Because I Would Not Sleep With You

Just because I would not sleep with you, this does not make me a bitch.
There you go again pretending there is a source, an X that marks the spot.
Pretending I hold your world in my callused little hands. Or in the space between my legs.

But it’s like putting a planet inside of a blender. 
Condensing a world to a form more easily held. More easily understood. 
More easily blamed.

Beside me a man pours his problems into a bottle.
Pretending they will fit inside a glass and yeast getaway.
Bright eyed girls on sidewalks, crushing a sky into a wooden bracelet,
riddled with patron saints
and tangible order.

In a pile of sheets/ in a fitness routine/ in these scripts that you write out carefully in your head.
In a word/ label/ curse/ hyphenated name.
In these anchors to ourselves that we come to rely on.

So now I’m a tease because you’re alone and looking for a villain in your story.
But you owe me more than flat characterization.
It is more it will always be more we will always be hungry and we will always pretend that we are full. We congratulate the substance in our stomachs in our guts for its so-called help and we play elaborate games of dress-up with our own philosophies.
An enemy, an addiction would be a luxury wouldn’t it?

But we were not made to be as constellations. 
We were not meant to be definable and immovable.
We are polka dots on a slab of black altogether circling something that may very well be nothing. 
And we don’t connect in sensible/ scientific ways.
The void in your stomach in your gut it is bigger than us it is bigger than blame and excuse,
Than the trite descriptions in the lines of your script.

Lose the pity party/ your theoretical universe/ your fucking “reasons” and “rights”
Ditch it all and-
Be honest.
Listen more.
Be nice.

These are the galaxy. These are the only gravity.

Pretense/ context/ elemental blocks-
The echoed calls that “everyone has their own story”
This all means nothing to me anymore.

I am not a bitch. You are not an asshole. You just want so badly to be.
Cruelty is cold and hard with pointed, measurable corners but-
We’re running off the script and it’s so so much harder for you to accept that
Language is fluid
Sexuality is fluid
History is
Parenting is
Politics and bodies and what you ate for lunch
It is all fluid and
We are all hungry.

Put these all in a blender all at once
and then you will see
what I cannot unsee.

Semifluid

I think I might be underwater.

A crowd screeches overhead, counting back from three,

giggling at my solitary jump with grins 

sewn to their cheeks like yarn.

The pool momentarily condenses, the liquid splintering into wood.

And I keep picturing middle school dance floors 

Awkward limbs stick to sneakers and are pasted, posed in corners.

The chemicals in stasis and not one child dares to move.

I keep thinking of this substance, this thing between liquid and solid

and how we waver between the two but feign definition.

Cell phones light the pathway to my house,

while lightning bugs drown alongside me in the pool.

Rules are rules are rules they say.

So dress nice, smile pretty, scrub your mouth out with coarse soap.

There are so many better words you could say.

I keep wishing I knew how else to speak to the sleeping.

But fuck it, fuck you, fuck your insistence that language is the enemy.

A splash of cold water across your proper face.

Step on me, scathe my skin, 

contort your body into pictures of rooms of people 

who you’ve talked to for years but you’ve never even met.

Yeah, let’s talk about the weather and my course load and the boy across the hall.

Let’s stitch together unicolor faces and yank at all the knots.

Filing cabinets filled with shit, empires filled with cruelty.

But the fit of it all is pleasant, everything is cute and nothing offensive.

So if it sounds like nice and looks like nice, then when is it allowed to just be fucking nice.

I’m glad that I jumped. I’m glad I danced. And I’m glad my mouth was made out of filth.

The water and the wood and my skin,

and pinocchio crying from the shelves of my mind,

begging me to reclaim my flesh, to choose reality.

Bodies around me all sculpted into shapes, rigid and exact,

and the poor dreamer has no idea what he’s saying. 

Count it with me, count it down,

the calories the test scores the boys that I have slept with-

the number of words I can’t say in public,

the venom of words that I say instead.

The measurements that then become the distance.

They push me in the pool and they laugh 

and we all forget, all at once,

that we are already

bodies of water.

The Day I Was Born

Maybe it doesn't matter, but maybe I wish that it did.

Traffic trickles in clumsy patterns below the main room window.

The colors are careless and clouded. 

There's something so strange to me about the way a bar looks in the morning-

It's basic structure exactly the same, the stools in place and the tile swept up.

But something in its bones is so utterly misplaced,

a shell of its own scene.

You're still asleep and I am cupping a margarita glass up to the light,

observing the cold curvature of neon-

A string of faces close to the concrete are like the beads of a rosary

A prayer that I haven't yet heard enough to repeat.

My lips curl into motion and then recoil.

Today is the day I was born,

years ago in the dead hours of the night,

and the date repeats itself again

in montages and dusty flashes of the mind.

A cracking cone of light beneath your front door.

A lazy morning song of headaches and dehydration.

You kissed me and you told me not to care.

But you're my friend and he's my friend and the two of you

are best fucking friends.

And I don't understand what you mean when you speak to me,

when you coat me in your blue covers and shiver into the lines of my chest.

So it doesn't matter- so none of this matters-

Here, let's all swim together in one big pool of our own chemicals.

Let's jump from bedroom to bedroom, like superheroes

ascending buildings in the midst of a sleeping city.

Let's kiss everything and love nothing at all.

If it doesn't matter, then tear it all down. 

This room and this street and that bar outside your window.

Hand it all to me in crumbs and pieces

and show me it can be devoured.

Because I don't want to do this again,

I don't want to pick up shells and pretend that they don't make me sad.

Just because something can be both created and destroyed,

doesn't mean the acts are the same.

The Portraiture Alphabet

Do you think maybe it's alive in there?
Like a little creature in a corner in a crate?
The whole of the sky bleeds a white canvas and
my parents smile in their miniature ways.
I think it's still breathing, a hint in the chest.
A pause and a frame, but still movement within itself.

My sister stands like she's seen this before,
her matted shoes hugging onto porcelain ankles
and her torso inverted, flipped away,
like she has already envisioned something apart from us.
And then there's me, a cannonball through the white,
plunging through the afternoon with no regard for my own gravity.
And I can't help thinking that I am something apart from us.
I am the trickling ink from a pen explosion,
not the format, or the intended, tilted cursive.
Not even contained in the pocket of the shirt.

My mother starts, twitches her hands,
like she is trying to pool together the mess,
to bottle it up again,
and pause it in frames.
She wanted to write it out in her own way. Within her own margins.
I think she must have felt the way then that I feel now-
like it's all so fucking terrifying.
Like the planes of ourselves keep layering until
they're too hard to sort or catalog.
I think she must have envied the alphabet.
And it's published, translated, understood permanence.

Maybe the two scenes are synonymous,
pausing and playing,
photographing and feeling?
The way a child grins when the A's and the B's and the C's spill into words.
But can still be taken back out again. Extracted.

The paper corners coiling on the picture lend shade to our bodies.
All bent in alternate directions..
My sister's are the only eyes within clear view,
and they shoot through the texture of the canvas,
away from the puddles of the ink, like they are unafraid of forgetting.
Like they see the letters and they see the sentences and paragraphs,
and they accept them all.
and I envy her for that.
I'm not sure if it's still breathing,
I'm not sure if we're still held within the ribs at all.
But in any event I continue to gather up all the planes
in a corner in a crate
and puncture tiny little holes for air.

Urgency

Let’s pretend you are holding a box. A frustrating box. Your fingers claw at its ends and corners and somehow they meet no entry.You seek out sharp objects and you growl out guttural noises and the box won’t open. You begin to stab at it in a repeated dance of arms. 

Somehow the creases of the cardboard make up an endless surface, a merciless platform for failure. Spectators gather and gawk. You start asking your friends to help and they’re asking their friends to help and no one can open 
the goddamn box. 

In this example I will be the box.

Between your fury and flesh lies the repose. 
A fluctuating chorus of fragile heat and hesitant sizzle and
I can’t feel anything at all.

Your hands turn purple. 
After hours of pushing and pulling you start to beg me, demand me, to open myself or at least split one of my edges, to slice myself into reason. The cardboard crunches into a false sense of hope and the spectators continue to look on. 

There is something that you expect, some response to urgency that you think would be more fitting. A natural order- the contents that follow the box, the flow that follows the ebb. 

More hours pass and your questions turn around. Their shapes flip in cubic rhythm. You begin to check your mailing records. You begin to wonder what you mean to find, or if this box was ever intended for you at all. You begin again in your repeated dance of arms.

I’m sorry, I am. But is there another way of saying what has been said one thousand times?
Is there another space to hold our truths as they fall like bodies?
In chants, in posters, in whispers, in letters,
but never in boxes till now.

When the outward voices crawl in 
And the arms above your head lay like figurines at your side,
Maybe you will see. Maybe you will see.

There is a kind of desperation that transcends the push and pull.
That wraps and bends around itself until its ends are endless.
And knows the silent nature of its space.

Dear Kirsten,

This is Kirsten. 
Maybe I seem to you a dreamy figure, with briefcases and bookshelves and boobs, but I think at this point you have so much more that is foreign to me.

You think of me now as an icon, a milestone to reach, but someday you will find that I am amorphous. That the vision of your 20-something self will never be constant and can never be mapped out. I remember the way you sit and imagine your freckles spilling out across adult features and flirty smiles. And eventually the image shifts and you picture me as edgy, unpractical, spontaneous. You have named me many things, tried to form me in many ways. You put so much pressure on me to have it all figured out. But Kirsten it can't be done.

Pretty soon you will wake up on a family vacation, with Mom and Dad's spherical faces hovering over your morning vision and whispering. Behind them you will notice a blinding sunshine through the sliding glass doors. You will hear them ask why you are smiling, you just woke up why are you smiling, and the hotel sheets will smell of citrus, your tiny body exploring their shape. And then you will hear them say that this is what you always do, this is how you always wake up, and for the first time you will have a sense of the only thing impermeable, unwavering, that you want to keep.

Stop thinking about that mocking question you're always asked. Assholes who ask 8-year-olds for their future professions are still just assholes. Stop spewing out that you'll become a ballerina or a vet or a singer. We both know you don't mean any of it, you're just scared that you need to grasp something and call it yours. 

But stop worrying and pulling your own hair. Because one day you will have the citrus on the bedsheets. And the rest will follow.




<3 Kirsten

Castle Kirsten

Reverse the car and start again.
Run me over and start

again.

You and I, we're always going through the motions

of this doll parade.

Synthetic hair entangling neon lace.

These figures sprawl out on the floor

In their motionless attempts to fill us up.

To act out scenes.

I find myself positioning plastic limbs in ways

we may never move ours.

It's weird, isn't it?

The way I thought up a house and named it my own.

I thought up a family and named it not yours.

You can hardly annoy me if you don't even know me. 

Sloppily sewn flags atop a painted castle.

And gilded picture frames with Barbie portraits.

Your shoulders curl away from me and

the red car traces beneath your hand.

The zig zagging tracks on the tattered carpet look so much to me like passports 

and diaries and college degrees.

Sometimes I have this image of you, torn and ground into clumps of pixels on my screen,

trying to talk to me over miles and miles of white noise,

but the sound goes mute on my computer.

and all I want is to click you back into place.

You're married now.

How the hell are you married now.

Your limbs aren't plastic any longer.

And I'm happy but I can't shake the feeling that we did this all wrong.

Maybe we did this all wrong.

Maybe corvettes and castles are the same fucking thing when you break them into these pixels

and rearrange the colors.

Red over gold. Gold over red. A fusion of the two.

And maybe the elemental squares sprinkled across screens were always the only thing we really needed to fill us up.

Reverse the car and start again.

Pick me up and start 

again.