairs in your in between time, where you can still feel the pull, in your back and your gut and your fingers and especially your toes, how they refuse to carry you very far away in this summer and you wonder when you will forget this smell, when this smell will cease to exist all together, when you will be immune, if you will be immune and you wish then that we still lived in caves, all together, for as many forever’s as it took to stop this feeling, the feeling you get whenever you leave - how getting in an airplane still feels like getting lost in the grocery store and the people in the plane are the vegetables, looking at you baldly, and they can never replace this perfect safety and you breathe in this smell, still, because you still can, for awhile yet, and the tears are escaping from your eyes so fast now

51

i couldn't remember anymore what it was supposed to be about.

50

take frustration and turn it into a physicality. it's a fish, right? cold and smooth and no matter which way you look, its ugly as sin and still a fish, and you want to release it back, right into the water where finally it will be free.

49

it was the first thing they thought of, first thing they dreamed, the inexorable, unimaginable, for weren't humans made to desire that which cannot be attained, cannot even be felt or seen but we must be able to feel it a little bit, like a curtain with a shadow showing through, a bright light around the corner and they wondered always what it would take to tear a eye-sized hole in the curtain, to poke their head around the corner just for a moment, but they knew it would be a terrible god, and they would be shamed and blamed if not by it, by themselves, and they would cease to be them and begin to be different beings all together trapped by that sight, in that sight, irrevocably changed, like when you begin to learn the secrets of the universe, the first time you find out about how sex works, the crudeness and the mundane, beautiful, soily, thought, or how you find out that saline drips and operations cost real money like food, and the lessing of it afterwards tunes you into just important your sickness was, or how you believed silk was satin and the confusion of it just made you hate fabric for the rest of your life, but suppose you kept on believing, suppose you knew these things, suppose you remained without - you would be happier now, wouldn't you?

turning lights off is the saddest thing. each click of the switch, you turn a little world black.

48

That I love you more than anything

Is what I whisper inside my head every time you

Love me harder and softer than ever I’ve been loved before

47

I like late nights and quiet laughter, from your core not your throat. He likes early nights and loud, booming chuckles, the ones that skip shallowly from your mouth, across the room. Laughs without depth. I guess anybody could tell we were doomed from the start.

46

She came out long-limbed, with glittered pores that hypnotized male and female alike and, ascribing to the school of thought that preached do what you're best at, she did. She was a snake charmer, a psychotherapist who had you on the floor crying about your childhood without ever knowing you did.

45

i don't fit in this skin

44

They held their cigarettes like beacons, shining through the night towards a vast moving audience. The audience was the city, the audience was the luminous future, the audience was the multitude of people who had bent themselves into step ladders, stacked one upon the other. For surrounded by such, who could help but climb upwards?

43

sweet pepper fries cold, cold, car coming at you like it’s gonna take you away, man chiseled from stone until his face moves and you realize he’s just made out of wax and you’re holding a candle to it

42

She was dreaming of temptation. Specifically, the temptation that crept stealthily into her fingertips every time she put her them near an electrical socket. The temptation that told her to stick her fingers in, as far as they would go, to be connected to that inexorable current, to be part of a winding spark that lit up the world, her house, the lamp beside her. That made her gadgets whirl and hum, that soothed her to sleep in the night with their constant speech.

Out of her dream, she heard a voice. It spoke in a monotone, and even from the haze she could make out its rhythm, clipped, short, sloping sharply downwards at the end of each sentence as if to clip the toenails of the words off and let them fall to the floor. Quickly after this first realization, the first part of an idea, came the feeling that something was not quite right.

41

And the plane took off and it swallowed time whole, and the clouds looked like the bottom of a boot, when the snow is packed in real tight, and my tears went back into my eyes like they were never there at all, way back into my head where they sat and drowned me, from the inside and out and I’m sure I looked like a broken baby with three fingers or a head swollen to ten times its size and I felt like that too, like I would never get it, never understand why you can’t trap things in little bottles and screw the lid on tight, so tight and carry them around with you, clinking together, and never open them again but know they are there, know that you could open the bottle and be back there, one time only, and experience it all again - how I can tell when you’re dreaming while you sleep, how we make a nest in my bed, how you breathe in and out like a vacuum cleaner, how your leg and your arm are the safest limbs in the world, like guns, like bars to keep me in, cage me maybe, but that you and me are glasses that stack perfectly on top of each other, into each other – but perhaps it will never be that way again, perhaps I will chip or you will warp and there never were any glass jars to put you in, to put IT in, to put the whole of IT in, the days and hours, the parts that defied everything I knew.

My nose is running now, I suppose some part of me had to weep. For you. For how frightened I am. For the plane and the clouds and the tears that wouldn’t come. For the future.

40

Once upon a time I believed we were two pieces of the same bolt,

Lighting and fabric

Once upon a time, I believed in forever,

The friend part

Then the clock clicked, time time time

And I barely think of you anymore

39

Oh gawd it was just horrible. I’m just driving and driving and I have the kids in the backseat, all three of them and they were bored all day and fighting, just making me and each other miserable and pinching each other and screaming in my ear and it was hot and everything smelled, and then the baby soiled his diaper and we were 100 miles away from the next rest stop and it stank something terrible so we had to smell it until finally we came got to a Shell and then when I tried to get gas, I couldn’t find my credit card anywhere, turns out I left it in the last gas station we stopped at it and some nice old guy found my new address, who knows where and sent it to me months later, well anyways so we’re driving and it’s dark as all get out and the heat isn’t working very well, and I’m freezing and the kids are shivering in their sleep and then, oh yeah THEN we get pulled over.

And the cop shines this flashlight in my face and I’m sure I just looked real crazy you know, cuz I was trying to get to Phoenix by the second, and we’d been driving, two days straight, no stops, well, he asks me to get out of the car and then Michelle wakes up and starts bawling cuz she’s scared and all and the cop just looks so annoyed and then he finds my heart medication and I’m standing there, about to fall over with how cold and tired I am and he says all angry

What is this medication? Why isn’t it in a bottle?

And I just break down, just WEEP and I can’t even talk but finally I say, it’s beta blockers, beta blockers for my heart and I’ve been driving forever Officer, and please don’t scare my kids with your guns and all because he took it out of his holster and he told me to put my hands behind my back and right there and then I’m so confused so I shut up because I don’t know what’s wrong, how I got here even, whether I’m hallucinating cuz I didn’t sleep or anything and he tells his partner to get the kids out of the car and makes them stand in a little row, and then calls for another squad car to come get them, and all this time, they’re crying from the car and I can here them but I just can’t say anything, my voice won’t come out of my mouth at all and

38

He considered the first time he wore them. They were stiff. Black. His high school prom. Nervous, dripping. Later, he sees her in K-Mart. She’s fat, really fat. Has three kids, like ducks following her. Noisy ducks.

He considered the next time he wore them. They were old. Black. His wedding, cheap fix. Proud, gleeful. Later, he divorces her in Richmond. He’s happy, really happy. Runs out of the courthouse, chest bursting. So content.

He considered the last time he wore them. They were broken. Black. His young son’s funeral. Drowning, lost. Later he scattered the ashes all over. So sad, really sad. Can’t go on any longer, sits down. Misses him.

37

And then we will weigh them, one against another in the pieces of time that create eternity, each soul spanning miles into the sky. And we will wonder if our scales weighed them correctly, life against life, or if we somehow missed something, if we tricked ourselves into believing that we were larger, more beautiful. If the sheen of our skin and the cleanliness of our bodies and the plump feelings we use to boost ourselves up, a little higher, a little farther, don't mean what we thought they meant all along.

36

His skin was the belly of a chip bag, greasy, and shiny, crinkly in places. If you licked it you could taste the grease, the salt that spread over him, and I was reminded of those deer you see at salt licks, opening their mouth’s slowly and sticking their tongues out, softly letting the crystals dissolve on their tongues. You know deer need salt to survive. You know we need salt to survive.

35

Time is a tombstone and you are the dead

Dread is a lover and you are the lead

34

like the backward end of a bruise, it hung on me, sapping the strength from me, unnoticable except when pressed

33

Once upon a time I couldn’t wait until this was over.

32

When this is over, when everything is said and done and finished, tied up in brown paper parcels with white-corded string, well then you will have time for regret. Then you can look back sorrowfully. Now.

Now, you must drive on, crack your whip, tuck your sleeping children into their beds, tell your wife it’s Now or Never, and maybe Never sounds like a better proposition in the long run, but Now is here, Now is glaring at you straight in the pupil, loud and long and ugly and about to run away.

31

When humans talk they dance like mirrors, reflecting, absorbing. Swallowing each other with intensity of purpose. After awhile, after thousands have twinkled into you, you forget that you can see all the way into them. You begin instead to look at your reflection in them.

Kids with Autism hate looking at your face. Even I hate looking at your face.

30

She imagined walking before the firing squad, her juicy satin pumps pulling her towards them, her red lined mouth, her red smudged teeth, set like a lady’s in an expression of composure - demure. She imagined a huge gust of wind blowing away her hood, her face stretching towards the sun, her dress, a lace frock flowing in the breeze, a magnificent tent. She imagined they were taken by her beauty. She imagined she called to them, Siren-like, one shrieking note, and it turned their hearts liquid, and their heads became balls of lust and their fingers betrayed them and they turned their guns to each other and the triggers quickened and stilled and they all lay before her in a miserable heap.

She imagined she was dragged, a laughing child from the yard and returned to her cell where she was not allowed to change, but remained in her lace for days until it became rank and scratched at her furiously. She imagined they brought her out finally and told her she would receive an injection, be strapped onto a gurney, and oh! she would kick madly until her pump flew across the room and into the tender eye of one of her Watchers, and she would shudder dramatically and finally lay still.

She imagined she was taken from the gurney and carried away, and in the hallway she leapt from the doctor’s arms, ran shrieking through death row, towards the sweet moving air. She imagined they caught her, dragged her back to her cell still dressed in her bedraggled lace, one pump remaining on her blistered foot. She imagined she stayed there for two hours while they faxed an emergency request across the border to Alabama where they hustled and rustled and sent the Spark of Death in a brown van, one-hour-and-twenty-minutes, faster than the devil.

She imagined the straps and wires, how she looked, a trussed whorey scarecrow. She cried this time, big sopping tears from her belly, and they made their way through a hole in the plastic covering the wiring and she exploded, blasting a hole in the roof and killing all five people in the room with her.

In 24 hours the fax would come back, stamped black. Denied. Hope was forgive and forget. Forgive her. The Governor. For.

Pinching pieces off of the Governor’s son with a blunt axe. In 1978.

When she was 15. After he had raped her.

And then came the trial. Forget, Governor. How you hired men to say she was a prostitute. How you called her an unforgivable slut, a callous demon. Forget, Governor. Forgive, Governor.