The Onions Were Fine.

Why are people always telling us how good we look in colors we hate or how tired we look after a full nights sleep?  Why can’t they just let us pass them in the hallways or stand behind them in line at the bookstore without feeling like they owe it to us to share their impromptu opinion of us?  

I drove to the farm stand on the edge of town and I parked in the dirt lot.  My shoes gathered dust.  My hands gathered beets, onions, red peppers, dark chocolate (shipped in from the city, $1.09).  My tongue was covered in the thick fuzz that comes with a hangover.  

Why aren’t I as skinny as the teenage hippie working the old-fashioned cash register?  Why doesn’t she have to wear make-up?  Why do I care?

I set my purchase on the wooden, beaten counter top.  She picks up the chocolate first.  

How did that get in there?  I say.  I try to look perplexed.  I can feel the crows feet at the corners of my eyes.  They’re scratching and clawing me raw.

I try to buff the dirt off of my shoes with the back of my legs.  I am sweating and now there is mud.  One red pepper has a soft-spot near the bottom that I hadn’t seen before.  I say nothing and let her place it into the re-usable shopping bag with the rest.  With the chocolate.  

Why do we always assume we’re hated immediately by strangers simply based on how we look?  Why can’t I buy $10.73 worth of farm stand goodies and why can’t she just ring them up and why isn’t that just the end?

I try to walk backwards to my car so that she doesn’t see the muddy sweat streaks on the backs of my calves.  I try to smile sweetly at her while I’m doing this.  She is reading a magazine.  

How to get the perfect summer body.

Why can’t I tear the paper from a bar of chocolate before the car is even on the road?

Why can’t I have the perfect summer body?

Dirty.

I’ve seen a lot of boys with dirt under their fingernails.  Dirt made of grease and shit and flaky skin.  Dirt made of blood and gravel and the wetness of some girl. 
I never much liked those boys.  I didn’t want those fingernails anywhere near me.  I feared I’d catch something, or worse, that the dirt would end up smeared across my skirt.  I didn’t dare think about the state of their beards, their hair.  What was crawling there (surely), was bound to have several legs and bodies you could see straight through.  Just thinking about it, I can see their insides, the milky white of their bellies and the coffee with cream shade of their brains.  Intelligent little things that could very easily see the benefit of jumping ship from this dirty boy onto me where my perfume smells slightly of lilacs and my teeth are filled with fruit.
So I would keep my distance from these boys.  Keep my glance down and my hands in my pockets.  Be sure to cover any small razor nicks on my knees. 
Until I saw you sitting on a sidewalk, that is.  In the city all alone, you sat back against a pile of books outside of a bookstore.  There were tattoos on your arms and there, of course, was the dirt under your fingernails.
I began to turn my head but something pulled me back to you.  I paused and began scanning (not truly looking, not registering) the titles lined up on the concrete.  I pick a large hardcover.  It’s Whitman and I flip to page 104.  I read a line on the page and then the ones on your face.  They’re similarly interesting and poetic so I say hello, ask if you like Whitman, because he’s pressed against my chest now.
Days later, you are running your hands along the curves of my spine and I grab your wrists, kiss them, and then plant my lips against the pad of each of your fingertips.  You run them through my hair and I feel the rough brush of your beard on my neck so I know your ear must be close to my mouth now.  My eyes are closed when I whisper that I love a man who knows how to use his hands.
And you do.  With them, you plant us a garden and chop garlic.  You wipe my hair from my face in bed and you pull my hips closer to you.  You squeeze lemons and limes into my liquor, you pull weeds. 
Suddenly there are callouses on on your palms that look like diamonds to me, mined from hard work, and they shine brighter from knowing where they’ve come from, and from thinking of all the places they’ve yet to leave their mark.

Dear Future Me, (as requested by: blankspage)

I hope it’s Autumn where you are.  Always.
And I hope that your hair
is a shade of silver that sparkles.  I hope it’s still long.
Do chandelier earrings peek out and shimmer
against that backdrop of grey
when you shake your head vigorously “no”?
You’re saying “no” more, now.  Your neck is sore
from saying it so much.  So much twisting
and it’s beginning to wear on your old spine
(it was never much good anyway)
but after so many years of playing the pleaser,
I’m happy to hear the crack of your bones
and to see the spiders legs at the corners of your mouth.
You’ve been smiling more.  You’re still wearing braids
now and then.  There’s a ring on your finger.
I have to say, I didn’t see that coming.  It’s silver,
at least.
The stone, imperfect.  It hardly shines.
It’s polished oyster shell, at best.  Pink in places.
You’ve married a man who actually cares for you.
He likes your poetry.  He likes your short stories
but he has a hard time seeing himself in them, though
he’s always there. 
The children in the leaves, the dark eyed ones,
they’re yours.  They have your play-ethic.  They’re jumping
and crunching earth.
Take your glasses down from your nose and look at them,
really take them in, covered in bits of ground.  When the rain comes,
don’t drag them indoors.  Let them become soaked through
with the sky.
Write your poems, your books, condition your hair,
kiss your husband good morning and kiss him, always,
good night.

Truthfully, I don’t leave my bed for long enough to write prose anymore.  I wake for short bursts and struggle through the haze of alcohol to remember the one or two pretty words that had flown through my head before sleep.  They must become a poem.  They cannot be expanded upon.  They were white birds and they are quickly taking flight, just trying to get their bearings on their clipped wings.  I think I may have gnawed them off while grinding my teeth during a bad dream.  

If I capture the tiny birds, the tiny words, the little white word-birds before they can fly up through the gaping whole in the ceiling (it had been burned there by a meteor that crashed into our bedroom two nights ago.  The sheets had been set on fire and I had never felt so warm.  It was the first good sleep I’d gotten in a while.) I will press them to an ink pad and press them to the wall.  I call them a poem, but don’t title it, and then as suddenly as I woke, I am sleeping again.  

The birds are always gone the next time I open my eyes, and their markings on the walls never make sense to me.  The walls are a mess that the landlord will need to paint over.  Several coats.

My jealousy has learned to bite its own tongue.

I tried wearing your / whispered bedtime words / on my charm-bracelet
but they scratched my wrist / open / and the bones / that were helping me
hold it together / spilled out onto / the carpet / mixed with the fibers 
and ground themselves to dust / before morning

Sugar Free Breakfast

She kisses her paper coffee cup, leaving lipstick on the lid.  She tosses the death of her rosy cells into a mountain of man-made madness, colonized and crushed into a cylinder of recycled mornings.  Black please, don’t even put the sugar next to the cup.

I was named after no one.  My mother dreamed of the inky notepad that was her life and wished to turn the page, clean.  Blank.  A subtle start that wouldn’t stay silent long.  At age two she handed me a pen, asked that I begin.  A lesson in making a mess.  Not so much art.  Not so much literature.  Not so much creation as it was a continuation of a story published in pity.  A dusty book on a dusty bookshelf in the back of an abandoned thrift store.

I was named after a dream that will never be told, even at parties when everyone’s been drinking down their pink champagne for hours.  Not even in secret whispers in bed to a lover you know you’ll never see again.  Not even in poetry where it’s hidden in double negatives and rambling lines that aren’t even worth the analysis.

I have that same dream now, of turning the page.  But in my dream the ink has all bled through, mapped out same crooked, crossing lines I’ve made when I was drunk and pressing too hard.  I have another dream too, of driving too fast towards the ocean and tossing the notepad into the waves.  But I know it would only find its way back to me, heavier then with the seawater, and impossible to carry in my back pocket.

We are stuck with our names, some of us.  Boys are stuck.  Some lonely girls are stuck.  Our names, carried with us in our wallets with our over-due rent checks and our overdrawn debit cards.  Our names, our given names, are heavy, if they weren’t already silvered for us at birth.  Shined.  Or they’re weightless in the way our bodies can feel weightless if we happen to fall in love with the right person.  If we find a baby, three days old, wrapped in a blanket on our front stoop, we give it a name, like Hope, and pass it on to an officer, who gives it another name.  Baby X stays swaddled in the unknown of itself.  Its mother may have had a name for it, but Baby Hope X will never know of that name.  It will pass through hands warm enough, play with plastic trains and hide its peas along the underside of the dinner plate.  It will laugh, once or twice. 

When the lonely girl decides she cannot remain the heir of her unfortunate name, she may marry the wrong man and take his.  He is stuck and so is greedily happy to pass his along.  They create a web.  They create more names, give them tiny toys and feed them every few hours, or when they cry.  The lonely girl signs the right papers and kisses him the right way.  She is his and she is stuck in some new way that looks shiny and crisp from the outside.  A mealy apple yet unbitten.

I was born to be a brilliant composer, just given the wrong fingers, the wrong ears, and the wrong name.

No Rain

There’s an open window just above our bed.  The earth rushes in to greet us, a flurry of snowflakes and feathers, gravel and pink sand and lifted seedlings.  Our lashes stick, wet and gritty.  There’s a darkness that is grey in color.  There’s a cold chill and there’s the heat from the baseboards and they mix into a hurricane in my hair.  My fingers are blind but they search for you.  They find sheets and they find dead skin.  They are slick with the storm that has taken over the entire apartment now.  There are jars shattering and glittering and I can’t find you through the noise.  I try to call your name but my lips are sealed off with a bright orange spiders web.  The spider is laying eggs in the hollow of my collarbone. I crave coffee.  It’s Saturday.  I am strapped to the mattress.  My wrist bones collapse into little clouds of dust.  You find me in the debris and warm my cheeks with your lips, recite poems into my ear and I feel them travel down my spine, words and phrases and the vibration of your voice hang from each vertebrae like a glass ornament, swaying.  I feel my body relax, a spell, magic.  It’s Saturday.  I sleep finally, you close the window.  The room settles and your poem sinks into my marrow.  There is no rain.

My Own Pink Tongue

There is a dense poem sitting in my chest.  It’s heavy, bruising, made of blood clots and phlegm.  It’s sticky, wet from the moisture of my breathing.  It pounds wildly against me.  It drips.  It screams, but I will never let it out.  I will break my fingers off, one by one, slice out my own pink tongue.  I will silence it, take it with me deep into the earth.  It will moan under the soil, up through the trees, but its meaning will be lost, forever buried with the smoke inside my lungs.

Love is a falling leaf meeting its shadow on the street, and nothing more.

I am a terrified series of nerve endings
tucked inside of a too-big body.

Naked Poetry

I’ll be in the shower, love.  I need a place where it’s warm and the steam helps to draw the poetry from me.  My long hair clings to my inner thighs and forms pictures and I think of how long it’s been since you’ve touched me.   There.  Anywhere.  I could be a leader of the lovers revolution if I could do it surrounded by pale pink porcelain.  I leave you love notes on the fogged mirror, but you never write back.

Tiredfoxes Confession: I Cannot Write Dialogue

“Write my dialogue for me, please.” she said.

“My muse is beautiful but mute.  Her mind is dark and wild, but with flowers and foxes and romantic men.  She was on a bad trip, acid or something, and her tongue, she swallowed it because for a moment, she tasted ripe cherry and honey there.”

I stare at her a long time.  I try to think of an excuse.  I say, she’s more mysterious without a voice.  But that won’t do.  She pleads, she cries.

“Write my dialogue for me, please.” she says.

“This muse I’m stuck with, she hasn’t spoken in years.  I’m not sure she even spoke as a child.  A fairy child.  She was so tiny when she was born, like a bud on a stem.  She never wept, not even when she was so thirsty she thought she may die.  Give her a voice.”

So I caved, as I do.  I stayed up writing, all night.  Her muse was in my head, making herself comfortable in the folds of my limited imagination.  She sipped tea and swung from ivy in the trees.  She blew bubbles that tickled all the way down my spine and burst against my skin, leaving glittery little freckles.  But in all of this, the most she did was sigh, giggle, or pop her lips.  No words ever came from her.

By morning, I was asleep across my desk and woke to the breeze of her sliding down over the bend in my neck and escaping soundlessly into a crack in the wall.  I picked up the phone to make a pained call to a girl so desperate for a vocal lullaby. 

“I’m sorry,” I said.  “But your muse may never speak.”