Something Special.

I’ve been running and slipping and I can’t catch my breath even when I’m sitting still, legs outstretched in my new black boots with the metallic insides, outstretched onto a marble table and my back flat against a taupe-colored chair that is probably meant for relaxation and light reading, because I’m in the library of the university that I’ve been attending and there are a hundreds of living bodies and sleeping bodies and ill bodies wandering and dozing and side stepping their way around me, with slack jaws and sucking teeth and sandbag dropping eyes, and there’s a bundled woman in front of me with bare feet and tired toes and we smiled at each other because we both have one of the those faces that you see and think you recognize so you smile sideways, just in case, and we may have had a class sometime, both quietly sitting in hard wooden chairs with smooth, silver legs and our lips tight and straight as we listened to the others converse and we studied by ourselves before midterms and hardly squeaked in class, our grey little faces like mice in the back of the classroom or in the taupe colored chairs of the library, two shy little things with hearstrings and irregular lungs because we can’t catch our breath and perhaps it’s strange that identifying with a barefoot woman is comforting but don’t we all call people with similar characteristics our friends and our lovers and it’s only getting harder and harder for me to identify with the people that share such close similarities to my own because I’m weary and getting defensive and hardly an exclamation point in the universe if you see it as a narrative and earth is hardly a pinprick, and I’m rambling and the thin black letters are getting nearer and nearer to the time where academic books will be opened and pens will be picked up, vertically dragging on sheets of crisp paper, and my heels will clack on the cold linoleum that always reminds me of a dimly lit hospital hallway and really, in relation to the milky way, we are just rambling bodies that are smaller than the period at the end of this sentence.

Freshly soaped shoulders
are lapping up blue paint
as the refrigerator hisses
and lungs gently deflate.
Webs and spindled legs
are unraveling in the sink
and a spoon of heavy pears
is clinging to your drink.
The faucet's dripping mold
but your skull- it feels at ease,
your mouth is slightly open
and it's letting in a breeze.
Your fingers kiss the kettle,
caressing lustrous metal,
and it's cold inside this home
but the halls are yours roam.

Basic Space.

In Seattle, the air smelled like salt and clams and basil and crisp autumn leaves. The loveliest smells, the warmest smells on the coldest of mornings. We drove past callow gardens with red and blue birdhouses. Walked beneath crossroads with spiderweb cables, guiding swerving metro buses. Stepped over manholes where steam seeped from the underground city. Fish scales lined the walls above galleries and pale strings hung limply from tree limbs. We drove from the forest hideaways, away from the most darling of twins. I wondered if business ever brought you to Seattle and I wept when I thought of the souvenir gifts that I couldn't hand to you and the letters I had been writing but never slipped into the mailbox. I made Peter feel the hollow spots in my hands, the places where tiny birds could make a nest for little robin eggs. Between the bones. Middle finger-forefinger nests. I snapped photos of the lumber factories, the steel factories, and the cement factories. Man-made pleasantries in the middle of somewhere. I drank chamomile lavender tea and coconut black tea and raspberry Italian soda in the loveliest cafes. We drenched ourselves in hotel hot tubs in our underthings because we had forgotten swimsuits. I whispered goodbye to the sea when we stepped off four wooden posts.

On the way home, we drove from the outskirts of Portland alongside the yellow lights of steam boats and white sails. The basic spaces of my skin and three sleeping bodies, my skin and the road. I came over the top of a midnight hill, the top of the world perhaps, and I saw a thousand blinking red lights. I've missed you, I thought. Hello, hello, hello they blinked to me.  I stared at my face in the rear-view mirror for a moment, I looked so pale, so washed out. You ghostly thing, I thought. We hid away on the interstate and I thanked Peter and Chelsey and Sean for the loveliest three days away from home.

Have you seen the skies?
Almond slivers
and apricot strokes.
Porcelain bats swoon
at the nape of bare wrists,
suspending the flares
with crescents shaped
like fingernails.
The silhouettes of
grapevine limbs
purr at hollow webs.
But there are rings
around the moon
and frost is coming.

 Photo Credit: Duy Huynh

Half Asleep.

The water trickles and I'm mumbling to myself to turn the music down because there are two sleeping bodies outside the door and I'm half asleep and it's early. I step inside the shower, brush against a thin curtain of pale greens and blues and the shower scalds me, brands little tear-shaped marks on my lower back. It's so hot that it's cold and I stare at my kneecaps covered in gooseflesh and I wonder why the uprising of hair follicles is called something so bizarre. It's dark outside and as soon as we hit a steady 68 I let myself linger in the space between dreaming and living. My left cheek is pressed against a pair of blue denim. I sit up slightly and stare at the delicate blue threads. I am a moth and my wings have left white powder on my resting place, I breathe into the air and they dissolve and we breath them in, these little wings like specks of dust.  I place a small gold key inside a small silver lock and twist, I listen for the chime of gears moving and a deadbolt fastening and I smile, remove a gray wall that's collapsing inside of itself. I think about losing my friend. And it's only the middle of my week and I can't hear anyone over the music because it's too loud and I'm muttering to myself to turn it down. And then I realize the music is just my humming, something someone once told my they do when they're nervous. But I'm not nervous, I'm just half asleep.

Deathwatch beetles crawl
within lackluster rings
as back-lit cabins fall,
but they are lacking wings.
Our tongues are silent rails
in an ash-enveloped cage
and a catacomb of blurs
are mistaking lust for rage.

Rusty.

I'm taking a moment, a brief relapse, to purge the words. My skull is like a rusty little typewriter in the shadows, tapping black keys. I'm taking a break from memorizing literary terms and breaking down the human cell until there's nothing left but a thousand little electrons buzzing around a tightly bound nucleus. The past few days have been rushed, in a word. 

I keep thinking about a beautiful baby girl, my best friend's little sister gave birth to the most amazing spirit. Her name is Lilleigh. I held her a few short hours after she emerged into the cool air. I brushed the pads of my fingers over her fontanels, feeling the grooves where bones folded into skin. I wept, staring into her gray eyes, watching her, watching me. She looks so much like her mother.

My calves are sore from organizing the spice cabinet in a new, yellow kitchen. My mouth felt strange for the expanse of about three hours, I said the word dad, out loud. To him, in the flesh. It was so strange. It really was. 

My eyes are tired from staring at this back lit-screen in coffee shops with aromas of nostalgia. I'm having a hard time finding time to write, and read. I want to read so badly, I walked into a bookstore and was compelled to buy new books but could only manage the first thirteen pages of the lyrical script before I had to set it aside and picked up a heavier, denser leaf with a thousand more prickly veins and a wider stem. This semester is killing me, and I'm afraid I may have packed on too much, but I crave the knowledge. I crave the avalanche. My books and I have a paradoxical relationship. I have fallen in love with every one of my classes. My creative writing class, especially. I wish I could make time to write. This morning I made linden flowers tea, I held honey by the ankles and let it bleed down onto a dusty teabag. I let white petals loll around the vacancies of my cheeks, I let steam warm my fingerprints. I'm hungry for boredom.

There is a pair of mooncalves,
blue and stagnant on the wall,
and the window traffic slurs
and the legs begin to crawl.
Their cold protruding caps
are enticing like the tides
and my sweet Achilles gills
are all sputtering in stride.
The water here is murky
as my chest compresses bones
and I'm thirsty for escaping
and not for casting stones.

 Photo Credit: Margaret Durow

Morning Tea

I wrote this for my creative writing class last week, my first fiction piece ever. Flash fiction. It's slightly morbid. I apologize to those of you with weak stomachs.

A hard, wooden chair cut into my back like razorblades, bruising the protruding disks of my vertebrates. I sat with my knees curled into my abdomen and for precisely twenty-three minutes I watched the violet shadows disintegrate into pale sunlight like an embryo escaping the womb. Sweat swirled from my tiny teacup and whisked itself into the cavities of my nostrils. It was then that my grandmother, aged ninety-eight years, interrupted the still morning. Her face was made of endless layers of skin, thin and transparent like a decaying peach slice. She made her way to the counter to pour herself a cup of tea. The splintered marrow in her hands caused her to drop the teapot, a Blue Willow china set from my mother’s first anniversary. I began to cry. Her nimble legs stooped down to pick up the shattered pieces of blue and ivory petals. I dripped from my chair and puddled around my grandmother. I stroked her hollow cheek and smiled at her to reassure her that everything was okay. She flinched away from me, cracking her skull against the corner of the counter; a tiny stream of blood trickled down her forehead and dripped onto a fragment of the teapot. 

I stared down at her limp chest and embraced the stillness of the room. I sauntered back to the kitchen chair facing the window and gripped my warm tea. It was lukewarm now. My fingers were sticky like maple syrup. I glanced at my grandmother again, her limbs looked like a paper doll chain, the ones my mother use to help me slice ribbon for to hang in the windowsill of the reading room. I held a large shard of Blue Willow in my palm and remembered how easy her skin was to slice through, like aged paper. A pool of blood seeped into the floorboards, it was the color of gingerbread tea. I decided to steep that for the afternoon.

I can sense your soul

slipping and hanging there

like a mid-morning cat,
and your grasp on clarity
becomes a porous scene
from monotone lungs.

But the sun is pale
and whisked with wings

like smooth vanilla tea

and I can feel you clinging

to the tiny white feathers
in the garden.

Photo Credit: Vavovi Rec