cw: chronic illness to be chronically ill from a young age is to know the taste of resignation better than that of happiness it is old facebook comments and constant questions about why you were never at school before you left (“i was sick” was apparently not a good enough answer) it is “you might grow out of it with age” (you will not) it is briefly vomiting in your mouth while burping and getting on with your day, because this is just your life it is your stomach feeling like lead after eating (and learning to dislike food because it only causes you pain) it is dark humor about your many disabilities because it’s one of the few ways you can cope it is the concerned gazes of your mother and doctors after getting on the scale (you lost weight again; you shrug, it’s not your fault your appetite is so moody) it is laying in bed after eating fast food and being acutely aware you’re going to be sick for the rest of your life, probably it is unconsciously comparing forms of suffering (you don’t have it as bad as some people, but that doesn’t mean you have it all that good, either)
temple israel, rosh hashanah services. my trumpet’s own feast. at planet fitness parking lot, you on your phone, I whistled, you smiled. I saw you dancing at club columbus, wanted to take you to bed. convenience store aisle, your denim jacket, smoky. deep blue eyes. call me. steam room at the gym, your towel slipped as you stood up. I liked what I saw. sucked you off in the safeway bathroom, you left once you came. what’s your name? picked up cigarettes you’d dropped, standing in front of The Pearl, your teeth glowed.
I used to think I could see the edge of the world from the Walt Whitman bridge. Around the same spell, a black sheep would tell me scary stories before naptime. I fell asleep to clipped Italian and soap opera drama. We each had a place at the table-- I only ate chicken tenders drowned in ketchup ice-cream at eleven AM fingers sticky as I reached for more Hershey Kisses, for another hand of cards in the most loving games of war I've ever played. I was a card shark at that mottled kitchen table for years. But the evening, dotted with the golden glow of end-table lamps, heralded the arrival of a drive home five PM feeling ants under my skin. After we’d packed up and, the leftovers were placed gently on the passenger’s seat, my grandmother would wave from the porch. Her teeth-- large, false brown from all the coffee she’d drink shone in the fading light as she smiled.
so my soul says i’m my own god and nobody can hold me back and leaves my body on the bed my body doesn’t even sigh because she is used to this, being left, and has learned to live with it. once my body fell very deeply in love with someone and thought she could never live without someone but someone said you are too desperate to be loved to be loved and left so my body figures she can find a way to live without a soul, too. my body lies on the bed for a while but she really cannot spend the rest of her life there, soul or no soul, so she gets out and makes some oatmeal thinking about how badly my soul loved oatmeal, but this does not make my body cry. for a second she thinks, this should make me cry. i am not doing this splitting up business the right way, i am supposed to be very sad and cry a lot into my oatmeal so it tastes like water and salt and wet cardboard. hmm. my soul is everything my body dreams of which is mostly to say, bodiless. without a body she can fly into the world to Find Herself. she visits many countries and talks with many people even though she is scared of talking and many and people. she finds no substance or self, but it will probably be around the next corner so she must go on. many years pass with my soul backpacking around europe and my body doing dishes and laundry and homework. my body sometimes think about my soul’s return and how strong she is going to stand, unflinching and proud and better off now. she imagines my soul’s beautiful heart and angry eyes, smirking oh, baby and how she will only roll her eyes in response. she will not take my soul back, which means absolutely nothing when my soul does not want to be taken back in the first place. one day my body receives a postcard in her mailbox, which she checks every day without ever missing a beat. it’s stamped in a language my body does not recognise and for a moment she thinks of the words lost like that. maybe my body is an untranslatable wound. there’s a firetruck on it which looks like hope surrounded by flames the same colour that look like hell. my body knows in her gut it’s from my soul, even though it does not read anything. no wish you were here . my soul might be many things but at least she is not cruel, my body thinks.
This, a pain when we touch, when we crush between our sticky fingers all that we've done : it smells of a fruit no one has a name for. We have no name for. In the mornings we carry the succor in the backs of our mouths, safe for later. We talk to the sky in made-up tongues. In made-up tongues we rabble and gobble and hunt each other for the right words: to glut, to skewer, to fuck. We know the names we call each other but no one else does. The pulp between us: silken, seeded, suited. We warble together to hear our choked songs when we forget how to speak.
CREAM AND OLIVEThey say when you’ve been around someone a long time you start to look like them there you were, standing in a paddock with your cameras again you shoot with one, another other slung around your wrist it occurs to me that you might be my person all cream and olive, Mary Poppins bag your sunglasses balanced on top of your head (i think you are the sweetest) swimming poolthe babies love it here they get wet and wild mums and dads like metal detectors in the shallow end i do my lengths and stare at the tiles dried juice around were you sipped look at where we are like we slipped, holding hands
AFTERNOONIt is the way the afternoon sits on the far hedge with the maroon aura of a monk at prayer, these are nameless hours, trapped in parentheses of barren remembering, scraping sour probabilities off the edges of clouds, the quiet that hovers over the thick air sweating salt into the shape of my listless wanting, steepled fingers running through the hair of the wind the way thought seeks to curl a thread of time into itself, long ago becomes a point on the far wall when promises were whispered against naked skin, but it was raining then, a deluge that swallowed earth and sky, columns of monstrous wetness holding up nothing, rising from nothing, a drop tracing the smooth cheek of the window pane in a nihilistic line, pain too is a lump of purposeful nothingness in a cross legged chant for release, its shadow at noon falling at its feet, prostrate, the light a wall of grotesque truth holding up nothing, rising from nothing. It is the way the afternoon sits on the far hedge. THE OLD HOUSEthe blue clay jar I brought from the market in Marrakesh slips through mother's wrinkled fingers shattering on her polished red oxide floor, she bends quietly, picking up the pieces, one by one as brown teak rafters sag low to examine her bruised hands, grandpa's empty armchair peers through his round glasses, his long sleep shaken by the sound of earth on earth, the frightened kitten flattens against the cat-shaped shadow on the whitewashed wall, just as the flowers in her hair fall over her shoulder, wild jasmine; we sat there long ago, at that very spot, she, telling me a story about gods and demons who churned the ocean for the nectar of eternal life, me, running away, my cup of milk turning on its side, a dusty, pink stream leading a breathless path to the unresisting door, now, years later, I pace the old house searching for myself in the guilty corners, while the yellow sunlight from a far desert freed from its terracotta cage stretches in the cool shade of her orange hibiscus flowers.
take me in your hand, i bend towards you, phototropic your yellow heat burns through my stomach rises up out of my mouth until i breathe it out in dimples it’s difficult to imagine someone else feeling like this hot-mouthed warming, warming, warming pinpricked through white sheets, being eaten alive, how wonderful it is to feel weightless to not exist, to not feel the red of body but yours so light it melts on the tongue like sherbet
I govern the change in my life by summers, everything relative to the months my skin doesn't stand on-end vacation sun sheltering my childhood coven, us barefoot-baby-witches the magic all in how we drag our feet on the asphalt & do not bleed the magic in how we race the boys downhill & always win rule out of a plastic castle sourgrass - our hemlock, mix a potion of innocence, of sleepover silence the poison we pick, that is something other than girlhood something other than being shameful dirty or mean, the way the TV told us like fresh sweat & strawberries shared like secrets we pluck the gravel out of each-others knees & ride on there is so much light to cast our bodies into & so much summer left for us
THE OCEAN IS A METAPHOROne hand is inside of my mouth the other is holding the door shut. This place is communal, even the wine. Someone is shitting in the toilet next to the shower where you are fucking me. Outside the Russian olive trees are in bloom they smell like they are dipped in milk. My blood on your tongue is salty. I have not yet cut off my wet hair. Tomorrow, everything will fall out of me, beached on the shore. PRIMROSEI left you and I guess I don't really know you aren't dead because I threw everything away even your suicide notes and then I started writing poems, not because you introduced me to Artaud but because you made me forget how beautiful flowers are. For example, the brown eyed primrose or how my fingertips smell after I rub a mint leaf between them. Yes, you made me forget how much I love hands.
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